Neural correlates of automatic mood regulation in girls at high risk for depression

Daughters of depressed mothers are at significantly elevated risk for developing a depressive disorder themselves. We have little understanding, however, of the specific factors that contribute to this risk. The ability to regulate negative affect effectively is critical to emotional and physical health and may play an important role in influencing risk for depression. We examined whether never-disordered daughters whose mothers have experienced recurrent episodes of depression during their daughters' lifetime differ from never-disordered daughters of never-disordered mothers in their patterns of neural activation during a negative mood induction and during automatic mood regulation. Sad mood was induced in daughters through the use of film clips; daughters then recalled positive autobiographical memories, a procedure shown previously to repair negative affect. During the mood induction, high-risk girls exhibited greater activation than did low-risk daughters in brain areas that have frequently been implicated in the experience of negative affect, including the amygdala and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. In contrast, during automatic mood regulation, low-risk daughters exhibited greater activation than did their high-risk counterparts in brain areas that have frequently been associated with top-down regulation of emotion, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. These findings indicate that girls at high and low risk for depression differ in their patterns of neural activation both while experiencing, and while repairing negative affect, and suggest that anomalies in neural functioning precede the onset of a depressive episode.     

An evaluation of the stimulus equivalence paradigm to teach single-subject design to distance education students via blackboard

The purpose of the current study was to examine the degree to which instruction based on stimulus equivalence procedures could be used to teach single-subject design methodology to graduate-level professionals through a Web-based course management system known as Blackboard (see http://www.blackboard.com). Specifically, we used the stimulus equivalence paradigm to teach relations among the names, definitions, graphical representations of the designs, and two practical scenarios of when it would be appropriate to implement each design. Most participants demonstrated the emergence of untaught relations, and some participants showed generalization to novel vignettes and graphs. Relations largely were not maintained at follow-up but were retaught.     

Effects of three types of noncontingent auditory stimulation on vocal stereotypy in children with autism

We evaluated the effects of 3 types of noncontingent auditory stimulation (music, white noise, recordings of vocal stereotypy) on 2 children with autism who engaged in high rates of vocal stereotypy. For both participants, the music condition was the most effective in decreasing vocal stereotypy to near-zero levels, resulted in the highest parent social validity ratings, and was selected as most preferred in treatment preference evaluations.     

Thin-slice perception develops slowly

Body language and facial gesture provide sufficient visual information to support high-level social inferences from "thin slices" of behavior. Given short movies of nonverbal behavior, adults make reliable judgments in a large number of tasks. Here we find that the high precision of adults' nonverbal social perception depends on the slow development, over childhood, of sensitivity to subtle visual cues. Children and adult participants watched short silent clips in which a target child played with Lego blocks either in the (off-screen) presence of an adult or alone. Participants judged whether the target was playing alone or not; that is, they detected the presence of a social interaction (from the behavior of one participant in that interaction). This task allowed us to compare performance across ages with the true answer. Children did not reach adult levels of performance on this task until 9 or 10 years of age, and we observed an interaction between age and video reversal. Adults and older children benefitted from the videos being played in temporal sequence, rather than reversed, suggesting that adults (but not young children) are sensitive to natural movement in social interactions.     

Emerging perception of causality in action-and-reaction sequences from 4 to 6 months of age: Is it domain-specific?

Two experiments (N=136) studied how 4- to 6-month-olds perceive a simple schematic event, seen as goal-directed action and reaction from 3 years of age. In our causal reaction event, a red square moved toward a blue square, stopping prior to contact. Blue began to move away before red stopped, so that both briefly moved simultaneously at a distance. Primarily, our study sought to determine from what age infants see the causal structure of this reaction event. In addition, we looked at whether this causal percept depends on an animate style of motion and whether it correlates with tasks assessing goal perception and goal-directed action. Infants saw either causal reactions or noncausal delayed control events in which blue started some time after red stopped. These events involved squares that moved either rigidly or nonrigidly in an apparently animate manner. After habituation to one of the four events, infants were tested on reversal of the habituation event. Spatiotemporal features reversed for all events, but causal roles changed only in reversed reactions. The 6-month-olds dishabituated significantly more to reversal of causal reaction events than to noncausal delay events, whereas younger infants reacted similarly to reversal of both. Thus, perceptual causality for reaction events emerges by 6 months of age, a younger age than previously reported but, crucially, the same age at which perceptual causality for launch events has emerged in prior research. On our second question, animate/inanimate motion had no effect at any age, nor did significant correlations emerge with our additional tasks assessing goal perception or goal-directed object retrieval. Available evidence, here and elsewhere, is as compatible with a view that infants initially see A affecting B, without differentiation into physical or psychological causality, as with the standard assumption of distinct physical/psychological causal perception.     

A randomized wait-list controlled analysis of the implementation integrity of team-initiated problem solving processes

Members of Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) teams from 34 elementary schools participated in a Team-Initiated Problem Solving (TIPS) Workshop and follow-up technical assistance. Within the context of a randomized wait-list controlled trial, team members who were the first recipients of the TIPS intervention demonstrated greater implementation integrity in using the problem-solving processes during their team meetings than did members of PBIS Teams in the Wait-List Control group. The success of TIPS at improving implementation integrity of the problem-solving processes is encouraging and suggests the value of conducting additional research focused on determining whether there is a functional relation between use of these problem-solving processes and actual resolution of targeted student academic and social problems.     

The Unseen Cost: A Discussion of the Secondary Traumatization Experience of the Clergy

The vocation of clergy life can be a hazardous journey. Stress and burnout are issues, which are increasingly reported by clerics. Burnout is defined by a constellation of work related symptoms (Doolittle, Mental Health, Religion & Culture,10(1), 31–38, 2007), with emotional exhaustion recognised as a core component. Despite this recognition the research has not focused on factors which lead to this state of emotional exhaustion in particular secondary traumatization. The purpose of this article is threefold. Firstly, it presents the theoretical framework of secondary trauma. Secondly it reviews the literature aligning clergy and trauma work and thirdly it discuses the emotional and physical toll upon clergy from this aspect of their role.     

The relationship between performance-based self-esteem and self-reported work and health behaviors among Danish knowledge workers

Since knowledge intensive work often requires self-management, one might fear that persons who are dependent on work success for self-esteem will have difficulties in finding a healthful and sustainable balance between internal needs and external demands. Accordingly, we examined to what degree work-related performance-based self-esteem (PBS) was linked to work and health behaviors in 392 knowledge workers (226 women, 166 men). In the women group, multiple binary logistic regression analyses with repeated measurements showed that the PBS score was associated with 10 of the 17 examined work and health behaviors. For men the corresponding figure was 3 of 17. In both men and women, higher PBS scores were positively associated with reports of efforts and strivings for work as well as attending work while ill. In conclusion, statistically significant relationships between PBS and work and health behaviors were more clearly visible among women than men. Whether this gender difference is dependent on the study design, or on true inherent differences between women and men, cannot be concluded with any certainty. However, persons who described themselves as being relatively more dependent on work accomplishments for a high self-esteem, as expressed by the PBS score, seem to display work behaviors that may lessen their restitution time. In addition, they also seem to be more prone to work while sick.     

Seeing women as objects: The sexual body part recognition bias

Objectification theory suggests that the bodies of women are sometimes reduced to their sexual body parts. As well, an extensive literature in cognitive psychology suggests that global processing underlies person recognition, whereas local processing underlies object recognition. Integrating these literatures, we introduced and tested the sexual body part recognition bias hypothesis that women's (versus men's) bodies would be reduced to their sexual body parts in the minds of perceivers. Specifically, we adopted the parts versus whole body recognition paradigm, which is a robust indicator of local versus global processing. The findings across two experiments showed that women's bodies were reduced to their sexual body parts in perceivers' minds. We also found that local processing contributed to the sexual body part recognition bias, whereas global processing tempered it. Implications for sexual objectification and its underlying processes and motives are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Brain activity in adults who stutter: similarities across speaking tasks and correlations with stuttering frequency and speaking rate

Many differences in brain activity have been reported between persons who stutter (PWS) and typically fluent controls during oral reading tasks. An earlier meta-analysis of imaging studies identified stutter-related regions, but recent studies report less agreement with those regions. A PET study on adult dextral PWS (n = 18) and matched fluent controls (CONT, n = 12) is reported that used both oral reading and monologue tasks. After correcting for speech rate differences between the groups the task-activation differences were surprisingly small. For both analyses only some regions previously considered stutter-related were more activated in the PWS group than in the CONT group, and these were also activated during eyes-closed rest (ECR). In the PWS group, stuttering frequency was correlated with cortico-striatal-thalamic circuit activity in both speaking tasks. The neuroimaging findings for the PWS group, relative to the CONT group, appear consistent with neuroanatomic abnormalities being increasingly reported among PWS.