Cortisol reactivity and regulation associated with shame responding in early childhood

The purpose of this study was to characterize cortisol response and regulation associated with shame responding in early childhood and to examine how general the relation between shame and cortisol is. It was predicted that children responding to task failure with shame would show a larger and more prolonged cortisol response than other children. Participants were 214 children (124 boys, 90 girls) ranging from 3.7 to 4.5 years of age (M = 4.14 years, SD = 0.24). Shame responding was assessed from children's emotion-expressive behavior in response to failing 6 performance tasks, 2 preceding (initial) and 4 following (subsequent) assessment of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activation. Cortisol response and regulation associated with failure were assessed from saliva sampled before and 15, 20, 25, 30, and 40 min following the first of the 2 initial failures. For boys and for some girls, high initial shame was associated with greater cortisol reactivity and slower regulation of the cortisol response. For boys, high initial shame and relatively slow regulation of the associated cortisol response predicted subsequent shame responding occurring after recovery of the cortisol response. For girls, high initial shame, but not cortisol response, predicted subsequent shame responding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).     

Women showing off: notes on female exhibitionism

The limitations of the phallocentric cast of earlier psychoanalytic formulations of "female exhibitionism" linger into the present. In part this connects to certain historical expectations for women's social behavior, and to the vicissitudes of Freud's insufficient knowledge of women in his libidinal psychosexual phasing used as a basis for analytic understanding. The contemporary fade of libido theory contributes to the neglect of such topics as they relate to the biological body. Yet ease and conflict regarding conscious and unconscious female body image representations related to that stepchild of theory-pregnancy and childbirth in particular-play a major role in female body display. Recognition of such body fantasies and female body meanings from early childhood into maturity tends to be marginalized within all of the psychoanalytic theories current today. The focus here on female exhibitionism suggests a normative spectrum for pleasurably active sex seeking and pleasurable procreative desire and fantasy that is present in a female's use of her body and which (of course, but secondarily) can become caught up in conflict. Two cases accenting analyses of female "showing off" behavior are included.     

The interpretation of discrepancies in multimethod research: A comparison of children's negotiations in two research contexts

Although multimethod research has a large number of advocates, problems arise in the interpretation of any discrepancies between results. This paper identifies three approaches to their interpretation: hierarchical validity, cross-validity and triangulation. The first assumes that methods can be ranked in order of validity so that lower ranking methods can be validated against higher ranking methods. The second assumes there is no hierarchy and that multiple methods are desirable to overcome the weaknesses in any one method and, further, that only results obtained from more than one method should be given credence. The third position, which differs from the others in that it arises from a constructionist rather than a positivist framework, holds that multimethods are valuable because of the different insights they produce and focuses attention on the need to examine methods in terms of their contribution in the context of a particular theory. These approaches are discussed in reference to results for children's negotiations from mothers' reports versus those from a quasi-experimental puppets task.     

"It's led me astray": How Cognitive Behavioural Therapists experience personal therapy in clinical practice

Personal therapy is considered to be an essential component of most psychotherapeutic training programmes. However, it remains peripheral to cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) training courses. We present a subsection of results from a qualitative study that examines how CBT therapists use personal therapy in their clinical practice. Seven CBT therapists who have undergone personal therapy were interviewed. Participants were asked about how they used personal therapy in their clinical practice and their accounts were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to identify common themes. This article presents the results of the first master theme, “Personal therapy creates conflict”, which explores a paradox that arises between personal therapy and CBT clinical practice; participants suggest that personal therapy equips them with therapeutic tools that paradoxically hinder their capacity to practice a standardised protocol‐led CBT. Results show that participants found personal therapy created considerable internal conflict, where their use of technical evidence‐based treatment protocols as practitioners was experienced in tension with the relationally oriented therapy they had received as clients. We discuss results in the context of Gabriel Marcel's philosophical insights on the dehumanising effects of technology on human relationships. We conclude with a brief consideration of the current political climate that increasingly privileges short‐term technical solutions to psychological distress.     

Explicit Learning of a Dynamic System with a Non-salient Pattern

We examine the hypothesis that a specific goal leads to implicit learning, whereas a nonspecific goal leads to explicit learning, even though the pattern to be learnt is non-salient. Subjects learned a dynamic control task (Berry & Broadbent, 1984). One group of subjects had a specific control goal, the second group had a non-specific pattern-search goal, and the third group had both goals. On measures of learning (control performance, prediction, and general questions), the non-specific group learnt explicitly, outperforming the other two groups on all learning measures. The specific group performed next best on control performance and prediction questions but performed very poorly on general questions. The dual-goal group performed poorly on all measures. Non-specific subjects predicted well on both familiar and unfamiliar situations. Specific-goal subjects predicted well on familiar situations, regardless of whether their previous response had been correct or incorrect. Dual-goal subjects predicted well only on familiar correct situations. We conclude that the non-specific group learned through explicit hypothesis testing, the specific group learned through a mixture of explicit problem solving and implicit instance learning, and the dual-goal group learned instances. Results are discussed in terms of dual-space models of problem solving and hypothesis testing and in terms of implicit instance learning. We consider how the choice of learning goal affects the cognitive processes used during learning and suggest that having subjects learn the same information implicitly or explicitly is potentially useful for drawing clearer distinctions between implicit and explicit modes of learning.