From the Couch to the Street: Applications of Psychoanalysis to Work with Individuals Who Are Homeless and Mentally Ill

Current-day psychiatric treatment of severely disturbed populations tends to focus on the biological, behavioral, and social dimensions of rehabilitation. This paper addresses the relative neglect of the complex psychodynamic and interpersonal aspects of treatment of individuals who are homeless and mentally ill by presenting two clinical cases that are discussed from various psychoanalytic frames of reference. Based on their clinical experiences, the authors conclude that psychoanalysis offers valuable frameworks to guide the treatment process and the structure of the treatment setting for individuals who are homeless and suffering from severe psychiatric illness.     

Contextual determinants of retrieval in three-month-old infants

Three-month old infants learned to kick to produce movement in an overhead crib mobile on a conjugate reinforcement (FRI) schedule. All infants were trained in the presence of one of two distinctive crib bumpers. In Experiment 1, infants receiving cued-recall tests in the presence of the original training bumper remembered the conditioned association 1 week later, but those tested in the presence of a different bumper did not. Two weeks later, neither training group evidenced retention of the contingency. In Experiment 2, infants who received a 3-min exposure (“a reactivation treatment”) to the original training bumper 24 h prior to the 2-week retention test exhibited excellent long-term retention, whereas those exposed to a different bumper as a reminder did not, irrepective of whether it was identical to the test bumper or not. These findings demonstrate that the context alone, even though it was never exclusively paired with reinforcement, can act as a retrieval cue.     

Locus of Control and Activity Level as Moderators in the Quantitative Job Demands—Satisfaction/ Psychological Anxiety Relationship: An Experimental Analysis

The present study examined the impact the quantitative job demands on satisfaction and psychological anxiety. In addition, the moderating effects of locus of control and activity level were examined. Consistent with the literature, perceptions of job demands were found to negatively affect satisfaction and positively affect psychological anxiety. Individuals reporting high activity levels had the strongest positive relationship between perceived job demands and psychological anxiety. Finally, external locus of control strengthened the negative relationship between perceived job demands and satisfaction. Results and social implications are discussed.     

Ontogeny of early event memory: II. Encoding and retrieval by 2- and 3-month-olds

The ability of 2-month-old infants to discriminate changes in a 5-object crib mobile following a retention interval of 24 hr was assessed using the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm. Infants were trained in 3 daily 15-min sessions to produce mobile movement by footkicking. Twenty-four hr later, independent groups received generalization tests with mobiles containing 1–5 novel objects substituted into their original training mobile. A control group was tested with the original training mobile. These findings were compared with findings of 2 previous studies involving identical procedures with 3-month-olds, reanalyzed for measures of individual performance over successive test minutes. Although, in absolute terms, 2-month-olds had a flat generalization gradient relative to 3-month-olds, when each infant's kick rate during the generalization test was expressed relative to that infant's kick rate before, and at the end of, training, it was found that the generalization gradients of 2- and 3-month-olds were indistinguishable. The relative response measures indicated a surprising degree of specificity by both age groups: Test mobiles containing more than 1 novel object did not cue retrieval, but test mobiles containing no more than 1 new object yielded perfect retention and complete generalization. These data indicate that infants as young as 2 months are capable of encoding and maintaining a representation of the specific details of their training context for at least 24 hr and, after that delay, can perform fine discriminations based on the discrepancy between their test context and that representation.     

The velten mood induction procedure: A methodological review

The Velten Mood Induction Procedure (1968) has been used extensively to induce elated and depressed moods in experimental subjects, and a wide range of psychological and behavioral effects have been studied following mood induction. This paper reviews experimental findings relating to the effectiveness of the Velten Mood Induction Procedure. Evidence is provided from 46 experiments concerning behavioral and self-report measures of assessment. Implications for the use of this procedure in mood induction research are discussed. It is concluded that the findings relating to the Velten procedure's effectiveness, and assessments of the contribution of demand characteristics to the procedure, are inconsistent and equivocal.     

Sex differences in behavioral and cognitive aspects of decision control

Sex differences in three components of decision control were examined in a series of studies utilizing 4-, 9-, and 14-year-old subjects. These components were actual decision control behavior, the cognitive understanding of the masculine or feminine nature of decision control, and the self-perception of decision control skills. At the behavioral level, boys controlled more decision outcomes than girls, especially at the oldest age grouping. In the area of self-perception, girls were less likely to perceive themselves as decision controllers compared to their male counterparts in the oldest age grouping. As far as general attitudes were concerned, neither boys nor girls equated decision control with masculinity. Results are discussed in terms of the socialization of powerlessness in women.     

Habituation at home

Habituation to mother's face in naturally occurring en face social interactions and to a single object in naturally occurring solitary play was studied in American and Japanese infants. Habituation was observed in both conditions in both samples, and home habituation data paralleled analogous laboratory habituation data both quantitatively and qualitatively.     

Memory for Duration: Role of Hippocampus and Medial Prefrontal Cortex

In this task rats had to learn that a three-dimensional object stimulus (a rectangle) that was visible for 2 s would result in a positive (go) reinforcement for one object (a ball) and no reinforcement (no go) for a different object (a bottle). However, if the rectangle stimulus was visible for 8 s then there would be no reinforcement for the ball (no go), but a reinforcement for the bottle (go). After rats learned this conditional discrimination by responding differentially in terms of latency to approach the object, they received large (dorsal and ventral) lesions of the hippocampus, lesions of the medial prefrontal cortex (anterior cingulate and precentral cortex), lesions of the cortex dorsal to the dorsal hippocampus, or served as sham-operated controls. Following recovery from surgery they were retested. The results indicate that there were major impairments following hippocampal lesions, in contrast to cortical control and medial prefrontal cortex lesions, as indicated by smaller latency differences between positive and negative trials on postsurgery tests. In order to ensure that the deficits observed with hippocampal lesions were not due to a discrimination problem, new rats were trained in an object (gray cylinder) duration discrimination task. In this go/no go procedure, the rats were reinforced for a 2-s exposure (duration) of the gray cylinder, but not a 10-s duration, or vice versa. The results indicate that after hippocampal lesions, there was an initial deficit followed by complete recovery. There were no significant changes for the medial prefrontal, cortical control, or sham-operated animals. It appears that the hippocampus, but not the medial prefrontal cortex, is actively involved in representing in short-term memory temporal attribute information based on the use of markers for the beginning and end of the presence (duration) of a stimulus (object).