Maternal and paternal infant-directed speech to girls and boys: An exploratory study

ABSTRACT

We compared systematically the structure and the content of maternal and paternal speech to infant boys and girls while we also investigated the effect of infant’s age. Six girls and five boys were observed in the interaction with their mothers and their fathers (dyads came from the same families) at home from the second to the sixth month after birth at 15- day intervals. Detailed analysis of time revealed that fathers favour systematically the temporal structure of their speech to both girls and boys, while mothers favour boys in infant emotion/attention thematic sequences and girls in infant attention speech. Variations are counterbalanced in the way mothers and fathers respond sensitively to known marked changes in infant- parent communication over the first 6 months of life. These results are discussing in relation to the theory of innate intersubjectivity and the complementary company and care both parents give to developing infant girls and boys.     

Dionysian Spirit as “The Social Self”: Alfred Schutz’s Insightful (Mis)use of Nietzsche

ABSTRACT

Recent publications on Alfred Schutz suggest the importance of his musical thought for understanding his general viewpoint on intersubjectivity. Developing this proposition further, my article focuses on one aspect of Schutz’s writings on music: his attempts to amalgamate the aesthetic oppositions of the Dionysian/Apollonian by Friedrich Nietzsche and inner duration/spatialized time by Henri Bergson. Despite the seeming distortion of the initial meaning of the Dionysian impulse, I suggest that Schutz’s employment remains faithful to the aesthetic and cognitive theory of early Nietzsche. To substantiate this, I draw a link between Nietzsche’s early theory of aesthetic cognition and the neurophysiology of the mid-nineteenth century. Furthermore, the way Schutz applied the Dionysian/Apollonian opposition to the problem of musical communication made his musical thought prefigure some neuro-scientifically inspired discussions of the present-day, like the one on joint attention. Schutz tackled the key paradox: why the experience of music can be shared but not directly communicated.     

What do psychodynamic therapists make of their reveries in the therapeutic encounter? A constructivist grounded theory study

ABSTRACT

The therapist’s mind can wander to daydreams, fantasies and preoccupations: mental events termed “reveries” in this study. As therapists attend to the current of their thought in the therapeutic encounter, the question of how to approach their reveries can arise. This qualitative study used semi-structured interviews with nine qualified psychodynamic therapists to investigate therapists’ attitudes to reveries. The research design and analysis followed the principles of Charmaz’s [Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory: A practical guide through qualitative analysis. London: Sage; Charmaz, K. (2014). Constructing grounded theory (2nd ed.). London: Sage] constructivist grounded theory. Results showed that therapists experienced diverse reveries sometimes felt to yield deeper clinical understanding. Reveries were also seen to have a “freeing-up” function for the therapist and patient, and to require mental freedom to operate. Implications for theoretical understanding and recommendations for clinical technique are discussed.     

Team adaptability and task cohesion as resources to the non-linear dynamics of workload and sickness absenteeism in firefighter teams

ABSTRACT

The current study builds on the non-linear Dynamic Systems (NDS) perspective to test the assumption that change in sickness absenteeism is non-linear, and that such change is due to workload, team adaptability and task cohesion. Participants were 37 firefighter teams (n = 250 individuals) from a main European capital city. The research hypotheses were tested using SPSS and the “cusp” package, in the statistical software R. The results suggest that change in sickness absenteeism behaviours over time is non-linear, with the cusp catastrophe model predicting such behaviours better than the linear and logistic models. In our model, task cohesion functions as an asymmetry factor (i.e., the independent variable that determines the strength and discrepancy between the two stable states of the dependent variable) leading to a linear change in sickness absenteeism. Interestingly, both workload and team adaptability function as bifurcation (i.e., the independent variable that determines the change between the two stable states of the order parameter) and asymmetry factors leading to non-linear and linear change in sickness absenteeism over time. This study contributes to the growing evidence that incorporating the NDS perspective enables a better understanding of action teams, namely those working in extreme environments.     

The temporal dimension in the understanding of maternal sensitivity in caregiver-infant interactions: The ‘Early Mother-Child Interaction Coding System’

Caregiver-child interaction is known to play a central role in children’s socioemotional development, yet the diversity of measures commonly used to evaluate it call into question the nature of the construct being assessed. Contingency within caregiver-child interactions has been identified as a key dyadic process that requires taking a temporal perspective to evaluating interactions. The Early Mother-Child Interaction Coding System is a psychometrically sound measure that sequentially code the flow of interactive and non-interactive behaviours within a caregiver-infant system. Its use of the framework of nonlinear dynamical systems (NDS) expands our understanding of contingent caregiver-infant dyadic behaviour.     

Estimating Age-Based Developmental Trajectories Using Latent Change Score Models Based on Measurement Occasion

Abstract

Accelerated longitudinal designs (ALDs) are designs in which participants from different cohorts provide repeated measures covering a fraction of the time range of the study. ALDs allow researchers to study developmental processes spanning long periods within a relatively shorter time framework. The common trajectory is studied by aggregating the information provided by the different cohorts. Latent change score (LCS) models provide a powerful analytical framework to analyze data from ALDs. With developmental data, LCS models can be specified using measurement occasion as the time metric. This provides a number of benefits, but has an important limitation: It makes it not possible to characterize the longitudinal changes as a function of a developmental process such as age or biological maturation. To overcome this limitation, we propose an extension of an occasion-based LCS model that includes age differences at the first measurement occasion. We conducted a Monte Carlo study and compared the results of including different transformations of the age variable. Our results indicate that some of the proposed transformations resulted in accurate expectations for the studied process across all the ages in the study, and excellent model fit. We discuss these results and provide the R code for our analysis.