Mental health of outpatient pediatric patients

The purpose of this study is to estimate the percentage of mental health problems in a pediatric outpatient Norwegian clinic. We used the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire to screen for mental health problems. Families of children aged 4–11 took part in the study, and 380 out of 982 possible families consented to take part, and 349 families contributed with questionnaire data. The main referral reasons for the patients were asthma, eneuresis and stomach pain. Mothers reported that 17.4% of boys and 17.8% of girls displayed mental clinical problems. The prevalence of problems did not differ significantly between somatic diagnostic groups. Although the study has low participation, it underlines the necessity of screening all pediatric patients for mental health problems. Future research in pediatric clinics should include factors of psychology because pediatric problems are not caused by somatics alone.     

A comparison of coping strategies in patients with fibromyalgia,chronic neuropathic pain,and pain‐free controls

Patients suffering from chronic pain may benefit from learning adaptive coping strategies. Consensus on efficient strategies for this group of patients is, however, lacking, and previous studies have shown inconsistent results. The present study has examined coping strategies in two distinctly different groups of chronic pain patients and a group of healthy controls. Thirty neuropathic pain (NP) patients, 28 fibromyalgia (FM) patients, and 26 pain‐free healthy controls completed the Coping Strategy Questionnaire (CSQ‐48/27) and rated their daily pain. The results showed that FM and NP patients did not cope differently with pain. The only difference between the groups was that FM patients felt more in control of their pain than NP patients. Both patient groups used more maladaptive/passive coping strategies, but surprisingly also more adaptive/active coping strategies than healthy controls. However, FM patients with high levels of passive strategies felt less in control than FM patients with low levels of passive strategies. This was not seen in NP patients. An important implication for clinical practice is therefore that passive coping strategies should be restructured into active ones, especially for FM patients. Otherwise, the same psychological treatment model can be applied to both groups since they use similar coping styles.     

Coping With Strain (CWS) course – its effects on depressive symptoms: A four‐year longitudinal randomized controlled trial

The Coping With Strain (CWS) course is a modification of the Coping With Depression (CWD) course. CWD is by far the most studied psycho‐educational intervention to reduce and prevent depression, but CWD has never been tested in a randomized controlled trial in the workplace. This study seeks to examine the extent to which CWS, on a short‐term and a long‐term basis, reduces depressive symptoms in employees. After advertising at workplaces, 119 employees were randomized into Intervention Group I (IG1), which immediately participated in CWS, or Intervention Group II (IG2), which functioned as a control group for six months until its participation in CWS. The follow up period lasted for four years in both IG1 and IG2. Linear mixed models were fitted to the data. Depressive symptoms were significantly reduced during the course. The reduction of depressive symptoms was maintained over a period of four years in both IG1 and IG2, although there is a slight increase towards the end of the follow‐up period. CWS is effective in reducing depressive symptoms among employees. The effects are long lasting and may be maintained over a period of four years.     

Dissociative Experiences and Trauma Exposure Among Newly Arrived and Settled Young War Refugees

War-traumatized refugee adolescents are a vulnerable and understudied group. This study of two different groups of war-traumatized youth (N = 77) resettled in Sweden (newly arrived refugee adolescents, n = 42, 13–19 years, and settled students with childhood war experiences, n = 35, 11–18 years) evaluated their war experiences, refugee journey, general trauma exposure, posttraumatic stress symptoms, and dissociative experiences. Both groups had experienced many traumas and a substantial proportion reported levels consistent with posttraumatic stress (71% in the newly arrived group and 34% among the settled students) and dissociation (36% and 23%, respectively). The study also provides information about the type of adverse events experienced by war-refugee adolescents, including their own subjective appraisals of the worst events. The results show that the extent of trauma exposure and posttraumatic and dissociative symptomatology among refugee adolescents are considerable even after a period of resettlement, a finding that has educational, clinical, and social implications.     

From Compassion to Obedience: Gender and Emotion in Two Danish Prayer Books

Drawing from recent scholarship on prayer, identity formation and the history and sociology of emotion, this article explores the intersection of gender and emotion in two Danish prayer books dating from before and after the Lutheran Reformation in 1536. It is argued that the introduction of Lutheranism in Denmark resulted in a more strictly gendered understanding of family prayer. In this, the social and emotional ideal of obedience to paternal authority came to eclipse the expression of compassion with the suffering Christ that was a characteristic feature of late-medieval prayer.     

To read two pages,I need 5 minutes,but give me 5 minutes and I will read four: how to change productivity estimates by inverting the question

Past research has shown that people underestimate the time they need to complete large tasks, whereas completion times for smaller tasks are often overestimated, suggesting higher productivity estimates for larger than for smaller tasks. By replacing the traditional question about how much time a given work will take with a question about how much work can be completed within a given amount of time, we also found the opposite pattern. Both trends could reflect a general tendency to underestimate large amounts (of work as well as time) relatively to small ones. This ‘magnitude bias’ was explored in two studies where students estimated reading tasks, a third where IT‐professionals estimated software projects, and a fourth where participants imagined a familiar walk, divided into time segments or part distances of varying lengths. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Difficult but Necessary: Conditions of a Contemporary Theology of Love

Abstract : Nørager takes his point of departure in the observation that in modernity “love” has increasingly and undisputedly acquired the status as the fundamental attribute of God. This in turn, however, has made a theology of love vulnerable to the critique leveled by Ludwig Feuerbach, who argued forcefully that God's love in reality was nothing but humanity's ideal of perfect love. Briefly rehearsing two of the most important solutions to this conundrum (Søren Kierkegaard and Anders Nygren), Nørager finds both of them unduly polemical toward “natural” love, leaving us with the idea of a dichotomy or inner opposition between human and divine love. Instead, Nørager points toward a new theology of love where eros and agape are recognized as differing aspects within a continuum of love, and where human and divine love are perceived as mirroring one another.     

Ordinary experience and the epoché: Husserl and Heidegger versus Rosen (and Cavell)

In various publications, Stanley Cavell and Stanley Rosen have emphasized the philosophical importance of what they both call “the ordinary.” They both contrast their recovery of “the ordinary” with traditional philosophy, including the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl. In this paper, I address Rosen’s claims in particular. I argue that Rosen turns the real situation on its head. Contra Rosen, it is not the case that the employment of Husserl’s epoché distorts the authentic voice of “the” ordinary—a voice that is clearly audible only from within everyday life. For (pace both Cavell and Rosen) there is no single “voice” of the ordinary: There are many such “voices,” not all of which are to be relied upon. Therefore, if we want to achieve an adequate grasp of ordinary experience, and Rosen does want this, we precisely need the epoché to curtail the misleading messages of certain other “voices of the ordinary.” Moreover, and somewhat surprisingly, this positive evaluation of the Husserlian epoché finds support in Heidegger’s writings from the twenties. I argue that Heidegger, too, believed that the epoché was an indispensable tool for the philosophical attempt to capture ordinary experience.