Multiple Attachment Representations in Clinical Practice: Case Study of a Six-Year-Old Maltreated Child

Research on attachment predominantly traces the effect of a single or primary attachment and/or attachment style on working models and behavior. However, most children form multiple attachments. This article reviews research on multiple attachment representations in children and considers how such information can usefully be applied to clinical settings. Through the case study of a six-year-old adopted boy with a history of maltreatment, it explores how those internal working models can be assessed in treatment and the clinical value of recognizing different attachment representations and styles. Implications for treatment interventions are explored.     

Intraclass Correlation Associated with Therapists: Estimates and Applications in Planning Psychotherapy Research

It is essential that outcome research permit clear conclusions to be drawn about the efficacy of interventions. The common practice of nesting therapists within conditions can pose important methodological challenges that affect interpretation, particularly if the study is not powered to account for the nested design. An obstacle to the optimal design of these studies is the lack of data about the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), which measures the statistical dependencies introduced by nesting. To begin the development of a public database of ICC estimates, the authors investigated ICCs for a variety outcomes reported in 20 psychotherapy outcome studies. The magnitude of the 495 ICC estimates varied widely across measures and studies. The authors provide recommendations regarding how to select and aggregate ICC estimates for power calculations and show how researchers can use ICC estimates to choose the number of patients and therapists that will optimize power. Attention to these recommendations will strengthen the validity of inferences drawn from psychotherapy studies that nest therapists within conditions.     

Functional Somatic Syndromes and Childhood Physical Abuse in Women: Data From a Representative Community-Based Sample

This study investigated whether childhood physical abuse was associated with functional somatic syndromes (FSS) in women while controlling for age, race, and four clusters of potentially confounding factors: (a) Other childhood adversities, (b) adult health behaviors, (c) socioeconomic status and stressors, and (d) mental health. A regional subsample of the 2005 Canadian Community Health Survey of 7,342 women was used. Women reported whether they had been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), fibromyalgia (Fm), irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), or multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS). Fully 749 reported having been physically abused by someone close to them during their youth. When controlling for potentially confounding factors, childhood physical abuse was significantly associated with CFS (OR = 2.11; 95% CI = 1.22, 3.65), Fm (OR = 1.65; 95% CI = 1.08, 2.52), and MCS (OR = 2.82; 95% = CI 1.90, 4.17). Clinicians using reattribution and stepped care approaches in the management of FSS should assess for a history of abuse.     

Interventions on causal exclusion

Two strains of interventionist responses to the causal exclusion argument are reviewed and critically assessed. On the one hand, one can argue that manipulating supervenient mental states is an effective strategy for manipulating the subvenient physical states, and hence should count as genuine causes to the subvenient physical states. But unless the supervenient and subvenient states manifest some difference in their manipulability conditions, there is no reason to treat them as distinct, which in turn goes against the basic assumption of nonreductive physicalism. On the other hand, one can preserve the distinction between the two by introducing asymmetric manipulability conditions that the supervenience thesis entails. But this response can be used to argue that mental causes never have physical effects. However, this argumentation can also be used to show that mental causes can have mental effects.     

The personality of meaning in life: Associations between dimensions of life meaning and the Big Five

The goal of the current study was to identify aspects of personality that are associated with different ways in which people find meaning in life. This was achieved using constrained principal component analysis (CPCA) on data from 322 university students, who completed the Sources of Meaning and Meaning in Life questionnaire and the Big Five Aspects Scale. CPCA demonstrated that personality traits and life meaning are associated, but not redundant, with one another. Specifically, respondents with high scores on lower-level aspects of Openness to Experience tended to derive meaning from questioning, learning and challenging tradition, whereas those with high scores on aspects of Conscientiousness and Extraversion tended to derive meaning from success at work, health, and family. Results suggest that personality traits are associated with variations in the domains used to derive meaning in life, and demonstrate the utility of CPCA as an innovative statistical technique for the study of individual differences.     

Multiple schedules of conjugate reinforcement and extinction: A translational model for assessing automatically reinforced behavior

This study evaluated the extent to which a conjugate reinforcement schedule (CONJ) involving a contingency between pedaling a stationary bike and viewing a preferred movie could serve as a translational preparation for the analysis of automatically reinforced behavior. In part, researchers examined whether providing participants with either an accurate or an inaccurate rule about the extinction (EXT) component of a multiple schedule (MULT) contributed to the development of control by the MULT (CONJ EXT) schedule. Results show schedule control emerged for four of five participants who received the accurate rule and none of the five participants who received the inaccurate rule. In addition, participants who received accurate rules typically increased pedaling during CONJ components that followed two consecutive EXT components, suggesting that they experienced deprivation for audio and visual stimulation generated by pedaling. These preliminary findings suggest that researchers could use this translational preparation to identify matched interventions for some automatically reinforced behavior.     

The effect of affine transformation on redundancy analysis

Canonical redundancy analysis provides an estimate of the amount of shared variance between two sets of variables and provides an alternative to canonical correlation. The proof that the total redundancy is equal to the average squared multiple correlation coefficient obtained by regressing each variable in the criterion set on all variables in the predictor set is generalized to the case in which there are a larger number of criterion than predictor variables. It is then shown that the redundancy for the criterion set of variables is invariant under affine transformation of the predictor variables, but not invariant under transformation of the criterion variables.     

Social evaluation research: the evaluation of two police patrolling strategies

In most social evaluation research it is difficult to achieve the degree of experimental rigor possible in an applied behavioral study. This study illustrates how the evaluation researcher can increase experimental rigor in the analysis of social interventions. In the first evaluation, a variation of the time-series design that offered maximum experimental control given the limitations of the situation, was employed to evaluate the effects of a specialized home-burglary police patrol. This design revealed that no effects could be attributed to the patrol. In the second evaluation, a multiple baseline-like design was possible in determining the effects of a police walking patrol. This design revealed that the patrol produced an increase in crime reporting but not in arrests. Social interventions often occur in a manner that allows varying degrees of experimental analysis. The evaluation researcher must attain optimal experimental analysis given the limitations of each social intervention.     

Evaluation of multiple schedules with naturally occurring and therapist‐arranged discriminative stimuli following functional communication training

Many studies have shown that (a) functional communication training (FCT) is effective for reducing problem behavior, and (b) multiple schedules can facilitate reinforcer schedule thinning during FCT. Most studies tha have used multiple schedules with FCT have included therapist‐arranged stimuli (e.g., colored cards) as the discriminative stimuli (S^Ds), but recently, researchers have evaluated similar multiple‐schedule training procedures with naturally occurring S^Ds (e.g., overt therapist behavior). The purposes of the current study were to compare the effects of arranged and naturally occurring S^Ds directly during (a) acquisition of discriminated functional communication responses (FCRs) and (b) generalization of discriminated FCRs when we introduced the multiple schedules in novel contexts in which the naturally occurring stimuli were either relatively easy or difficult to discriminate. Results showed that (a) 2 of 3 participants acquired discriminated responding of the FCR more rapidly with arranged than with naturally occurring stimuli, (b) 2 of 3 participants showed resurgence of problem behavior , and (c) 2 of 3 participants showed greater generalization of discriminated responding to novel contexts with arranged stimuli than with naturally occurring stimuli. We discuss these results relative to the conditions under which naturally occurring and arranged S^Ds may promote rapid and generalized treatment gains.