Party Pooper or Life of the Party: Dampening and Enhancing of Positive Affect in a Peer Context

Dampening and enhancing responses to positive affect have been linked to depressive symptoms. The main aim of the present study was to examine such responses in an interpersonal peer context and to examine their relation with depressive symptoms. A community sample of 665 seventh-graders (52.0% girls, Mage = 12.7 years) took part in the study. Using a newly developed questionnaire, the Co-Dampening and Co-Enhancing Questionnaire (CoDEQ), a two-factor model distinguishing co-dampening and co-enhancing was validated. Relations with general depressive symptoms, anhedonic symptoms, and friendship quality were investigated. The direction of relations was examined over a 1-year interval using cross-lagged analyses. Cross-sectional results revealed that higher levels of co-dampening and lower levels of co-enhancing were associated with more depressive and anhedonic symptoms, while controlling for co-rumination levels. For anhedonic symptoms, this pattern also held over and above intrapersonal dampening and enhancing. Friendship quality was related to higher concurrent levels of co-enhancing and lower levels of co-dampening. The longitudinal results pointed towards a scar model, in that both depressive and anhedonic symptoms predicted relative increases in co-dampening over time; however, this did not hold in a model in which dampening and enhancing were included as control variables.     

Subjectivity,health and gender: an approach to chronified pain through the Psychosocial Gender Diagnostic methodology / Subjetividad,salud y género: una aproximación al dolor cronificado mediante la metodología del Diagnóstico Psicosocial de Género

Abstract

This paper bases itself on a psychological perspective to make a theoretical and methodological proposal that shifts the concept of health towards the crossing point between biomedical and social sciences. To that end, it is suggested that the concept of Subjectivity should be placed at the centre of the discipline of psychology, understanding it from the theoretical perspective that intersects between post-structuralism, psycho-dynamic theory and gender. The objective of the article is to make this proposal through a case study about chronic pain without organic cause, an emerging, contemporary, controversial malaise that is becoming increasingly common, called Fibromyalgia in the biopsychomedical field, and which affects mainly — but not only — women. In order to pursue this goal, a new methodological instrument was developed: the psychosocial gender diagnostic, oriented toward capturing the dynamics of chronic pain. This methodology facilitates the integration of the connections between subjectivity, gender and health, while at the same time problematizes the excessive medicalization of modern day life.     

The development of emotional face processing during childhood

Our facial expressions give others the opportunity to access our feelings, and constitute an important nonverbal tool for communication. Many recent studies have investigated emotional perception in adults, and our knowledge of neural processes involved in emotions is increasingly precise. Young children also use faces to express their internal states and perceive emotions in others, but little is known about the neurodevelopment of expression recognition. The goal of the current study was to determine the normal development of facial emotion perception. We recorded ERPs in 82 children 4 to 15 years of age during an implicit processing task with emotional faces. Task and stimuli were the same as those used and validated in an adult study; we focused on the components that showed sensitivity to emotions in adults (P1, N170 and frontal slow wave). An effect of the emotion expressed by faces was seen on the P1 in the youngest children. With increasing age this effect disappeared while an emotional sensitivity emerged on N170. Early emotional processing in young children differed from that observed in the adolescents, who approached adults. In contrast, the later frontal slow wave, although showing typical age effects, was more positive for neutral and happy faces across age groups. Thus, despite the precocious utilization of facial emotions, the neural processing involved in the perception of emotional faces develops in a staggered fashion throughout childhood, with the adult pattern appearing only late in adolescence.     

Scientific societies and research integrity: What are they doing and how well are they doing it?

Scientific societies can play an important role in promoting ethical research practices among their members, and over the past two decades several studies have addressed how societies perform this role. This survey continues this research by examining current efforts by scientific societies to promote research integrity among their members. The data indicate that although many of the societies are working to promote research integrity through ethics codes and activities, they lack rigorous assessment methods to determine the effectiveness of their efforts. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the AAAS-Office of Research Integrity (ORI) meeting in Washington DC on the theme: “The Role and Activities of Scientific Societies in Promoting Research Integrity” held on April 10–11, 2000.     

Rorschach protocols from children and adolescents diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder

Rorschach protocols from 35 children and adolescents with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and 35 with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) were compared. Both groups revealed significant differences from the normative tables on the same 12 variables: SCZI, DEPI, CDI, X + %, EgoC, Afr, T, EA, P, WSumC, RawSumSS, and WgtSumSS. However, as predicted, 4 of those variables, the Schizophrenic Index (SCZI) and 3 of the criterion tests that comprise it (X + %, RawSumSS, and WgtSumSS) were significantly different between the PTSD and ODD groups, with the PTSD group responding with more extreme scores. These findings contradict Exner's (1993) statement that only people with schizophrenia can be "defined or conceptualized as having both the problems of disordered thinking and inaccurate perception" (p. 356). Children and adolescents with PTSD also display these problems when trauma interrupts the child's naive belief that the world has predictable rules, the people in it are trustworthy and fair, and punishment and pain are consequences of bad behavior. When young victims cannot comprehend or make sense of what has happened to them, life becomes irrational, illogical, and confusing. Exner's SCZI does what it was designed to do: identify individuals with disordered thinking and inaccurate perception. Therefore, SCZI should be renamed the Perception and Thinking Index (PATI) to reflect its function rather than a diagnostic category.     

Socio-cognitive conflict and peer interaction: Development of compensation

The purpose of this study was to examine under which social conditions cognitive development of children at the same cognitive development level will be stimulated. One hundred and two children (mean age 7.8 years), understanding conversation of area quantity, but not yet able to grasp the compensatory relationships between the dimensions of length and width of an area, participated in two experimental conditions in which the developmental processes of socio-cognitive conflict and coordination were evoked. The results indicate that the resolution of the socio-cognitive conflict and the occurence of coordination is higher in individual than in dyadic conditions, and higher in (inter-group) competitive and (adult) supervised conditions than in conditions were task execution was left to the spontaneous initiative of the children themselves. Cognitive developmental progress generalized from the area concept to liquid and mass concepts.     

CROSS-CULTURAL STUDIES OF TEMPERAMENT: TEMPERAMENT IN GREEK INFANTS

Three infant cohorts from Greek cultural backgrounds were compared with an Anglo-Australian infant cohort across 9 dimensions of temperament using Australian and Greek versions of the revised Infant Temperament Questionnaire (Carey and McDevitt 1978). Infants from a Greek cultural background were generally considered to be more ‘difficult’ than the Anglo-Australian infants on the temperament dimensions of Approach, Adaptability, Mood and Distractibility even after the effects of social class were controlled statistically. The reported cross-cultural differences were discussed with regard to the potential influence on temperament ratings of ethnicity and culture, social status, psychobiological factors, migrant status, social assimilation, and questionnaire characteristics.     

Observation of Depictive Versus Tracing Gestures Selectively Aids Verbal Versus Visual–Spatial Learning in Primary School Children

Previous research has established that gesture observation aids learning in children. The current study examined whether observation of gestures (i.e. depictive and tracing gestures) differentially affected verbal and visual–spatial retention when learning a route and its street names. Specifically, we explored whether children (n = 97) with lower visual and verbal working‐memory capacity benefited more from observing gestures as compared with children who score higher on these traits. To this end, 11‐ to 13‐year‐old children were presented with an instructional video of a route containing no gestures, depictive gestures, tracing gestures or both depictive and tracing gestures. Results indicated that the type of observed gesture affected performance: Observing tracing gestures or both tracing and depictive gestures increased performance on route retention, while observing depictive gestures or both depictive and tracing gestures increased performance on street name retention. These effects were not differentially affected by working‐memory capacity. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Family therapy with incest

Intervention to interrupt the cycle of incest poses unique considerations for the clinician. This paper presents a multilevel intervention model making use of the family system and subystems within it to interrupt the incest cycle. The discussion provides a perspective for the clinician for intervention with such families including the use of dyads: Husband-wife, father-daughter, mother-daughter. It focuses on the central importance of strengthening the marital dyad while providing support for realignment of dysfunctional coalitions which allowed for the emergence of the incest cycle. Boundaries, collusion, the use of the therapy team, and implications for treatment are integral to the discussion.