Father Absence and Familial Antisocial Characteristics

This study examined family antisocial characteristics according to whether biological fathers live at home and agree to be study participants. Antisocial symptoms were tabulated for 161 clinic-referred children and their parents. Families with fathers at home had fewer paternal, maternal, and child antisocial symptoms, and scored higher on multiple SES indicators, than did families with departed fathers. Antisocial characteristics were highest, and SES was lowest, when fathers could not be located or recruited. Results suggest that requiring father participation (as in family-trio genetic designs) screens out the more antisocial families. Of clinical interest, antisocial behavior in any family member is more likely if the father is absent and nonparticipating. The heightened antisocial behavior in children associated with absent biological fathers was not mitigated by presence of stepfathers and was not accounted for by lower SES. The ethical use of mother report on absent fathers is discussed.     

Time manages interference in visual short-term memory

Emerging evidence suggests that age-related declines in memory may reflect a failure in pattern separation, a process that is believed to reduce the encoding overlap between similar stimulus representations during memory encoding. Indeed, behavioural pattern separation may be indexed by a visual continuous recognition task in which items are presented in sequence and observers report for each whether it is novel, previously viewed (old), or whether it shares features with a previously viewed item (similar). In comparison to young adults, older adults show a decreased pattern separation when the number of items between “old” and “similar” items is increased. Yet the mechanisms of forgetting underpinning this type of recognition task are yet to be explored in a cognitively homogenous group, with careful control over the parameters of the task, including elapsing time (a critical variable in models of forgetting). By extending the inter-item intervals, number of intervening items and overall decay interval, we observed in a young adult sample (N?=?35, M_age?=?19.56 years) that the critical factor governing performance was inter-item interval. We argue that tasks using behavioural continuous recognition to index pattern separation in immediate memory will benefit from generous inter-item spacing, offering protection from inter-item interference.     

父母冲突、亲子关系与青少年抑郁的关系:独生与非独生的调节作用

以452名青少年及其父母为被试,采用问卷法考察亲子关系在父母冲突与青少年抑郁关系间的中介作用,以及独生与非独生对上述中介作用的调节作用。结果发现：（1）独生家庭的母子关系和父子关系显著优于非独生家庭;独生与非独生家庭的父母冲突没有显著差异;（2）父母冲突正向预测青少年抑郁,母子亲密与母子冲突在父母冲突与青少年抑郁间发挥着中介作用,父子亲密与父子冲突的中介作用不显著;（3）母子亲密在父母冲突预测青少年抑郁中的中介作用在独生子女与非独生子女上没有差异,母子冲突的中介作用仅在独生子女上显著。研究结果显示,对于独生子女家庭而言,母亲应尤其注意将父母冲突所带来的消极情感消化在夫妻系统内部。     

Psychological implications of a vision disorder

The paper discusses how the condition of crossed‐eyes affects a baby's eye contact with mother and potentially results in the loss of a vital emotional connection with her during the earliest days of life. This loss may contribute to a rupture that arrests emotional development at a deep psychic level. It is suggested that, in the same way as premature separation, the rupture can precipitate a ‘fusional complex’, a defence that develops to protect the infant against psychotic anxieties. The paper proposes that psychological development atrophies in this place and creates a blind spot. These ideas are explored through analytic theory and developmental literature. The dreams of a patient and his art are used to illustrate a 10‐year ‘alchemical’ process of bringing repressed material into consciousness and transformation. Healing the psychological wounds of deficits in early eye contact may be found to bring sight to a blind spot that was created by the nature of the condition itself.     

THE STUDY AND TREATMENT OF MOTHERS AND INFANTS,THEN AND NOW: MELANIE KLEIN'S “NOTES ON BABY” IN A CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOANALYTIC CONTEXT

This paper draws on Melanie Klein's (unpublished) observational notes of her infant grandson, written primarily in 1938 and 1939. Apart from moving glimpses into a young family's life, the notes contain astute observations of an infant's behavior and emotions. Compared with Klein's published writings, the style is less theoretical and polemical. Later, in his latency years, Klein's grandson was in analysis with Marion Milner, who in 1952 published a paper drawing on the treatment. The present paper focuses on (1) how observations and treatment of the same child and his family by clinicians in close relationships with each other (Klein, Milner, and Winnicott) fertilized reciprocal influence but also brought into question the validity of Klein's observations, and (2) the relative merits and contributions of various modalities in understanding the infant's psyche, including experimental research, direct observation, parent–infant psychotherapy, and reconstructions from older patients—as occurs, for example, in psychoanalysis.     

优差生亲子沟通与认知和情绪压力的关系

研究对优生、差生与其父母围绕数学问题解决而展开的沟通过程进行观察,并采用量表法测量其感受到的认知和情绪压力,以考察两变量之间的关系及优、差生在两者得分上的差异。结果发现：（1）优生无论在沟通行为次数上,还是在沟通行为类型上都表现出一些积极特征;（2）优生的二级认知压力显著高于差生,一级认知压力和情绪压力显著低于差生;（3）督促、指责等消极沟通行为都与一级认知压力和情绪压力存在正相关,而积极沟通行为,如方法指导等则与一级认知压力、情绪压力呈显著负相关;一级认知压力与正确提议比例之间存在显著负相关。     

中学生亲子依恋的特点及其对社会适应的影响:父母亲密的调节作用

以六城市2630名中学生为被试,用问卷法考察中学生亲子依恋、父母亲密和社会适应的状况,发现:(1)中学生母子依恋质量高于父子依恋质量;男生的父子沟通、母子疏离和父子疏离的得分显著高于女生;随年级升高,亲子依恋质量显著下降;(2)亲子依恋各维度与社会适应各维度存在显著相关.积极社会适应四维度上的得分,存在双亲安全依恋型>一方安全依恋型(父子安全-母子不安全型和父子不安全-母子安全型)>双亲不安全依恋型的情况,消极社会适应的得分则恰好相反;(3)父母亲密能够调节亲子依恋对社会适应的预测作用.     

Thinking with,and about,patients too scared to think: Can non‐interpretive maneuvers stimulate refl ective thought?

Patients incapable of higher-order (symbolic) thinking can often not tolerate evidence of the analyst's separate existence, particularly when that 'otherness' becomes evident in the process of the analyst's refl ecting upon and interpreting how the patient experiences or represents the analyst. The patient's intolerance of the analyst's efforts to think (refl ect upon and interpret) renders the usual psychoanalytic maneuvers employed to stimulate refl ective thought ineffective with such patients. Such patients have to learn to tolerate multiple perspectives before they can allow the analyst, or themselves, to think in the other's presence. The author presents two clinical vignettes that illustrate how the analyst's efforts to think about the patient were experienced by the patient as both intolerably distancing and as rejecting of an aspect of the patient's subjective reality. Working psychoanalytically with such patients requires the analyst to forgo the use of narrow interpretations that elucidate unconscious meanings and motives in favor of alternate technical maneuvers capable of facilitating the development of symbolic thinking and refl ective thought (insightfulness). These maneuvers include a demonstration of the analyst's willingness and ability to withstand (rather than 'interpret away') how he is being psychically represented by the patient, without becoming destroyed by, or lost within, the patient's characterization of him. Beside modeling a tolerance of alternate perspectives of one's self, other non-interpretive maneuvers that help facilitate the development of self-refl ective thought include: stimulating the patient's curiosity about the workings of his own mind by identifying incompletely understood behaviors or reactions worthy of greater psychological understanding, and insinuating doubt about the adequacy of the patient's explanations of such phenomena.     

Democracy,Equality and Toleration

In this paper I comment on a recent “letter” by Burleigh Wilkins addressed to nascent egalitarian democracies which offers advice on the achievement of religious toleration. I argue that while Wilkins’ advice is sound as far as it goes, it is nevertheless underdeveloped insofar as his letter fails to distinguish two competing conceptions of toleration – liberal-pluralist and republican-secularist – both of which are consistent with the advice he offers, but each of which yields very different policy recommendations (as can be seen by consideration of The United States v. Lee in America and, I’affaire du foulard in France). I argue that a democratic society of equals must be committed to liberal-pluralist rather than republican-secularist toleration. Some material in this paper is drawn from Catriona McKinnon, Toleration: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2006). This paper was written during a Fellowship on the Philosophy Program, School of Advanced Study, University of London. I am grateful to the University of York for a sabbatical term, and the Leverhulme Trust for a Study Abroad Fellowship, during which this paper was written. I would like to thank John Horton and Cécile Laborde for very useful written comments, and two anonymous referees for The Journal of Ethics for their reports.     

父子(女)间面孔相似性的进化适应机制及其影响

由于受精和孕育过程发生在母亲体内, 人类受孕具有一定的隐蔽性, 同时人类早期社会存在着通奸行为, 因而, 父亲面临着父亲身份不确定性的风险。为了应对这种风险, 人类男性在生活中往往会寻求一些能表征父亲身份的线索, 其中亲子间面孔相似性被证明是辨别个体间是否存在基因关联(或血缘关系)的有效线索之一。morph软件合成、第三方评定以及当事人的主观评定是研究亲子间面孔相似性的三种基本范式。以往的研究表明当父子(女)间面孔相似性越高时, 父亲对子女的亲子投资水平越高, 父亲感知到的焦虑水平越低, 父亲的身体也越健康, 与此同时, 当父子(女)间面孔相似性越高时, 父亲对女儿会表现出更高的性厌恶水平。未来的研究可以进一步关注文化因素在该效应中的调节作用, 探寻新的研究范式以提高研究的内部效度和外部效度, 以及探讨影响亲子间面孔相似性感知的因素。