Reflections on the work of Hanna Segal (1918–2011),

This paper is based on a talk given at the conference to celebrate the Work of Hanna Segal and attempts to summarise her contribution to psychoanalysis. I suggest that in addition to being the important presenter of the work of Melanie Klein, she made major contributions to our understanding of many analytic ideas, for example, symbol formation, the usefulness of the concept of the death instinct and the relation between phantasy and reality. She was a pioneer in the analytic treatment of psychosis and sh wrote important papers on literature and aesthetics. She was a great teacher and emphasised the central role played by the analytic setting in representing the attitude of the analyst.     

Engineering Values Into Genetic Engineering: A Proposed Analytic Framework for Scientific Social Responsibility

Recent experiments have been used to “edit” genomes of various plant, animal and other species, including humans, with unprecedented precision. Furthermore, editing the Cas9 endonuclease gene with a gene encoding the desired guide RNA into an organism, adjacent to an altered gene, could create a “gene drive” that could spread a trait through an entire population of organisms. These experiments represent advances along a spectrum of technological abilities that genetic engineers have been working on since the advent of recombinant DNA techniques. The scientific and bioethics communities have built substantial literatures about the ethical and policy implications of genetic engineering, especially in the age of bioterrorism. However, recent CRISPr/Cas experiments have triggered a rehashing of previous policy discussions, suggesting that the scientific community requires guidance on how to think about social responsibility. We propose a framework to enable analysis of social responsibility, using two examples of genetic engineering experiments.     

Remember the Children,Honey! Spouses' Gender-Role Attitudes and Working Mothers' Work-to-Family Conflict

Work-to-family conflict (WFC) is a pressing issue for many working parents, in particular for working mothers, and hence, understanding the factors that contribute to WFC is important. We examined gender-role attitudes as antecedents of working mothers' WFC, focusing on both working mothers' own and their husbands' gender-role attitudes. Building on cognitive dissonance theory and crossover research, we assumed that working mothers who hold more traditional gender-role attitudes or who live with a husband who holds more traditional gender-role attitudes experience more WFC. Additionally, we assumed that the strength of these effects further depends on mothers' workload and the age of their children. We tested our hypotheses with several waves of recent data of 222 dual-earner couples, drawn from a representative sample of the Swiss Household Panel. Results showed that working mothers experienced more WFC if they held more traditional gender-role attitudes, but only if they had a high workload. Working mothers also experienced more WFC if their husbands held more traditional gender-role attitudes, however, independently of mothers' workload or age of the children. These results suggest that both spouses' gender-role attitudes influence working mothers' WFC, albeit in somewhat different ways.© 2018 International Association of Applied Psychology.     

Some correlates of health locus of control among multicultural individuals

The relationship of locus of control to depression, anxiety, hostility, and physical health was assessed in a sample of multicultural college students (N = 162). Powerful Others Health Locus of Control was correlated with depression, anxiety, hostility, and recent physical symptoms while Chance Health Locus of Control (CHLC) was correlated with all of the above as well as chronic physical symptoms and major health problems. When controlling for a variety of health risk factors (viz., age, sex, body mass, exercise, smoking, salt, alcohol, and caffeine), only CHLC remained significant in the physical health models. Results support the cognitive model of mental health which emphasize the importance of adaptive beliefs. Specifically, they suggest that issues about control are related to negative affect and indicate that the often-cited relationship of an external locus of control to depression and anxiety also holds for hostility. The findings do not, however, support the view that anxiety and depression are associated with different types of external locus of control but rather suggest a unified set of locus of control beliefs underlying the three types of negative affect. In addition, evidence is provided for the external validity of the Multidimensional Health Locus of Control (MHLC) Scales with respect to mental health. Further, the results indicate that belief about one’s health may play a significant role in one’s physical health and that the health behavior model of the relationship between locus of control and physical health is insufficient to explain the relationship. As the Chance and Powerful Others MHLC scales were not related to health habits in this sample but were related to mental health (viz., depression, anxiety, and hostility), locus of control beliefs may be related to physical health via their relationship with mental health.     

The short-form Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire (BPAQ-SF): a validation study with federal offenders

The 12-item short form of the Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire (BPAQ-SF) was originally developed by Bryant and Smith (2001) and modified and confirmed using confirmatory factor analysis with mentally ill offenders by Diamond, Wang, and Buffington-Vollum (2005). In the current study, construct validity of the BPAQ-SF was assessed with a sample of 1,181 male and 435 female general population federal offenders. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the four-factor structure. Tests confirmed factorial invariance across gender for all loadings and covariances. Reliabilities were found to be adequate and comparable to those found in the studies cited above. Concurrent validity was supported by high correlations between the subscales of the BPAQ-SF and several relevant subscales on the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI). In addition, those offenders with prior history of violence, head injuries, childhood abuse, residential treatment, custody, or foster care as a child had higher scores on the BPAQ subscales.     

Interactive effects of APOE and CHRNA4 on attention and white matter volume in healthy middle-aged and older adults

In the present study, we investigated age-related changes in interactions between efficiency of neuronal repair mechanisms and efficiency of cholinergic neurotransmission in the context of attentional orienting. In addition, we explored white matter volume changes as possible neuronal underpinnings. A sample of 230 healthy middle-aged (53–64 years) and older (65–75 years) adults was genotyped for polymorphisms of APOE and CHRNA4, a nicotinic receptor subunit gene. Participants were administered a visuospatial attention task involving letter discrimination with location cues of varying validity. Genotype effects on white matter volume were also investigated in a subset of participants who received MRI scans. APOE interacted with CHRNA4, such that APOE-ε4 carriers who were also CHRNA4 TT homozygotes showed disproportionately slowed reaction time (RT) following invalid location cues. The interaction was stronger in the middle-aged participants than in the older participants. There was also a trend for individuals with combined APOE-ε4/CHRNA4 TT genotypes to show both lower white matter volume and slower overall RT on the attention task. The interaction of a neurotransmission gene (CHRNA4) and a susceptibility gene (APOE) suggests that the efficiency of neuronal repair mechanisms may modulate the cholinergic system to influence attentional function.     

Regarding time-sharing with convergent operations

This study contrasts the structural bottleneck and the resource view of attentional limits in time-sharing performance. The research incorporated features of the psychological refractory period (PRP) and the relative priority paradigm designed to maximize joint performance. A main distinction between the two attention views was their prediction on the extent that graded performance tradeoff was possible with graded priority changes. Detailed analysis of the performance and time-sharing strategies called into question the conclusions based exclusively on the PRP paradigm.     

The association between maternal smoking and secondhand exposure and autonomic functioning at 2-4 weeks of age

This study examined the association between maternal smoking and exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) during pregnancy and infant heart rate. Participants were 62 mother-infant dyads where mother smoked during pregnancy, 47 dyads where mother did not smoke during pregnancy but was exposed to ETS and 47 dyads where mother did not smoke and was not exposed to ETS. Average heart rate (HR) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) were assessed at 2-4 weeks of age during sleep. Infants in both exposure groups had higher HR and lower RSA than nonexposed infants. Furthermore, boys in both exposure groups had higher HR and lower RSA than girls. These results highlight the importance of considering prenatal ETS exposure and infant gender when assessing infant outcomes.     

The classification of violence risk

The Classification of Violence Risk (COVR) is an interactive software program designed to estimate the risk that a person hospitalized for mental disorder will be violent to others. The software leads the evaluator through a chart review and a brief interview with the patient. At the end of this interview, the software generates a report that contains a statistically valid estimate of the patient's violence risk-ranging from a 1% to a 76% likelihood of violence-including the confidence interval for that estimate, and a list of the risk factors that the program took into account to produce the estimate. In this article, the development of the COVR software is described and several issues that arise in its administration are discussed.