Persistent crying and parenting: Search for a butterfly in a dynamic system

The risks and causes of persistent crying in early infancy are discussed on the basis of a study of 61 infants referred to the Munich Interdisciplinary Research and Intervention Program for Fussy Babies for persistent crying between 1 and 6 months of age, and of a community sample of 51 infants of the same age. Particular attention was paid to pre-verbal parent-infant communication, the development of which was interpreted in terms of a dynamic interactional system including both regulatory and communicative predispositions in infants and intuitive competence for supporting infant predispositions in parents. Neither a gut problem nor any other single causal factor was identified for persistent crying in the majority of cases. In contrast, persistent crying was significantly associated with multiple biological and psychosocial risk factors for both parents and infants. Neurological immaturity, difficult temperament and sleep problems in infants, and impaired psychological conditions, limited resources and failures of intuitive competences in mothers were found to threaten the developmental process in infants and give rise to ‘vicious circles’ which were destabilizing the interactional systems. Increased attention to intuitive parental competences is recommended as one effective model for therapeutic interventions.     

Melodies in caregivers' speech: A species-specific guidance towards language

The author reports on a series of integrated studies on melodic contours in infant-directed (ID) speech. ID melodies in speech are taken as an instructive example of intuitive parenting in order to review current evidence on its forms, functions and determinants. The forms and functions of melodic prototypes are compared in terms of universal properties and individual and/or cultural variability across samples of German, Chinese and American mothers, and German mothers and fathers with their 2- and 3-month-old infants. Microanalyses of interactional contexts show that forms and functions of ID melodies are intimately related to typical dimensions of intuitive caregiving–arousing/soothing, turnyielding/turn-closing, approving/disapproving. The communicative functions of ID melodies as both categorical and graded signals are discussed with respect to the current knowledge on infant responses to ID speech and on early speech perception. According to a comprehensive longitudinal study of ID speech in relation to stages of infant vocalization, ID speech results from fine-tuned adjustments in various prosodic and linguistic features to developmental changes in infants' perceptual and vocal competence. ID melodies evidently have the potential to draw infant attention to caregivers' speech, to regulate arousal and affect in infants, to provide models for imitation, to guide infants in practising communicative subroutines and to mediate linguistic information. Current evidence suggests that the melodies in caregivers' speech provide a species-specific guidance towards language acquisition.     

Laboring and Hanging Out in the Embodied In‐Between

In this essay I describe how my involvement in the political struggles of an immigrant domestic workers' collective inspired me to hang out not only with the workers, but also with the writings of María Lugones and Hannah Arendt. The essay invites the reader to engage in a playful rereading of Arendt's notion of the worldlessness of laboring in the private realm by putting her into dialogue with Lugones's notion of the hangout that defies the public–private split Arendt adamantly insists on in all her writings. By following the complex physical, mental, and emotional itineraries of immigrant domestic workers to, from, and in‐between a number of places and spaces, I demonstrate how their stories blur the line between public and private, and therefore also between the unfreedom of the body and the presumed escape into the political public. I describe the women's experiences as the living promise of a world that allows for an embodied fluid movement between labor, work, and the freedom “inherent in action” (Arendt 193, 153).     

Fischer 344 and wistar rats differ in anxiety and habituation but not in water maze performance

The fact that various neuropharmacological substances have anxiolytic as well as amnesic effects suggests that neuronal mechanisms of anxiety and learning/memory closely interact. Hence, we hypothesized that differences in anxiety-related behavior could be accompanied with differences in cognition or habituation. Two rat strains with different levels of anxiety, more anxious Fischer 344 rats by Charles River (FC) and less anxious Wistar rats by Winkelmann (WW), were tested in the Morris water maze task and an open field test for habituation learning. Additionally, we investigated the effect of different light intensities on the performance in the Morris water maze and the elevated plus maze. The results of the water maze task indicate that differences in anxiety-related behavior do not go along with differences in this performance of learning/memory. Moreover, the test was not affected by different light intensities. In contrast, illumination did affect performance in the elevated plus maze test, wherein dim light provoked an anxiolytic effect in both rat strains. The findings that neither different baseline levels of anxiety nor fear modulating light conditions were accompanied by changes in the performance of rats in the Morris water maze led us to the suggestion that there is no connection between anxiety and learning/memory in this task. Contrarily, anxiety might be associated with habituation learning in the open field test, shown by the superior habituation of the anxious FC rats in comparison to the less anxious WW rats. In sum, these results indicate that anxiety and learning/memory seem to be independently regulated behaviors, whereas habituation might be more closely correlated with anxiety. Nevertheless, a general statement about the relation between emotionality and learning/memory mechanisms would be premature and the link between behaviors remains to be clarified.     

Stressbew?ltigungsintervention am Arbeitsplatz

Background

Occupational stress is considered a major risk factor for a wide range of health outcomes. To examine long-term effects on perceived stress reactivity a randomized controlled trial [1?year after stress management intervention (SMI)] was implemented in a metal working plant.

Method

A total of 174 participants were randomly assigned to an intervention (IG) or a waiting control group (CG) and underwent a group-based program over 2 days, followed by 2-3?h booster sessions. The primary endpoint was perceived stress reactivity (Stress Reactivity Scale, SRS), while secondary endpoints were anxiety and depression (Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, HADS), salivary cortisol and alpha-amylase.

Results

SRS scores decreased in both groups. A two factor ANOVA proved greater reduction in the IG. For SRS, the effect size (Cohen??s d) after 1?year was d=0.416 in the IG and d=0.166 in the CG. Alpha-amylase as a measure of sympathetic nervous system activation decreased more strongly in the IG. Reduction of depression and anxiety was higher in the IG but did not reach statistical significance.

Conclusion

The conducted SMI is effective over a longer period in reducing perceived stress reactivity and sympathetic activation.     

Didactic adjustments in fathers' and mothers' speech to their 3-month-old infants

Vocal dialogues of 3-month-old infants with their mothers and fathers were recorded during dyadic interactions in the laboratory. Six-minute speech samples were analyzed for syntacticlexical and temporal-melodic features. Both parents adopted strikingly similar speech registers. Segmentation, reduction in syntactic complexity, repetitiveness, and slow tempo were more marked than reported for parental speech to children above 1 year. However, rather than providing proper linguistic models, parents utilized simplified patterns of expressive melodic contours as the most salient units of speech. This tendency is interpretable as age-specific adjustment to infants' integrative capacities. Structural similarities between maternal and paternal baby talk by far outweighed a few quantitative differences. The intuitive nature of recourse to basic nonverbal properties of vocal communication, together with universality across sex, favors the assumption that baby talk is a part of species-specific didactic support to infant communicative development.     

Psychosomatische Frauenheilkunde

The psychosomatic perspective offers the adequate method in face of the particularities of gynaecologic tasks and the expectations of women. Every patient comes not only with her illness as an acute and pressing issue into the treatment situation, but brings with her the sum of her previous experiences about her own body and about the medical institutions. The more conscious the doctor-patient-relationship, the less the risk of violations of personal limits which could trigger interpersonal conflicts and problems. The gynaecologist accompanies the normal bodily development, too. So she/he is an advisor in various life-periods as adolescence, pregnancy and childbirth or the menopause and senium. This very special relationship between doctor and patient offered the ground for integrating psychosomatics into gynaecological practice. The theoretical basis of psychosomatic gynaecology includes several models which can be applied to the one or the other illness. We assume a complex, multifactorial and interdependent event where biological, organic, psychodynamic and sociological factors are interacting. From historical and feminist perspective interesting developments can be traced about "what makes women ill". Psychosomatic symptoms may be seen as disturbances of interpersonal relationships on the background of the indidvidual life history and they may be understood as socially co-determinated. For the theory of psychosomatic gynaecology this means, that the bodily, social and psychic differences between women and men should be considered and theoretically reflected. In the future, specific strains of women as expressed in psychosomatic-gynaecological symptoms need further investigation.     

Communication in early infancy: an arena of intersubjective learning

The present essay summarizes experimental, video-microanalytic and clinical aspects of the Papouseks' approach to early preverbal communication. The first section summarizes some of their video-microanalytic research on intuitive parenting and preverbal parent-infant communication. It describes the naturalistic preverbal learning context where infants learn and integrate experiences about themselves, the parent, their interrelatedness, and interactions with objects and events in the environment. The second section recapitulates research involving various kinds of experimental manipulations of the parents' communicative behavior and its effects on infant responses. The final section draws a bow to individual differences and what can be learned from the application of the still-face paradigm in clinical assessments of dysfunctional parent-infant communication.     

Entwicklung eines Curriculums für psychosomatische Grundversorgung in Frauenheilkunde und Geburtshilfe

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