The Building of Epistemic Trust: An Adoptive Family’s Experience of Mentalization-Based Therapy

ABSTRACT

Recently, theorists have posited the development of epistemic trust – the trust in others as reliable sources of information – as an essential aspect of the therapeutic relationship and a mechanism of therapeutic change. Epistemic trust is likely to be disrupted in adoptive children and families and Mentalization Based Treatment (MBT) aims to explicitly promote its development. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how epistemic mistrust is addressed and how epistemic trust is established within the MBT framework. This single-case, exploratory study reports data from in-depth interviews with one adoptive family, which were analyzed qualitatively using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Two superordinate themes are reported: pre-therapy factors contributing to epistemic mistrust and factors contributing to the development of epistemic trust. The findings highlight two critical elements in establishing epistemic trust: the use of certain clinical skills that help build a secure base within therapy and the possibility of trust being transferred from and to other professionals/systems beyond therapy. Hence, this study informs a deeper understanding of how epistemic trust may be built in therapeutic work with adopted children and identifies possible clinical approaches that may be used by clinicians working with this client group.     

The role of familiarity in a face classification task using thatcherized faces

Two experiments are reported to test the proposition that facial familiarity influences processing on a face classification task. Thatcherization was used to generate distorted versions of familiar and unfamiliar individuals. Using both a 2AFC (which is “odd”?) task to pairs of images (Experiment 1) and an “odd/normal” task to single images (Experiment 2), results were consistent and indicated that familiarity with the target face facilitated the face classification decision. These results accord with the proposal that familiarity influences the early visual processing of faces. Results are evaluated with respect to four theoretical developments of Valentine's (1991) face-space model, and can be accommodated with the two models that assume familiarity to be encoded within a region of face space.     

Childhood anxiety and attention to emotion faces in a modified stroop task

This study used an emotional face stroop task to investigate the effects of self‐report trait anxiety, social concern (SC), and chronological age (CA) on reaction time to match coloured outlines of angry, happy, and neutral faces (and control faces with scrambled features) with coloured buttons in a community sample of 74 children aged 6 –12 years. The results showed an interference of colour matching for angry (relative to neutral) faces in children with elevated SC. The same effect was not found for happy or control faces. In addition, the results suggest that selective attention to angry faces in children with social concern (SC) was not significantly moderated by age.     

Physical Activity and Social Cognitive Theory: A Test in a Population Sample of Adults with Type 1 or Type 2 Diabetes

The purpose of the study was to test the Social Cognitive Theory (SCT; Bandura, 2004 ) for explaining physical activity (PA) in a large population sample of adults with type 1 or type 2 diabetes. Study objectives: (1) test the fit of the SCT structure in the total sample, and the diabetes sub-types; (2) determine the SCT structural invariance between the type 1 and type 2 groups; and (3) report explained variance and compare strength of association for the SCT constructs in predicting PA for both type 1 and type 2 groups. In all, 2,311 individuals with type 1 or type 2 diabetes were assessed on their self-efficacy, outcome expectancies, impediments, social support, goals, and physical activity at baseline and 1,717 (74.5%) completed these assessments again at 6 months. Multi-group Structural Equation Modeling was conducted. The findings provide evidence for the utility of the SCT in the diabetes samples. The SCT fits individuals with type 1 and type 2 diabetes except for SCT impediments, which appear to be obstructing goal-setting in individuals with type 2 diabetes only. Promotion of health behavior should target self-efficacy to set goals and change behavior. Outcome expectancies and social support are also important factors for setting goals and behavior performance.