Back to sleep: Teaching adults to arrange safe infant sleep environments

There are over 3,000 sleep related infant deaths each year in the United States. Attempts to teach medical personnel and parents safe infant sleep practices in the infant sleep training literature have demonstrated mixed results. Thus, strategies to teach arrangements of safe infant sleep environments warrant further investigation. Behavioral skills training (BST) is an evidence-based teaching strategy shown to successfully teach various safety skills to children and adults. The current study evaluated the effectiveness of behavioral skills training to teach safe infant sleep practices to typically developing adults. Specifically, differential responding was assessed across multiple environmental arrangements typical of contexts parents may be exposed to when putting an infant to sleep. BST significantly improved appropriate arrangement of a safe sleep environment for infants for all 8 participants.     

Sketching while narrating as a tool to detect deceit

In none of the deception studies that used drawings to date, was the effect of sketching on both speech content and drawing content examined, making it unclear what the full potential is of the use of drawings as a lie detection tool. A total of 122 truth tellers and liars took part in the study who did or did not sketch while narrating their allegedly experienced event. We formulated hypotheses about the total amount of information and number of complications reported and about various features of the drawings. Participants in the Sketch-present condition provided more information than participants in the Sketch-absent condition, and truth tellers reported more details than liars, but only in the Sketch-present condition. In contrast to previous research, no Veracity differences occurred regarding the content of the drawings, perhaps because sketching was introduced as a tool that facilitated verbal recall and not as a stand-alone tool.     

The relationships between justice perceptions, trust, and employee attitudes in a downsized organization

The authors examined perceptions of distributive justice, procedural justice, trust, organizational commitment, organizational satisfaction, and turnover intentions among survivors in an organization that had recently completed an organizational downsizing. Results suggested that trust partially mediated the relationship between distributive justice and both organizational satisfaction and affective commitment. Additionally, the relationship between procedural justice and turnover intentions was mediated by trust perceptions.     

THE RELATIONSHIP OF GENDER AND ETHNICITY TO SELF-SILENCING AND DEPRESSION AMONG COLLEGE STUDENTS

This study expands on the initial work with the Silencing the Self Scale (STSS; Jack, 1991) by presenting data using a more diverse, nonclinical sample. Included were both men and women ( n = 604) who were African American, Asian, Caucasian, and Hispanic. It was expected that women would be more self-silencing than men, and that there would be ethnic differences. There were three principal findings: (a) men were more self-silencing than were women on the STSS; (b) there was a main effect for ethnicity on the STSS, with Asians expressing the highest levels of self-silencing; and (c) there was a positive correlation between self-silencing and depression for all ethnic/gender groups.     

“I Will Fear no Evil,for I Am with Me”: Mentalization-Oriented Intervention with PTSD Patients. A Case Study

Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients are described as suffering from a collapse of mentalization—the inability to understand and interpret their own behavior and that of others as emanating from intentional mental states. The present paper proposes an integrative focused intervention, called “traumatic mentalization change”, to improve and strengthen the mentalization abilities of PTSD patients. With the assistance of the therapist, patients learn how to embed their present self-states within their retrieved memories of the traumatic event and thus to change their traumatic narrative. These present selfstate images enrich the patients’ narratives with the emotional needs that were missing during the traumatic event by addressing mistaken attributions regarding these memories. In this way, the traumatic narrative changes, and the devastating selffeelings experienced during the original traumatic event are reduced. We demonstrate this intervention with a case study of a veteran PTSD patient who suffered from PTSD for 10 years after being involved in a terrorist attack. The neuro-clinical and clinical implications are discussed.     

Becoming a Telepathic Tuning Fork: Anomalous Experience and the Relational Mind

Although we tend to regard telepathic communication as anomalous or uncanny, outside the range of scientific explanation, many paranormal experiences can be understood scientifically as the type of unconscious affective communication about which there is a growing body of scientific research and evidence. An information-processing model illuminates how a patient’s dissociated attempts to communicate through sensory experiences may be converted to the verbal symbolic via the analyst’s use of evoked images in the dissociative process. Understanding projective identification as a dissociative process of communication by which the patient projected his own unacceptable emotions into the analyst, who could then know experientially what the patient was feeling, can be understood scientifically as telepathic communication. When a patient experiences the effects of severe trauma and is very dissociative, as in the case presented, it is difficult to track and reflect upon these processes as they occur, making it virtually impossible to become and remain empathically attuned to his many self states. In the dissociative attunement deconstructed here, the therapist–patient dyad resonated increasingly in a telepathic attunement, despite much discord and confusion.