Adult-child interaction during invasive medical procedures.

Adult-child interactions during stressful medical procedures were investigated in 43 pediatric patients videotaped during a venipuncture procedure in the course of cancer treatment. Relations among six adult behavior categories (explain, distract, command to engage in coping behavior, give control to the child, praise, and criticize/threat/bargain) and three child behavior categories (momentary distress, cry/scream, and cope) were examined using correlational and sequential analysis. Results indicated that adult distraction resulted in increased child coping and reduced momentary distress and crying. Adult explanations, although a likely response to child distress and crying, did not result in a reduction of these behaviors. Attempts to give the child control reduced child crying. Implications for clinical interventions during painful medical procedures are discussed.     

The ratio principle holds over a million-to-one range of illumination

Infant sensitivity to kinetic information specifying three-dimensional object shape was assessed using computer-generated random-dot displays. Four-month-old infants were habituated to displays of an object oscillating about two different axes on alternating trials. Following habituation, the infants were tested for recovery from habituation to a display of the same object and a novel object. Both test displays employed a new axis of rotation. The infants generalized habituation to the same object and increased their looking to the new object. These results provide evidence that infants are sensitive to motion-carried information specifying three-dimensional object shape, since the random-dot displays minimized static information that differentiated the two objects. These findings suggest that, at least by 4 months of age, infants can detect subtle differences in shape from purely kinetic information.     

Timed picture naming: Extended norms and validation against previous studies

Factors affecting word retrieval were compared in a timed picture-naming paradigm for 520 drawings of objects. In prior timed and untimed studies by Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) and Snodgrass and Yuditsky (1996), concerns were raised that participants could not reliably name large numbers of items in a single session. We show that reliable results are obtained in a single session for 520 items and validate our method against previous findings by Snodgrass and colleagues for overlapping items. For these items, comparable levels of name agreement and latency are obtained, and we replicate effects of length, frequency, both objective and subjective age of acquisition, and visual complexity on reaction time (RT) and name agreement measures. Name agreement is unaffected by order of presentation, although there is a gradual increase in RTs across the session, requiring use of multiple random orders. Current extensions of our method include cross-linguistic, bilingual, developmental, and neuropsychological studies and comparisons of action naming and object naming.     

Electrophysiological evidence for age effects on sensory memory processing of tonal patterns

In older adults, difficulties processing complex auditory scenes, such as speech comprehension in noisy environments, might be due to a specific impairment of temporal processing at early, automatic processing stages involving auditory sensory memory (ASM). Even though age effects on auditory temporal processing have been well-documented, there is a paucity of research on how ASM processing of more complex tone-patterns is altered by age. In the current study, age effects on ASM processing of temporal and frequency aspects of two-tone patterns were investigated using a passive listening protocol. The P1 component, the mismatch negativity (MMN) and the P3a component of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to tone frequency and temporal pattern deviants were recorded in younger and older adults as a measure of auditory event detection, ASM processing, and attention switching, respectively. MMN was elicited with smaller amplitude to both frequency and temporal deviants in older adults. Furthermore, P3a was elicited only in the younger adults. In conclusion, the smaller MMN amplitude indicates that automatic processing of both frequency and temporal aspects of two-tone patterns is impaired in older adults. The failure to initiate an attention switch, suggested by the absence of P3a, indicates that impaired ASM processing of patterns may lead to less distractibility in older adults. Our results suggest age-related changes in ASM processing of patterns that cannot be explained by an inhibitory deficit.     

Dampening of positive affect prospectively predicts depressive symptoms in non-clinical samples

Past research has convincingly shown that a ruminative response style to negative affect (NA) predicts concurrent and prospective levels of depressive symptoms. Recent findings suggest that how people respond to positive affect (PA) might also be involved in the development of depressive symptoms, although this has heretofore not been tested prospectively. Participants from two non-clinical samples (total N=487) completed measures of depressive symptoms, response styles to NA (negative rumination) and response styles to PA (positive rumination and mood dampening) at two assessments separated by a 3-month (Sample 1) and 5-month period (Sample 2). Results in both samples showed that increased dampening responses to PA predict depressive symptoms at follow-up, even when taking into account baseline depressive symptoms and ruminative responses to NA. The results suggest that (dampening) responses to PA add useful information above and beyond (ruminative) responses to NA in predicting depression symptoms prospectively.     

Are immigrants in the nursing industry at increased risk of bullying at work? A one‐year follow‐up study

The purpose of this study was to explore whether (a) immigrant health care workers (HCW) are more at risk of bullying at work than Danish staff members, (b) this association is increased by previous exposure to bullying and (c) immigrants experience more bullying from supervisors, colleagues and clients/residents. We analyzed cross-sectional baseline data from 5,635 health care students of whom 10.4% were immigrants, and conducted a prospective analysis by following 3,109 of these respondents during their first year of employment. More than a third of the respondents had previous experiences with bullying. The baseline analyses showed that immigrants are more at risk of being bullied during both their theoretical education and trainee periods than their Danish co-students. At follow-up we found that 9.1% of the total cohort had been exposed to bullying at work during their first year of employment, hereof 1.8% frequently. "Non-Western" immigrants had a significantly higher risk of exposure to bullying at work during follow-up than the Danish respondents independent of previous experience with bullying. Danish and immigrant health care workers were more exposed to bullying from co-workers than from supervisors with no statistically significant difference between the Danes and the immigrant groups. Both "Western" and "non-Western" respondents were more at risk of bullying from clients/residents than the Danish respondents.     

Zones of Proximal Emotional Development — Psychotherapy Within a Neuroaffective Perspective

This article outlines a conceptual framework for assessing personal and emotional functions of a person’s zone of proximal emotional development. The framework is based on the integrative theory Neuroaffective Developmental Psychology (NADP), which brings together attachment theory, neuropsychology, developmental psychology, and trauma theory. Within the NADP framework, this article describes a way of understanding children’s normal emotional mental organization and of examining how this mental organization may be developed or disturbed by relational issues. It also describes how a child’s mental organization can be disturbed and thus, without intervention, disturb the child’s personality development on a lifelong basis. The article presents three case vignettes, describing three children growing into adolescence with three different attachment patterns and suggested individually tailored intervention plans for each of them, relevant and useful for clinicians working with vulnerable children and families. Because the nervous system retains its plasticity throughout life, attachment is not necessarily an unchangeable pattern. That is why we as clinicians should develop psychotherapeutic methods and a research-based way of determining “what works for whom” by assessing the zone of individual proximal emotional development. The text outlines the characteristics of NADP and how it can be used to structure an intervention plan.     

Analytic change: Assessing ways of being in a psychoanalytic follow‐up interview

The article argues that the concepts of relational scenario, structuralized affect and actualized affect are proposed candidates for observation of changes in relational ways of being as it is expressed in transference. A psychoanalytic follow‐up interview of a former analytic patient is presented in order to illustrate how change in relational ways of being may be registered and studied. By triangulating the patient's verbal report of change with nonverbal information and transference–countertransference dynamics, one may grasp qualitative changes in relational ways of being. The case presented illustrates a former patient's on‐going process of working towards representing aggression in a more direct manner and how this process is made observable with the aid of the proposed concepts in the interview situation. The proposed concepts of relational scenario, structuralized and actualized affect discussed are compared to the concept of transference used in studies of core conflictual relationship theme (CCRT).     

Book reviews

Arvind Sharma, The Philosophy of Religion and Advaita Vedānra: A Comparative Study in Religion and Reason. University Park, Pennsylvania, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, viii+232 pp., £29.50, $32.50. ISBN 0 271 01032 0.

Niels C. Nielsen Jr (ed.), Christianity After Communism: Social, Political and Cultural Struggle in Russia. Boulder, Westview Press, 1994, ix+171 pp., £37.00, $49.95. ISBN 0 8133 2365 7.

Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume 1, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, xi+744 pp., £45.00, $49.95. ISBN 0 521 43405 X.

Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991, 312 pp., $48 (hardback) ISBN 0 1226 32738 8, $16.95 (paperback) ISBN 0 226 32738 6.

Clifford Geertz, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1995, 198 pp., $27.50. ISBN 0 674 00871 5.

William Hamilton, A Quest for the Post-Historical Jesus. New York, Continuum, 1994, 304 pp., $27.50. ISBN 0 8264 0641 6.

Valerie J. Hoffman, Sufism, Mystics, and Saints in Modern Egypt. University of South Carolina Press, 1995, 377 pp.+ notes and index. ISBN 1 57003 055 3.

Margaret H. Case (ed.), Heinrich Zimmer: Coming Into His Own. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994, vi+ 148 pp., $24.95. ISBN 0 691 03337 4.

Tessa J. Bartholomeusz, Women Under the Bō Tree: Buddhist Nuns in Sri Lanka. (Cambridge Studies in Religious Traditions 5.) Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, xx+284 pp., £37.50, $59.95. ISBN 0 521 46129 4.

Philip C. Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, xiii+ 218 pp., £35. ISBN 0 521 45371 2.

George W. Stocking, Jr., After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888–1951. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, London, Athlone Press, 1996, xx+441 pp., $40. ISBN 0 485 30072 9.

P. F. Kornicki and I. J. McMullen (eds), Religion in Japan: Arrows to Heaven and Earth. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, xxv+315 pp., £40. ISBN 0 521 55028 9.

Michael Angold, Church and Society in Byzantium under the Comneni 1081–1261. 605 pp., $89.95 (cloth). ISBN 0521 26432 4.

David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996, ix+301 pp., $29.95, £23.95. ISBN 0 691 03375 7.