The Value of Integration: Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Meets Ego Psychology in a Psychotherapy Group for Children

ABSTRACT

Psychotherapy integration requires us to look beyond the confines of a particular theoretical or technical approach towards other perspectives. Integrative work with children, in particular, meets the socio-emotional needs of the child while simultaneously modeling behaviors and skills. This paper presents an explicitly integrative approach to child group psychotherapy: Relationships. Individuals. Skills. Engagement (RISE) Group. We begin with an in-depth discussion of the RISE group structure illustrated by clinical examples (the “what”) followed by a review of the theory and treatment modalities that inform the approach (the “why” and “how”). The RISE group is grounded in two theoretical perspectives (psychoanalytic principles and ego psychology) and draws upon clinical techniques from multiple treatment modalities (including cognitive behavior therapy, psychodynamic play therapy and dialectical behavior therapy). Combined, the merger of these perspectives results in a multilevel intervention that forges pathways to mastery and competence within the child. Finally, we discuss the value and limitations of integration as applied to group psychotherapy for children.     

DARMA: Software for dual axis rating and media annotation

Continuous measurement systems provide a means of measuring dynamic behavioral and experiential processes as they play out over time. DARMA is a modernized continuous measurement system that synchronizes media playback and the continuous recording of two-dimensional measurements. These measurements can be observational or self-reported and are provided in real-time through the manipulation of a computer joystick. DARMA also provides tools for reviewing and comparing collected measurements and for customizing various settings. DARMA is a domain-independent software tool that was designed to aid researchers who are interested in gaining a deeper understanding of behavior and experience. It is especially well-suited to the study of affective and interpersonal processes, such as the perception and expression of emotional states and the communication of social signals. DARMA is open-source using the GNU General Public License (GPL) and is available for free download from http://darma.jmgirard.com.     

Obtaining representative nominal groups

Many researchers studying the effectiveness of working in groups have compared group performance with the scores of individuals combined into nominal groups. Traditionally, methods for forming nominal groups have been shown to be poor, and more recent procedures (Wright, 2007) are difficult to use for complex designs and are inflexible. A new procedure is introduced and tested in which thousands of possible combinations of nominal groups are sampled. Sample characteristics, such as the mean, variance, and distribution, of all these sets are calculated, and the set that is most representative of all of these sets is returned. The user can choose among different ways of conceptualizing the meaning of most representative, but on the basis of simulations and the fact that most subsequent statistical procedures are based on the mean and variance, we argue that finding the set with the mean and variance most similar to the means of the representative statistics for all of the sets is the preferred approach. The algorithm is implemented in a stand-alone C++ executable program and as an R function. Both of these allow anyone to use the procedures freely.     

Conformity effects in memory for actions

The goal of this research was to examine whether memories for actions can be affected by information reported by another person. In two studies, pairs of participants performed 48 of a set of 96 actions. In Study 1, both members of the pairs performed the same actions, and in Study 2, they performed different actions. One week later, the members of the pairs were questioned together about whether they had or had not done all 96 actions. What one person reported greatly influenced what the other person reported for both correct and incorrect responses. This influence was maintained when the participants were later tested individually, and the participants described having pictorial memories for doing many of the actions that they had not done but had merely been suggested.     

Recognition and context memory for faces from own and other ethnic groups: A remember-know investigation

People are more accurate at recognizing faces from their own ethnic group than at recognizing faces from other ethnic groups. This other-ethnicity effect (OEE) in recognition may be produced by a deficit in recollective memory for other-ethnicity faces. In a single study, White and Black participants saw White and Black faces presented within several different visual contexts. The participants were then given an old/new recognition task. Old responses were followed by remember-know-guess judgments and context judgments. Own-ethnicity faces were recognized more accurately, were given more remember responses, and produced more accurate context judgments than did other-ethnicity faces. These results are discussed in a dual-process framework, and implications for eyewitness memory are considered.     

The Hannibal Lecter Myth: Psychopathy and Verbal Intelligence in the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study

Due to the intriguing nature of the psychopathy construct, it is not surprising that psychopathic characters would appear in popular culture. At times, media portrayals of psychopathic personality are consistent with scholarly research, others times they are not. In the case of Hannibal Lecter, the psychopathic killer was framed as an individual with superior intelligence—an omnibus intelligence that enhanced his ability to manipulative and victimize others. Contrary to this popular conception and based on data from 840 cases selected from the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study, ordinary least squares and ordered logistic regression models showed inverse relationships between verbal intelligence and psychopathy for eight of twelve items of the disorder in this exploratory study. Due to the uniqueness of the MacArthur sample and concern about generalizeability, further research on verbal intelligence and psychopathy is recommended.     

Social anxiety moderates memory conformity in adolescents

When two people view the same event and later try to remember it together, what one person says affects what the other person reports. A model is presented which predicts that this memory conformity effect will be moderated, in different ways, by two components of social anxiety. People with higher fear of negative evaluation should be more influenced by their peers than others, but those with higher social anxiety related to avoiding social situations may be less influenced by their peers than others. Pairs of adolescent‐aged participants took part in a face recognition study. For each trial one person responded and then the next person responded. The effect of what the first person said on the second person's response was measured; the size of the effect was moderated by the social anxiety measures as predicted by the model. This is the first study showing the relationship between social anxiety and memory suggestibility. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Turning a blind eye to double blind line‐ups

Although psychologists have urged police officers to use double blind line‐up procedures during their investigations, police officers state that these would be difficult to administer and most have been reluctant to implement this change. Four studies examine whether lay people's judgements about the guilt of a suspect vary according to whether a brief written summary of a case described the identification procedure as double blind or non‐double blind. The effects were all small (and almost all non‐significant). Most people do not treat double blind line‐ups differently from non‐double blind line‐ups when assessing the guilt of a defendant. Either police investigators should stop using this biased method or police investigators and others in the judicial system (e.g. jurors, judges) should be informed of this bias when evaluating results from any line‐up. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.