Relational recovery after infidelity as a dual process: A model based on the experiences of female injured partners

In the literature, relational recovery after infidelity is often described as a process going through different consecutive stages towards a reconciliation. We interviewed 25 injured partners and invited them to look back and talk about what helped them to recover from the pain and the conflicts caused by the relational infidelity of their partner. From their stories—through thematic analysis—four themes emerged: 1. talking, 2.the truth, 3. trust and 4. ethical imbalance. It furthermore struck us how the participants described their recovery process as an experience of being oscillated between connection and disconnection. These findings pointed us in the direction of developing a dual process model that fits with our participants' experiences of recovering after infidelity, while emphasizing the dynamic nature of their stories.     

Communication Between Spouses as a Resilience Factor in Families in Which a Parent Has Depression: A Condensed Report

This study focused on communication as a family resilience factor in families in which an adult suffers from a depressive disorder. Six partners of depressive adults were interviewed. Results revealed two groups of couples. The “talkative couples” have many conversations during the depression and a facilitating factor was having insight into the depression. The other group, the “taciturn couples,” indicated large difficulties in having conversations, resulting in silence being the dominant contact between the partners. The majority of the participants stated that the absence of conversation would have meant the end of their relationship.     

Attentional inhibition or paracontrast?

In visual search experiments using asynchronous presentation of target and distractors, a robust and unexpected inhibition of reaction time was observed for the discrimination of a temporally trailing target. A number of experiments were required to determine the source of this inhibition. These experiments eliminated the possibilities that the inhibition might be a manifestation of three attentional processes: inhibition of return, attentional dwell time, or attentional capture by the temporally leading item. Other experiments eliminated the possible preattentional process of the temporal impulse response, the psychological refractory period, and a response inhibition. The characteristics of this inhibition lead to the conclusion that it is a manifestation of paracontrast.     

Child conduct problems: Disorders in conduct or social continuity?

This paper outlines data and speculations relevant to a social continuity hypothesis regarding the development of children's conduct problems. According to the hypothesis, conduct problems arise from an absence of continuity in the child's relationship with parents. This absence constitutes an unpredictable and aversive context for the child, and because the youngster's disruptive conduct can generate short term continuity, that behavior is likely to be reinforced. A review of research concerning this hypothesis is presented and the conclusions focus on evidence of continuity in cooperative parent-child exchanges and discontinuity in non-compliant exchanges. The grounding of this hypothesis within social learning and theory is outlined and its heuristic value for future research and clinical interventions is presented.     

Dichoptic and dichotic micropattern discrimination

Ss compared two rapidly successive, brief, discriminably different stimulus elements, called a micropattern, with a second micropattern composed of the same two stimulus elements presented in reverse temporal order. Discriminations could be made between two such micropatterns in the monaural (monocular) as well as in the dichotic (dichoptic) modes of presentation. Discrimination between micropatterns was based on the perceptual dominance of the temporally trailing stimulus element in both modalities and in both modes of presentation. While monaural (monocular) micropattern discrimination is significantly superior to dichotic (dichoptic) discrimination, the existence of dichotic (dichoptic) discrimination demonstrates that no essential peripheral process is required for micropattern discrimination.     

Central auditory processing. VI. Detecting ear dominance by evoked potentials

An electrophysiological method is described for measuring the direction and strength of a subject's ear dominance for pitch using the P3 component of event-related potentials. Results of these experiments reveal that the P3 can be used effectively for these measures in man.     

Family Secrecy in Family Therapy Practice: An Explorative Focus Group Study

The aim of this focus group study was to explore the experiences of family therapists working with family secrecy. Our study highlights that family secrets present important and compelling challenges for family therapists. Furthermore, our study reveals that there seem to be some basic strategies family therapists use in dealing with these challenges in therapy sessions. One basic strategy is that family therapists try to guard their position of being a trustworthy therapist for each family member by avoiding becoming stuck in family secrecy. Furthermore, therapists explore ways to guide the family toward the disclosure of the secret in order to alleviate the toxicity of the secrecy. This highlights the importance of the systemic model and how influential this perspective is in family therapy practice. Some participants, however, have in addition a second strategy they sometimes use: talking with the family about secrecy without aiming to disclose the secret. In the discussion section of the article we reflect on the possibility that in the strategic choices family therapists make conceptual issues might be involved. Furthermore, we stress the importance of further research.     

“We Hardly Ever Talk about It”: Emotional Responsive Attunement in Couples after a Child's Death

Within Western cultural traditions, the idea that parents should talk about the death of their child with each other is deeply rooted. However, across bereaved parent couples there are wide variations in communication about their grief with each other. In this study, we explored the experiences of bereaved couples related to the process of talking and not talking. We used a thematic coding approach to analyze 20 interviews with 26 bereaved parents (11 interviewed as couples, four as individuals). Four main meanings emerged out of our analysis: not talking because of the inadequacy and pointlessness of words in grief, not talking as a way to regulate emotions in daily life, not talking as an expression of a personal, intimate process, and not talking because the partner has the same loss but a different grief process. In addition, we found that the process of talking and not talking can partly be understood as an emotional responsive process on an intrapersonal and interpersonal level. In this process partners search for a bearable distance from their own grief and their partner's, and attune with their relational context. A better understanding of this process is sought in a dialectical approach, emphasizing the value of both talking and not talking in a tense relationship with each other. Implications for clinical work are described.     

Ambiguous Loss in Transnational Families’ Adolescents: An Exploratory Study in Ecuador

In psychosocial migration literature, the perspective of ambiguous loss has been relevant to articulate personal and relational experiences in the context of transnational families and ongoing separation. Most studies have focused on adult members’ experiences of transnational families, but research exploring ambiguous loss in adolescents whose parents have migrated is still lacking. The present study aimed to explore adolescents’ lived experiences of parental migration. In a pilot explorative study, 14 adolescents with at least one parent who migrated were interviewed about their lived experiences of transnational parent-child relationships and ongoing parent-child separation. Data analysis identified four themes in participants’ accounts: practices of separation creating confusion; current relationship with migrant parents permeated by ambiguity; distrustful representations of migrant parents; and family and social dynamics reactivating the pain of loss. The findings reveal how in the context of parental migration, patterns of separation and ongoing relational processes, compounded by the uncertainty of reunification and an exclusionary social fabric, constitute core elements that shape adolescents’ lived experiences of parent-child relationships characterized by ambiguity.     

Conservation of temporal information by perceptual systems

Experiments in the auditory, visual, and vibratory modality employed two brief discriminably different stimuli, which were presented with temporal asynchronies unequivocally below the Hirsh-Sherrick threshold for performing temporal order judgments. A pair of such stimuli, experienced as a unitary perceptual event, is referred to as a “micropattern” composed of two “stimulus elements.” Ss could readily distinguish between two such micropatterns in which the temporal order of the stimulus elements was reversed. The discrimination was based on the perceptual dominance of the second stimulus element of each micropattern. This perceptual dominance was studied as a function of stimulus-element onset and offset asynchrony, the duration and intensity of the stimulus elements, and the difference (in frequency or wavelength) between the stimulus elements of a micropattern. The results suggest the existence of an operation of all perceptual systems in the time domain that acts to conserve information concerning the temporal order of the two stimulus elements at the expense of discriminatory acuity of the f’~rst element.