Cognitive Behavioral Science behind the Value of Play: Leveraging Everyday Experiences to Promote Play,Learning, and Positive Interactions

ABSTRACT

Participating in play affords physical, social, and cognitive benefits. Here, we review the cognitive behavioral science literature highlighting the value of play and describe the different types of play along with the evidence linking play to positive outcomes for children in areas such as social-emotional, cognitive, academic, and social-emotional development. Several case studies demonstrate how educators, caregivers, and community members can integrate low-cost, evidenced-based playful learning interventions into community settings to impact children where they live.     

The Emergence of Human Altruism:Preschool Children Develop a Norm for Empathy-based Comforting

ABSTRACT

The study examined whether preschool children conceive of empathy-based comforting as being an obligatory reaction toward others in emotional need. We presented 3- and 5-year-old children with three scenarios in which protagonists showed different reactions toward an agent who has hurt herself. One protagonist reacted antisocially by laughing at the agent, one ignored the agent, and one demonstrated empathy-based comforting. The 3-year-olds only protested against the antisocial protagonist. In contrast, the 5-year-olds protested against the protagonists who either acted antisocially or ignored the needy other while they selectively affirmed the protagonist who showed empathy-based comforting. The findings indicate that a norm for empathy-based comforting develops in the preschool years. Overall, our study demonstrates the emergence of a normative concern with the well-being of others, a central aspect of human altruism.     

Mentalization-Based Interventions in Child Psychiatry and Youth Protection Services I: Objectives,Setting, General Principles and Strategies

ABSTRACT

Many of the children who receive services in child psychiatry or are in the care of Youth Protection Services present with complex, multiple and often severe problems. Classic psychodynamic psychotherapy seems to be of little benefit to them. The majority of these children tend to not use symbolic play as a means of expressing their intrapsychic conflicts or relational difficulties and they do not verbally communicate much with clinicians. They are more likely to display an imaginative poverty that translates into boredom, motor discharge, and an inability to use the material put at their disposal for therapeutic purposes. The systematic and rigorous observations of these children in Quebec revealed that the majority of them present with severe mentalizing difficulties. They often show attitudes and behaviors linked to the prementalizing modes of psychic functioning. This article presents a mentalization-based intervention adapted to these children’s difficulties. The objectives, adaptation of the work setting, and general principles underlying this intervention are discussed. In addition, general intervention strategies are also covered. These interventions are considered as preparatory work whose principal purpose is to enable children to benefit later on from psychodynamic psychotherapy. The authors also recommend specific intervention strategies adapted to children’s predominant mode of psychic functioning. The details of these strategies will be shared in a separate article.     

What Changes in Therapy? Who Changes?

SUMMARY

A central component of therapeutic change involves facilitating the capacity to move and be moved by the other. Another way of saying this might be that change entails experiencing a greater freedom of relational movement. The question of who and what actually changes in the process of therapy is the focus of the three vignettes that follow. They highlight, among other things, the recognition and acknowledgment of mutuality as an essential force within the relational matrix and the ever-changing landscape that this creates. Each of these examples of a change process bears, as well, a particular stamp of its own, and thus speaks to the unique personality of every therapeutic dyad.     

Effects of noradrenergic activity on temporal information processing in humans

Temporal processing of durations in the range of seconds or more is mediated by working-memory mechanisms whereas processing of brief durations in the range of milliseconds appears to be beyond cognitive control and modulated by dopaminergic activity in the basal ganglia. In the present study, the effects of the selective noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor reboxetine on temporal information processing were evaluated. In a double-blind crossover design, either placebo or 2 or 4 mg of reboxetine were administered to 24 healthy male volunteers. Performance on temporal discrimination of longer durations, as indicated by 75%-difference thresholds in relation to a 1,000-ms standard interval, was significantly improved by 2 mg of reboxetine as compared to placebo, whereas the improvement observed with the 4-mg dose just failed to reach statistical significance. There was, however, no effect of reboxetine on temporal discrimination of extremely brief durations, as indicated by threshold values in relation to a 50-ms standard interval. Findings provided additional evidence for the notion that temporal processing of durations in the range of seconds is based on working-memory processes including aspects of directed attention. In timing of brief durations in the range of milliseconds, however, noradrenergic activity didnot seem to play a critical role.