Neighborhood Stress and Life Satisfaction: Is there a Relationship for African American Adolescents?

Applied Research in Quality of Life - This study identified associations between perceived neighborhood stress and adolescents’ perceptions of life satisfaction. African American adolescents...     

From the Balint method toward profession-related supervision

This paper focuses on Michael Balint's special application of psychoanalysis, originally conceived as a training of doctors. Then the attempt is made to discover indirectly, since Balint never described his method in context, what he thought mattered in terms of method. Besides Balint's own contributions, those of his own staff are also consulted as well as the cultural background of the Tavistock Clinic and the Tavistock Institute. Then the further developments of the Balint method in the German-speaking world are presented. At the center are the special features of the method: (a) the atmosphere, (b) the narrator's contribution, (c) listening and reactions of the members of the group, (d) the unconscious enactments in transference and countertransference and the mirror-phenomena, respectively. Furthermore, the respective central points of reference are discussed from the viewpoint of communication science: (a) case, (b) group, and (c) institution. In conclusion and based on these foundations, the characteristics of the application of the Balint method in the form of a particular profession-related supervision are presented.     

The history of couple therapy: a millennial review

In this article, we review the major conceptual and clinical influences and trends in the history of couple therapy to date, and also chronicle the history of research on couple therapy. The evolving patterns in theory and practice are reviewed as having progressed through four distinctive phases: Phase I–Atheoretical Marriage Counseling Formation (1930–1963); Phase II–Psychoanalytic Experimentation (1931–1966); Phase III–Family Therapy Incorporation (1963–1985); and Phase IV–Refinement, Extension, Diversification, and Integration (1986–present). The history of research in the field is described as having passed through three phases: Phase I–A Technique in Search of Some Data (1930–1974), Phase II–Irrational(?) Exuberance (1975–1992), and Phase III–Caution and Extension (1993–present). The article concludes with the identification of Four Great Historical Ironies in the History of Couple Therapy.     

Eat,drink, and be merry,for tomorrow we diet: effects of anticipated deprivation on food intake in restrained and unrestrained eaters

This study examined the effect of anticipated food deprivation on intake in restrained and unrestrained eaters. Participants were randomly assigned to a diet condition, in which they expected to diet for a week, or to a control (no-diet) condition. Immediately after being assigned to a condition, participants completed a taste-rating task in which food consumption was measured. Restrained eaters in the diet condition consumed significantly more food than did restrained eaters in the no-diet condition or unrestrained eaters in either condition. Unrestrained eaters consumed the same amount regardless of condition. These results confirm that merely planning to go on a diet can trigger overeating in restrained eaters, reflecting the dynamic connection between dieting and overeating.     

Clinical features of major depressive disorder in adolescents and their relatives: impact on familial aggregation, implications for phenotype definition, and specificity of transmission

Three questions were addressed using family study data from a community sample: (a) Which clinical features of major depressive disorder (MDD) in adolescents are associated with elevated rates of MDD in relatives? (b) Which features of MDD in relatives distinguish family members of depressed adolescents from relatives of adolescents without mood disorders (NMD)? and (c) Do depressed adolescents with particular features have higher proportions of depressed relatives with the same features? Participants included 268 MDD adolescents, 401 NMD adolescents, and their 2,202 first-degree relatives. Rates of MDD were highest among relatives of depressed adolescents with recurrent episodes and greater impairment. Depression severity best distinguished the relatives of depressed adolescents from relatives of controls. Specific clinical features did not aggregate in families.     

Molecular analyses of the principal components of response strength

Killeen and Hall (2001) showed that a common factor called strength underlies the key dependent variables of response probability, latency, and rate, and that overall response rate is a good predictor of strength. In a search for the mechanisms that underlie those correlations, this article shows that (a) the probability of responding on a trial is a two-state Markov process; (b) latency and rate of responding can be described in terms of the probability and period of stochastic machines called clocked Bernoulli modules, and (c) one such machine, the refractory Poisson process, provides a functional relation between the probability of observing a response during any epoch and the rate of responding. This relation is one of proportionality at low rates and curvilinearity at higher rates.