Individual differences in children's emotion understanding: effects of age and language

Over the last two decades, it has been established that children's emotion understanding changes as they develop. Recent studies have also begun to address individual differences in children's emotion understanding. The first goal of this study was to examine the development of these individual differences across a wide age range with a test assessing nine different components of emotion understanding. The second goal was to examine the relation between language ability and individual differences in emotion understanding. Eighty children ranging in age from 4 to 11 years were tested. Children displayed a clear improvement with age in both their emotion understanding and language ability. In each age group, there were clear individual differences in emotion understanding and language ability. Age and language ability together explained 72% of emotion understanding variance; 20% of this variance was explained by age alone and 27% by language ability alone. The results are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical implications.     

Therapist Self-Efficacy in Delivering Cognitive Processing Therapy in a Randomized Controlled Implementation Trial

Efforts to improve the implementation of evidence-based treatments (EBT) have recently made important strides. One such example is understanding the vital role that weekly consultation plays as therapists learn to deliver an EBT. Because mechanism-based research can further support EBT implementation, the present study sought to examine the potential relationship between therapist self-efficacy in relation to treatment fidelity and outcomes.We examined therapist self-efficacy ratings from 80 therapists working with 188 patients. These data were collected as part of a randomized controlled implementation trial testing cognitive processing therapy (CPT). Across post-workshop training conditions, we ran multilevel models to assess (1) changes in therapist self-efficacy, (2) therapist self-efficacy in relation to treatment fidelity, and (3) therapist-self-efficacy in relation to patient PTSD symptom outcomes.We found that therapist self-efficacy significantly improved over the course of 6 months of CPT training. Baseline therapist self-efficacy was differentially associated with client outcomes based on post-workshop training condition. Specifically, therapists with low self-efficacy that did not receive post-workshop consultation tended to have poorer outcomes than therapists with low self-efficacy that received consultation. In the present sample, therapist self-efficacy was not related to treatment fidelity.As this was the first study to examine therapist self-efficacy in the implementation of an evidence-based treatment, our findings suggest that self-efficacy may be an important implementation factor in treatment outcomes and worthy of ongoing research.     

Hierarchies of Self-Organizing Maps for action recognition

We propose a hierarchical neural architecture able to recognise observed human actions. Each layer in the architecture represents increasingly complex human activity features. The first layer consists of a SOM which performs dimensionality reduction and clustering of the feature space. It represents the dynamics of the stream of posture frames in action sequences as activity trajectories over time. The second layer in the hierarchy consists of another SOM which clusters the activity trajectories of the first-layer SOM and learns to represent action prototypes. The third- and last-layer of the hierarchy consists of a neural network that learns to label action prototypes of the second-layer SOM and is independent – to certain extent – of the camera’s angle and relative distance to the actor. The experiments were carried out with encouraging results with action movies taken from the INRIA 4D repository. In terms of representational accuracy, measured as the recognition rate over the training set, the architecture exhibits 100% accuracy indicating that actions with overlapping patterns of activity can be correctly discriminated. On the other hand, the architecture exhibits 53% recognition rate when presented with the same actions interpreted and performed by a different actor. Experiments on actions captured from different view points revealed a robustness of our system to camera rotation. Indeed, recognition accuracy was comparable to the single viewpoint case. To further assess the performance of the system we have also devised a behavioural experiments in which humans were asked to recognise the same set of actions, captured from different points of view. Results form such a behavioural study let us argue that our architecture is a good candidate as cognitive model of human action recognition, as architectural results are comparable to those observed in humans.     

Promoting Honesty: The Influence of Stories on Children's Lie‐Telling Behaviours and Moral Understanding

Moral stories are a means of communicating the consequences of our actions and emphasizing virtuous behaviour, such as honesty. However, the effect of these stories on children's lie‐telling has yet to be thoroughly explored. The current study investigated the influence of moral stories on children's willingness to lie for another individual. Children were read one of three stories prior to being questioned about an accidental wrongdoing: (1) a positive story, which emphasized the benefits of being honest; (2) a negative story, which outlined the potential costs of lying; and (3) a neutral story, which was unrelated to truth‐telling or lie‐telling. Initially, most children withheld information about the event. Older children were better able to maintain their lies throughout the interview. However, when asked direct questions, children in the positive story condition were more likely to tell the truth than those in the negative and neutral conditions. No significant differences were found between the negative and neutral story conditions. The present study also investigated the relationship between children's conceptual understanding and behaviour. The findings revealed that children's knowledge of truths and lies increased with age. Children who lied had significantly higher conceptual scores than those who did not lie. Furthermore, the type of story children were read had a significant impact on their evaluations of true and false statements. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Light and color in a void: The analysis of a special needs child

This clinical report comes from the five year, four day a week analysis of a male child. What is special is that this treatment is of a child with marked mental retardation. I have retained this nomenclature because that is how Ricardo's parents described his mental capacity. What they meant was that he was greatly impaired in his cognition and this could be seen in Ricardo's severe cognitive, social, behavioral, and relational improprieties. I have privileged the function of psychoanalytic understanding and the role of transference to bring about modifications in this child's internal world. And I have considered the patient's psychotic mental state to be in need of psychoanalytic treatment not withstanding his psychosis's connection to his cognitive handicap. I have also added information I have received after the analysis, information that demonstrates continued integration coming from the analytic process. Owing to Ricardo's limited mental capacities, this article advances clinical information that is not often found in analyses of children. There are possibly many other children like him who nonetheless would benefit from dynamic psychoanalytic understanding. On the other hand, I shall not discuss this matter theoretically, even though some theoretic considerations are necessary. Clinical practice and the transferential relation are this report's principal material.