学前儿童对事实、信念、愿望和情绪间关系的认知

76名3至5岁儿童接受了区分事实和信念、根据信念推测他人愿望、根据愿望推测他人情绪等实验任务,通过考查学前儿童对事实、信念、愿望和情绪间关系的认知,探察学前儿童心理理论发展的特点。结果显示3岁儿童在区分信念和事实时,出现错报事实或错报信念两种错误,而不单纯是现实主义偏向错误;在推测他人愿望时,部分3岁和4岁儿童虽然能够正确报告他人的信念却不能正确推测他人愿望,愿望认知发展有其复杂性的一面。学前儿童主要依据愿望推测他人情绪,儿童对信念和愿望的认知水平制约儿童对他人情绪的理解。     

The Individualised Patient‐Progress System: A decade of international collaborative networking

Background: The backstage of research projects is seldom presented to the general audience, in particular, how the research questions emerged, how the team interacted and how the methods and design were decided upon. Aim: In this paper we will recount the story behind an international practice‐based research network for personalising health assessment, the joint journey of researchers and therapists from three different countries in creating the Individualised Patient‐Progress System (IPPS). Results: We first describe how the idea of the IPPS emerged; then we show how IPPS is being piloted and integrated into clinical practice. Next, we present the views of therapists and researchers who have been part of this project. Conclusions: We discuss some lessons learned from this 14‐year collaborative research programme.     

Growth in emotional intelligence. Psychotherapy with a learning disabled girl

This paper describes the once-weekly psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a girl, called Ellie, aged eight at the start of her treatment. Ellie had a learning disability and displayed difficult behaviour at school and at home. In her therapy, Ellie grew in emotional intelligence, more in touch with and able to express her feelings. Her behaviour improved and so did her capacity to learn. In the therapy there were certain limitations to progress and this is discussed in terms of how Ellie's disability affected the basic achievements of emotional development, including a mind with a solid ‘reality ego’, able to contain anxiety, and able to maintain depressive functioning. The importance of parallel parent work, to share observations and understanding of the child's functioning is discussed. Difficulties for both child and parents in dealing with the pain of difference and how this limits emotional intelligence are discussed. The author hopes that this paper will encourage the offering of psychoanalytic psychotherapy to children and young people with learning disabilities, who are significantly more likely to suffer from mental health problems than their peers.     

Family Conflict and Children's Internalizing and Externalizing Behavior: Protective Factors

The current investigation examined whether the positive association of family conflict to adolescent depression and conduct problems is attenuated by maternal, paternal, and peer attachment, and maternal and paternal monitoring, within a low-income, multiethnic sample of 284 adolescents. Parental attachment and monitoring moderated the link from family conflict to conduct problems but not depression; the relationships among family conflict, the hypothesized protective factors, and conduct problems were further modified by adolescent gender but not ethnicity. In general, higher levels of the hypothesized protective factors attenuated the relationship between family conflict and conduct problems for girls but exacerbated this relationship for boys. These findings suggest that, in general, parental attachment and monitoring served as protective factors for girls while serving as additional risk factors for boys in conflictual families.     

Conducting clinical research in Polish conditions

This paper comments on Polish legal guarantees for diseased persons with reference to the hazards that accompany experimental treatment. While acknowledging that participation in a clinical research program provides patients with additional opportunities for advanced treatment, the paper also points out that systems for monitoring patients participating in experimental treatment require improvement. This paper was presented at the 6th International Bioethics Conference on the subject of ‘The Responsible Conduct of Basic and Clinical Research’, held in Warsaw, Poland, 3–4 June 2005.     

The mythic function of narcissism

The paper makes some critical comments on the use Freud makes of myth and examines some of the inconsistencies and contradictions in his conceptualization of narcissism. Using some of the ideas of Bachelard and Hillman on the role of the imaginary, the authors theorize a function of myth that is independent of and not subordinated to the reality function. They suggest that narcissism must be seen not only in terms of individual history but that it has a mythic function; narcissism facilitates the creation of a relationship between the ego and the Self through the mediation of the imaginal world and through the prospective value of images.     

Acquiring new spatial intuitions: learning to reason about rotations

There are certain simple rotations of objects that most people cannot reason about accurately. Reliable gaps in the understanding of a fundamental physical domain raise the question of how learning to reason in that domain might proceed. Using virtual reality techniques, this project investigated the nature of learning to reason across the domain of simple rotations. Learning consisted of the acquisition of spatial intuitions: there was encoding of useful spatiotemporal information in specific problem types and a gradual accumulation of this understanding across the domain. This pattern of learning through the accumulation of intuitions is especially interesting for rotational motion, in which an elegant domain-wide kinematics is available to support insightful learning. Individual ability to reason about rotations correlated highly with mastery motivation, skill in fluid reasoning, and skill in reasoning about spatial transformations. Thus, general cognitive advantages aided the understanding of individual rotations without guaranteeing immediate generalization across the domain.     

Sublexical and morphological information in speech processing

Three experiments investigated the impact of syllabic boundary information and of morphological structure on performance in a sequence-monitoring task. In sequence monitoring, participants detect pre-specified sequences of phonemes in spoken carrier words. Sequences corresponded to the first syllable of the carrier word, to its first morpheme, or simultaneously to both. The data from Experiments 1 and 2, using different variants of the monitoring task, showed a strong impact of syllable boundary cues on monitoring latencies. An effect of morphological match between targets and carrier words was also evident. Experiment 3, in which parts of the spoken carrier words were cross-spliced, revealed that syllabic boundary information takes precedence over morphological information. The results are in line with an early process of speech processing, in which syllabic cues are used to aid lexical access. The morphological effect is better understood as a later, probably lexical, contribution of morphological decomposition to monitoring performance.     

Evidence for an Error Monitoring Deficit in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

We studied error monitoring in ADHD and control children in a task requiring inhibition of a motor response. The extent of slowing following successful (stopped) and failed (nonstopped) inhibition was compared across groups. We also measured the time required to inhibit a response (stop signal reaction time, SSRT). Compared to controls, ADHD participants slowed less following nonstopped responses. Slowing did not vary with comorbid reading, oppositional, conduct or anxiety disorder, sex or ADHD subtype. Slowing after nonstopped responses was marginally, although significantly correlated with total ADHD symptoms and with age. ADHD participants had significantly longer SSRT than controls, but SSRT was not significantly correlated with slowing. The apparent deficit in error monitoring in ADHD and its independence from the inhibition deficit observed in ADHD has implications for executive control models of ADHD, performance problems associated with the disorder and for component theories of executive control.