TEMPERAMENTAL ADAPTABILITY,PERSISTENCE, AND REGULARITY: PARENTAL RATINGS OF NORWEGIAN INFANTS AGED 6 TO 12 MONTHS,WITH SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR PREVENTIVE PRACTICE

There is a need for standardized measures of infant temperament to strengthen current practices in prevention and early intervention. The present study provides Norwegian data on the Cameron‐Rice Infant Temperament Questionnaire (CRITQ; J.R. Cameron & D.C. Rice, 1986a), which comprises 46 items and is used within a U.S. health maintenance organization. The CRITQ was filled out by mothers and fathers at 6 and again at 12 months as part of a longitudinal study of mental health during the first years of life (the “Little in Norway” study, N = 1,041 families enrolled; V. Moe & L. Smith, 2010). Results showed that internal consistencies were comparable with U.S. data. The temperament dimensions of persistence, adaptability, and regularity had acceptable or close‐to‐acceptable reliabilities in the U.S. study as well as in this study, and also were unifactorial in confirmatory factor analysis. These dimensions are the focus in this article. Findings concerning parents’ differential ratings of their infants on the three dimensions are reported, as is the stability of parents’ ratings of temperament from 6 to 12 months. In addition, results on the relation between temperament and parenting stress are presented. The study suggests that temperamental adaptability, persistence, and regularity may be relevant when assessing infant behavior, and may be applied in systematic prevention trials for families with infants. The inclusion of concepts related to individual differences in response tendencies and regulatory efforts may broaden the understanding of parent—infant transactions, and thus enrich prevention and sensitizing interventions with the aim of assisting infants’ development.     

COGNITIVE AND SOCIOEMOTIONAL FUNCTIONING AT 4½ YEARS IN CHILDREN BORN TO MOTHERS WHO HAVE RECEIVED TREATMENT FOR SUBSTANCE‐ABUSE PROBLEMS WHILE PREGNANT

Cognitive and socioemotional functioning at 4½ years of age were examined in children born to mothers with substance‐abuse problems (n = 22) recruited from residential treatment institutions while pregnant, and then compared to children born to mothers with mental health problems (n = 18) and children from a low‐risk group (n = 26). No significant group differences in cognitive functioning were found, but the children born to mothers with substance‐abuse problems showed more caregiver‐reported socioemotional problems than did the low‐risk children, like the children born to mothers with mental health problems. Birth weight had an effect on internalizing problems at 4½ years and mediated the relation between group and socioemotional problems, although not when controlling for caregiver education, single parenthood, and anxiety and depression. At 4½ years, 7 children born to mothers with substance‐abuse problems were placed in foster care. These children had lower birth weight and higher caregiver‐rated internalizing problems. In addition to emphasizing the importance of the quality of the prenatal environment, this study suggests that families with previous substance abuse are in need of long‐term follow‐up to address socioemotional problems and enhance further positive child cognitive development. The foster‐placed children may be in particular need of long‐term follow‐up.     

The Associations Between Intensive Residential Couple Therapy and Change in a Three-Year Follow-Up Period

This Norwegian couple therapy effectiveness therapy study explored the course and prediction of relationships between depressive symptoms, interpersonal problems, and dyadic adjustment during residential treatment and over a 3-year post-treatment period (N = 117). All measures indicated significant improvement (p < .001) between admission and discharge (effect sizes .25 to .67), and improvement was maintained at 3-year follow-up. The proportion of recovered patients during treatment was stable at follow-up. Finding that initial levels of the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP) predicted dyadic adjustment change in the follow-up period, we discuss how such interpersonal problems may influence the course of couple therapy.     

Recognition Failure: The Influence of Semantic Cue-Target Integration- A Short Note

The observed probability of recognition given recall regularly adheres to what is predicted by the Tulving-Wiseman function. However, three types of exceptions have been observed: Cue overlap and poor cue-target integration cause an enhanced dependence, whereas good cue-target integration causes a diminished dependence between cued recall and recognition. In the present experiment, a diminished dependence between cued recall and recognition was demonstrated for good semantic cue-target integration. Conversely, poor semantic cue-target integration leads to an enhanced dependence between the two tests (see Gardiner & Tulving, 1980). The data were interpreted using the notion of cue-dependence (A rlemalm & Nilsson, 1994) and the semantic assimilation hypothesis (Ronnberg et al., 1991), which is a special case of cue-dependence.     

Breast cancer: a manual for a proposed group treatment integrating evidence based resilience factors

The paper presents the structure and content of a manual for a proposed treatment of breast cancer patients in groups. The proposed treatment is structured, time limited, and integrates elements from 1995 work of Spiegel and the Yalom 1995 theory of group therapy as well as empirically derived resilience factors. Addressing the psychological specificity of breast cancer, the overall treatment goals are to help patients to acquire new coping skills for relieving stress, to increase their personal and social competence and their use of available social support, to increase family coherence, to enhance optimism and quality of life, and to help patients develop new values and priorities that comply with their current and future life situation.     

The enactment effect is due to more than guesses and beliefs

Three experiments examined whether the enactment effect - that is, higher recall of enacted than of corresponding non-enacted information - might be explained by guessing rates and performance expectancies. Experiment 1 checked whether the guessing rate of target items would be higher as a result of a narrowed sampling space defined by the enactment condition. By means of pre-experimental instructions, the subjects in Experiments 2 and 3 were induced to expect respectively a positive enactment effect, a negative enactment effect, or no difference in amount of recall of enacted and non-enacted materials. Experiment 2 had a within-subject design, Experiment 3 a between-subject design. The experiments failed to support the proposed explanations.     

Inventory of interpersonal problems: a three-dimensional balanced and scalable 48-item version

Interpersonal relating has been a focus of attention in psychiatry for decades. To address this domain, a self-rating scale, the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP; Horowitz, Rosenberg, Baer, Ure?o, & Villase?or, 1988), was developed. Analysis of the psychometric properties of IIP presented in this article was performed by principal component analysis (PCA) for the purpose of obtaining subscales with a balanced, bipolar dimensionality. The model was validated by the resulting dimensions' ability to discriminate among different categories of personality disorders (PDs). The problem of a General Complaint factor affecting PCAs of questionnaires such as the IIP is discussed thoroughly, and ways of avoiding the problem are outlined. We present a three-dimensional structure of the IIP with both theoretically appealing and statistically robust dimensions of Assertiveness, Sociability, and Interpersonal Sensitivity based on 48 (out of 127) items. Balanced, additive indexes using the subset of 48 items appeared psychometrically sound by showing much lower correlations internally and less confounding from the General Complaint factor than extant indexes derived from the IIP. External validity seemed to be bolstered by all subscales' discriminating significantly between different PDs versus no PDs, on both cluster and single diagnosis levels. Our analysis seemed to substantiate the reliability (scalability) of three dimensions of the IIP tapping different areas of the interpersonal relational field.     

Visual discovery in mind and on paper

The effectiveness of mental imagery with and without drawing support (perceptual assistance) in the visual synthesis of novel patterns was studied in three experiments. When the task was to create one recognizable pattern from three simple shapes in a 2-min assembly period, subjects were as likely to produce a recognizable or creative pattern per trial whether mental imagery was augmented by external drawing support or not. When the task was to create as many patterns as possible in a 3-min assembly period, more patterns were produced per trial with external drawing support than without; however, neither the recognizability nor the creativity of the patterns differed. Differences in performance in the visual synthesis task with and without external drawing support are interpreted in terms of limited cognitive resources.     

Integration versus nonintegration of noun pairs and verb pairs under enactment and nonenactment conditions

Summary Two paired-associate experiments examined conditions responsible for the free-to-cued-recall decrease phenomenon. Word class was controlled for by the use of pair elements, which could be treated alternatively as verbs and nouns. With this list material, the two experiments studied the effect of encoding conditions varying from standard, unspecified enactment instructions to enactment instructions enriched with context information. The results showed that the free-to-cued-recall decrease did not depend on motor performance, or on word class, but was much more pronounced for recency than for prerecency positions. The findings were discussed in terms of the difference between strategic and nonstrategic processing of memories of enacted information.