Aktuelle Entwicklungen in der Psychotherapieausbildung und der Ausbildungsforschung

In the journal Psychotherapeut, issues of psychotherapy training have been repeatedly published during recent years, especially related to discussions about a reform of the current training system. This reform now seems to have been initiated. Besides a historical sketch of the training-related discourse of recent years and a proposal for defining core fields of competence of psychotherapists, this paper summarizes current trends in training research, which seem to be gaining importance within psychotherapy research.     

Testing the Four Main Predictions of the Interpersonal–Psychological Theory of Suicidal Behavior in an Inpatient Sample Admitted Due to Severe Suicidality

This study aimed to evaluate four main predictions of the Interpersonal Psychological Theory of Suicide (IPTS): the importance of perceived burdensomeness (PB), thwarted belongingness (TB), hopelessness (H), and capability for suicide (CS) for (passive/active) suicide ideation, suicide intent and suicide attempts. N = 308 psychiatric inpatients admitted due to severe suicidality (53.6% female: n = 165; age: M = 36.82, SD = 14.30, range: 18–81) completed self-report measures of TB, PB, H, CS and suicide ideation as well as interviews on suicide intent and suicide attempts. TB and PB were associated with (passive/active) suicidal ideation, whereas the three-way interaction PB, TB, and H was not associated with active suicide ideation. Fearlessness about death in conjunction with active suicidal ideation was not associated with suicide intent and the interaction of PB, TB, and CS was neither predictive of recent suicide attempt status nor lifetime number of suicide attempts. Given the cross-sectional nature of the data, conclusions on causality should be handled carefully. The results challenge the theoretical validity of the IPTS and its clinical utility—at least within the methodological limitations of the current study. Yet, findings underscore the importance of PB in understanding suicidality.     

Psychobiological Aspects of Infant Crying

This study addresses the relationship between the amount of infant crying and maternal responsiveness to the infant's facial communicative cues during distress and non-distress situations. From an evolutionary perspective, the interpretation of infant crying as a communicative signal is preferred over its distance-regulating function. This view implies a relation between the amount of infant crying and parameters describing interactional regulation. Maternal responsiveness is operationalized by (a) the contingent reactions in a latency time span which define the intuitive character of parental behaviours (200–800 ms) and by (b) an event-based coding system of maternal inappropriate behaviour. Infant states (crying, fussing, sleeping and waking hours) were assessed by means of diaries kept by the mothers. In two samples (N=10, N=13, respectively), married, middle-class mothers were videotaped in free play situations with their healthy, firstborn children in their family homes. Results show that there is a strong intersituational consistency of maternal behaviour, but context-sensitive components of maternal behaviour could also be found. The contingency of maternal reactions during the free play situation can be regarded as a predictor of the duration of the infant's crying measured by a maternal diary. The whole pattern of the results confirms the regulatory function of infant crying in the context of early caregiver–child interactions.     

Working with families of adults with anorexia nervosa

The aim of this paper is to describe working with the carers (families) of adults with anorexia nervosa (AN), which is different from working with families of younger adolescents. The main difference is in the area of rights and responsibilities of both parties. Moreover, as AN in adults is often a chronic condition, the treatment goal may not focus on recovery, but instead on improvement in quality of life. Thus the spectrum of nature and degree of parental involvement in the treatment of adults with AN is much broader than in children and adolescents. Our framework for intervention is based on a clear model of carer distress, from which targets for intervention follow. The paper outlines some of the core components of this work.     

Correlation between tests of attention and performance on grooved and Purdue pegboards in normal subjects

This study investigated the relation between tests of manual dexterity and attentional functions with 49 normal, right-handed medical students (26 women, 23 men, ages 19-30 years) who were assessed with a Purdue Pegboard Test, Grooved Pegboard Test, and a Test for Attentional Performance, comprising measures of tonic and phasic alertness and divided attention. Weak to moderately high partial correlations controlling for finger size were obtained between pegboard test performance of the left hand and phasic alertness (r = .31-.50). Purdue Pegboard Assembly subtest scores were weakly correlated with divided attention (r = -.39). These findings suggest that attention is an important determinant of performance for manual dexterity tests of the nondominant hand.     

Psycholinguistic evidence for the underspecification of morphosyntactic features

This paper investigates the paradigmatic relations between inflected word forms (or their affixes) and the feature specifications of these elements. In two sentence-matching experiments German speakers had to decide whether sentence pairs involving inflected adjectives or determiners were identical or not. In both experiments, there was a delay when an inflected form contained positive feature specifications for grammatical features that did not match the feature specifications of the grammatical context in which it appeared. No delay, however, occurred when an incorrectly inflected form had mismatching negative specifications, whereas its positively specified features matched the respective positive features of the context. This result provides evidence for a different status of positively and negatively specified morphosyntactic features. It supports the idea of radical underspecification according to which only positive feature specifications are part of the representations of morphologically complex forms or affixes, whereas negative feature specifications are assigned on the basis of paradigmatic contrasts.     

Convex hull and tour crossings in the Euclidean traveling salesperson problem: Implications for human performance studies

Recently there has been growing interest among psychologists in human performance on the Euclidean traveling salesperson problem (E-TSP). A debate has been initiated on what strategy people use in solving visually presented E-TSP instances. The most prominent hypothesis is the convex-hull hypothesis, originally proposed by MacGregor and Ormerod (1996). We argue that, in the literature so far, there is no evidence for this hypothesis. Alternatively we propose and motivate the hypothesis that people aim at avoiding crossings.     

Altered behavioral and neural responsiveness to counterfactual gains in the elderly

Counterfactual information processing refers to the consideration of events that did not occur in comparison to those actually experienced, in order to determine optimal actions, and can be formulated as computational learning signals, referred to as fictive prediction errors. Decision making and the neural circuitry for counterfactual processing are altered in healthy elderly adults. This experiment investigated age differences in neural systems for decision making with knowledge of counterfactual outcomes. Two groups of healthy adult participants, young (N = 30; ages 19–30 years) and elderly (N = 19; ages 65–80 years), were scanned with fMRI during 240 trials of a strategic sequential investment task in which a particular strategy of differentially weighting counterfactual gains and losses during valuation is associated with more optimal performance. Elderly participants earned significantly less than young adults, differently weighted counterfactual consequences and exploited task knowledge, and exhibited altered activity in a fronto-striatal circuit while making choices, compared to young adults. The degree to which task knowledge was exploited was positively correlated with modulation of neural activity by expected value in the vmPFC for young adults, but not in the elderly. These findings demonstrate that elderly participants’ poor task performance may be related to different counterfactual processing.     

Perfectionism in young musicians: Relations with motivation, effort, achievement, and distress

Many musicians experience anxiety and distress when performing, which has been related to perfectionism. Recent findings, however, show that only some facets of perfectionism are associated with anxiety and distress, whereas other facets are associated with positive characteristics and outcomes such as motivation and achievement. To investigate how different facets of perfectionism are related to motivation, effort, achievement, and distress in musicians, 146 young musicians completed measures of perfectionism (striving for perfection, negative reactions to imperfection, and perceived pressure to be perfect), intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, effort, achievement, and distress. Results showed that striving for perfection was associated with intrinsic motivation (intrinsic/identified reasons), higher effort, and higher achievement. Whereas perceived pressure from music teachers was also associated with intrinsic motivation (identified reasons only), negative reactions to imperfection were associated with extrinsic motivation and higher distress. The findings demonstrate that perfectionism in musicians has both positive and negative sides. While negative reactions to imperfection are clearly unhealthy, striving for perfection may be regarded as a healthy pursuit of excellence.