Children's night-time fears: an overview

Night-time fears are a normal developmental occurrence for most children. However, a small proportion of children may experience severe night-time fears of much greater intensity and duration, and typically meet diagnostic criteria for an anxiety or phobic disorder diagnosis. The content and developmental features of children's night-time fears are explored, highlighting the heterogeneous nature of nocturnal fears. Fears of this nature are probably due to an interaction of biological, environmental and cognitive-mediational factors, together with the involvement of family and operant learning processes. Clinical assessment procedures are briefly outlined, including the behavioural interview, the diagnostic interview, self-report inventories and home-monitoring on the part of parents. Family-based cognitive-behavioural treatment strategies are described. Although research findings are encouraging for the efficacy of these interventions, future studies need to utilize methodologies that allow for the identification of the specific mechanisms responsible for treatment, and improved diagnostic assessment of night fearful children.     

Assessing the Readability of Mental Health Internet Brochures for Children and Adolescents

We investigated the readability of seven mental health brochures on mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders in children that were selected from a website developed by the Center for Mental Health Services at http://www.mentalhealth.org. The reading grade levels of the brochures ranged from 11.1 to 14.8 (mean 13.23), considerably higher than the 8th grade level recommended for educational material by the U. S. Department of Education (1986). On other readability variables, assessed using the Readability Assessment Instrument (RAIN; Singh, 1994), all brochures met criterion on most variables but failed on those for new words (audience appropriateness) and print size. This is a favorable result in comparison with other studies that have assessed readability of mental health information on the Internet using the RAIN, although less so with reading grade levels.     

Personality Disorder Attributes as Supplemental Goals for Change in Interpersonal Psychotherapy

Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) is a manualized, short-term (usually 12–16 sessions) based on the assumption that psychological disorders often emerge secondary to social and interpersonal problems that require active intervention to achieve symptom remission. The time-limited nature of IPT compels therapists to establish the goal of diminishing, on a weekly basis, a small number of focused interpersonal problems with a decided emphasis on proximal rather than historic conflicts and associated patterns of behavior. This strategy discourages the adoption of diffuse therapy goals and directions that have more opportunity to emerge in long-term, unstructured treatment modalities. The role of traditional personality testing in short-term therapy, when it occurs, is to identify and quantify symptom clusters that warrant attention as dependent measures in the treatment process. The role of personality factors in the genesis or maintenance of psychological disturbance is rarely addressed. The present article explores theoretical and pragmatic objections to the use of personality testing in IPT. A method is proposed for the limited but systematic incorporation of personality testing in the IPT treatment process using the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI-III). While unreasonable to expect personality transformation through short-term therapy, the partial attenuation of maladaptive behavioral, attitudinal, and emotional reactions to stressors could prove exceedingly helpful to short-term treatments such as IPT.     

The stroop effect: Failure to focus attention or failure to maintain focusing?

Subjects matched the position (high or low) of a first stimulus with either the position or the meaning of a word (HI or LO) presented after an interstimulus interval (ISI). The form of the first stimulus (X or O) varied randomly within trial blocks and specified the relevant feature (meaning or position) of the second stimulus to the subject. When the relevant feature was meaning, Stroop interference from the second stimulus position was observed. This interference decreased as ISI increased. At the longest ISI, it was eliminated completely. A number of explanations for these effects are discussed and then tested in two further matching experiments. In a fourth experiment a similar decrease in interference was observed. These reductions in interference with increase in ISI appear to represent the development of attentional focusing on the relevant feature of the second stimulus. Stroop interference may occur in experiments where the relevant attribute is constant because of a difficulty associated with repeated focusing on the same attribute.     

Believers and Their Disbelief

Several recent Roman Catholics who were known for their devotion have left accounts of their troubled faith. I consider three of these: St. Therese of Lisieux, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Then I tell of the troubled atheism of Jean‐Paul Sartre. Finally, I use texts of Sartre and Teilhard to understand the unsettled nature of belief.