Working with and ‘seeing through’ the sexual transference in the psychotherapy of an adolescent boy

This paper explores the challenges and developmental opportunities of working with the sexual transference in psychotherapy with adolescents. Psychoanalytic contributions investigating the nature of adolescent sexuality and the developmental move from a narcissistic organisation to a capacity to form intimate relationships are reviewed, and the question of what happens when there is a lack of containment in infancy is addressed. The way in which unintegrated sexual impulses and phantasies can invade the therapeutic relationship is further discussed through the account of the weekly psychotherapy of a 16-year-old boy who formed a powerful sexual transference to his female therapist. The paper highlights how working through the sexual transference enabled this young man to face his developmental paralysis and begin to use the therapy as an opportunity for psychic growth.     

Are you looking my way? Ostracism widens the cone of gaze

Ostracized individuals demonstrate an increased need for belonging. To satisfy this need, they search for signals of inclusion, one of which may be another person’s gaze directed at oneself. We tested if ostracized, compared to included, individuals judge a greater degree of averted gaze as still being direct. This range of gaze angles still viewed as direct has been dubbed “the cone of (direct) gaze”. In the current research, ostracized and included participants viewed friendly-looking face stimuli with direct or slightly averted gaze (0°, 2°, 4°, 6°, and 8° to the left and to the right) and judged whether stimulus persons were looking at them or not. Ostracized individuals demonstrated a wider gaze cone than included individuals.     

A rating measure of ADHD-related neuropsychological impairment in children and adolescents: Data from the Cognition and Motivation in Everyday Life (CAMEL) Scale from population and clinical samples

A new parent-completed questionnaire, the Cognition and Motivation in Everyday Life (CAMEL) scale, was developed to provide a comprehensive assessment of neuropsychological impairment in children related to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) across diverse cognitive, motivational and energetic domains. Its psychometric properties were investigated. A total of 60 items were generated to cover a wide range of putative ADHD-related neuropsychological processes. A clinical (n = 142) and community (n = 810) sample of parents with children between 6 and 16 years of age completed the questionnaire. Data on ADHD symptoms were also collected with a commonly-used, validated parent rating scale to explore the associations between CAMEL scores and dimensional measures of child ADHD and conduct problems. Factor analysis identified six factors which we labeled (i) Cognition, (ii) Self-Direction and Organization, (iii) Effort Engagement, (iv) Arousal Regulation, (v) Motivational Responsiveness, and (vi) Cautiousness. Self-Direction and Organization and Arousal Regulation were the strongest predictors for ADHD symptomatology. Self-Direction and Organization was strongly associated with inattention and Arousal Regulation with hyperactivity-impulsivity symptoms. Parents distinguished between broad neuropsychological domains in reliable and plausible ways, making distinctions between key aspects of functioning. However, the boundaries between these domains did not map directly onto the distinctions drawn within traditional models of ADHD deficits. Further research is required to examine the predictive validity and cost-effectiveness of the CAMEL scale compared to direct objective testing using laboratory measures in predicting prognosis and treatment outcome.     

Genuine eye contact elicits self-referential processing

The effect of eye contact on self-awareness was investigated with implicit measures based on the use of first-person singular pronouns in sentences. The measures were proposed to tap into self-referential processing, that is, information processing associated with self-awareness. In addition, participants filled in a questionnaire measuring explicit self-awareness. In Experiment 1, the stimulus was a video clip showing another person and, in Experiment 2, the stimulus was a live person. In both experiments, participants were divided into two groups and presented with the stimulus person either making eye contact or gazing downward, depending on the group assignment. During the task, the gaze stimulus was presented before each trial of the pronoun-selection task. Eye contact was found to increase the use of first-person pronouns, but only when participants were facing a real person, not when they were looking at a video of a person. No difference in self-reported self-awareness was found between the two gaze direction groups in either experiment. The results indicate that eye contact elicits self-referential processing, but the effect may be stronger, or possibly limited to, live interaction.     

Eye contact does not facilitate detection in children with autism

Eye contact is crucial in achieving social communication. Deviant patterns of eye contact behavior are found in individuals with autism, who suffer from severe social and communicative deficits. This study used a visual oddball paradigm to investigate whether children with high functioning autism have difficulty in detecting mutual gaze under experimental conditions. The results revealed that children with autism were no better at detecting direct gaze than at detecting averted gaze, which is unlike normal children. This suggests that whereas typically developing children have the ability to detect direct gaze, children with autism do not. This might result in altered eye-contact behavior, which hampers subsequent development of social and communicative skills.     

A longitudinal study of the development of shifts of gaze to a peripheral stimulus in preterm infants with transient periventricular echogenicity

Shifts of gaze to peripheral targets were studied longitudinally, between 6 and 26 weeks corrected age, in full-term and very preterm infants with transient periventricular echogenicity (PVE). Before 10 weeks, simple shifts of gaze were faster and more frequent in preterms with PVE<14 days than in full-terms, suggesting these preterms profited from additional early visual experience. After 16 weeks, there were subtle differences between full- and preterm infants in the development of shifts of gaze requiring disengagement. The differences suggest that, after disengagement had become established, its fine-tuning occurred more slowly in the preterms. Slower fine-tuning of disengagement was not associated with duration of PVE, since it was more marked in preterms with PVE<14 days than in preterms with PVE> or =14 days. The differences in performance between full- and preterm infants were small. However, even small differences may affect the efficiency of visually guided behaviors.     

Mementos and the endowment effect

This research provides evidence for a new moderator of the endowment effect: having a memento of the endowed object. Three studies adapting classic endowment effect paradigms and using a variety of endowment objects and mementos demonstrate that having a memento of an endowment increases willingness to trade the endowment and decreases selling prices for the endowment. We provide evidence that mementos attenuate the endowment effect regardless of whether the memento is a separate small gain when facing the loss of the endowment or a small part of the original endowment that is kept. Examining mementos in context of the endowment effect not only provides insight into the psychology underlying the reluctance to part with one's endowment but also other consumer disposition behaviors.     

Preference for human or algorithmic forecasting advice does not predict if and how it is used

Past research has found that people treat advice differently depending on its source. In many cases, people seem to prefer human advice to algorithms, but in others, there is a reversal, and people seem to prefer algorithmic advice. Across two studies, we examine the persuasiveness of, and judges' preferences for, advice from different sources when forecasting geopolitical events. We find that judges report domain-specific preferences, preferring human advice in the domain of politics and algorithmic advice in the domain of economics. In Study 2, participants report a preference for hybrid advice, that combines human and algorithmic sources, to either one on it's own regardless of domain. More importantly, we find that these preferences did not affect persuasiveness of advice from these different sources, regardless of domain. Judges were primarily sensitive to quantitative features pertaining to the similarity between their initial beliefs and the advice they were offered, such as the distance between them and the relative advisor confidence, when deciding whether to revise their initial beliefs in light of advice, rather than the source that generated the advice.     

Exploiting Listener Gaze to Improve Situated Communication in Dynamic Virtual Environments

Beyond the observation that both speakers and listeners rapidly inspect the visual targets of referring expressions, it has been argued that such gaze may constitute part of the communicative signal. In this study, we investigate whether a speaker may, in principle, exploit listener gaze to improve communicative success. In the context of a virtual environment where listeners follow computer‐generated instructions, we provide two kinds of support for this claim. First, we show that listener gaze provides a reliable real‐time index of understanding even in dynamic and complex environments, and on a per‐utterance basis. Second, we show that a language generation system that uses listener gaze to provide rapid feedback improves overall task performance in comparison with two systems that do not use gaze. Aside from demonstrating the utility of listener gaze in situated communication, our findings open the door to new methods for developing and evaluating multi‐modal models of situated interaction.