Size of human figure drawing and Goodenough-Harris scores of pediatric oncology patients: a pilot study

Human figure drawings of 12 pediatric oncology patients were significantly smaller in height, width, and area than were drawings of 12 school children and 12 pediatric general surgery patients paired for sex and age. The Goodenough-Harris scores of the cancer patients' drawings were also significantly lower than those of both school and general surgery groups. It is hypothesized that anxiety, lowered self-esteem, and the effects of chemotherapy contributed to these findings.     

Teaching minority high school students to recruit helpers to attain personal and educational goals

Recruiting help from mentors and other potential helpers is a promising strategy for helping disadvantaged and minority youths meet their personal and educational goals. Three African-American high school seniors participated in a project designed to evaluate the effectiveness of training procedures that would allow them to ask for help in attaining educational and other personal goals. A behavioral training procedure that included instructional materials, role-play practice, praise, and feedback was used. Targeted skills included goal setting and 30 responses involved in the process of meeting with a potential helper. Role-play situations were used to evaluate participants' help-recruiting skills before and after training. Participants increased their help-recruiting skills from an average of 38% during baseline, to an average of 75% after training. Self-reported measures of goal attainment suggested that the students benefited from the training. Implications for mentoring programs designed to increase minority students' opportunities to reach educational goals were discussed.     

Assessing the impact of a family nurse-led intervention on young mothers’ references to internal states

A mother's propensity to refer to internal states during mother–child interactions is important for her child's developing social understanding. However, adolescent mothers are less likely to reference internal states when interacting with their children. We investigated whether young mothers’ references to internal states are promoted by the Family Nurse Partnership (FNP) intervention, an intensive home-visiting programme designed to support adolescent mothers in England. We also investigated family, maternal, and child factors associated with young mothers’ references to inner states during interactions with their children. Adolescent mothers (n = 483, aged ≤ 19 years when recruited in pregnancy) and their children participated in an observational substudy of a randomized controlled trial investigating the impact of FNP compared to usual care. Mother–child dyads were video-recorded during free play, and mothers’ speech was coded for use of internal state language (references to cognitions, desires, emotions, intentions, preferences, physiology, and perception). We found no differences in mothers’ use of internal state language between the FNP and usual care groups. A sample-wide investigation identified that other features of mothers’ language and relationship status with the child's father were associated with internal state language use. Findings are discussed with reference to targeted interventions and implications for future research.     

The MUSOS (MUsic SOftware System) Toolkit: A computer-based,open source application for testing memory for melodies

Despite numerous innovative studies, rates of replication in the field of music psychology are extremely low (Frieler et al., 2013). Two key methodological challenges affecting researchers wishing to administer and reproduce studies in music cognition are the difficulty of measuring musical responses, particularly when conducting free-recall studies, and access to a reliable set of novel stimuli unrestricted by copyright or licensing issues. In this article, we propose a solution for these challenges in computer-based administration. We present a computer-based application for testing memory for melodies. Created using the software Max/MSP (Cycling ’74, 2014a), the MUSOS (Music Software System) Toolkit uses a simple modular framework configurable for testing common paradigms such as recall, old–new recognition, and stem completion. The program is accompanied by a stimulus set of 156 novel, copyright-free melodies, in audio and Max/MSP file formats. Two pilot tests were conducted to establish the properties of the accompanying stimulus set that are relevant to music cognition and general memory research. By using this software, a researcher without specialist musical training may administer and accurately measure responses from common paradigms used in the study of memory for music.     

Group Therapy for Loss: Attachment,Intersubjectivity, and Healing

Loss is a fundamental human experience that can impact a person’s mental health in diverse ways. While this experience is potentially formative, harmful manifestations can fracture one’s sense of self and undermine relational health. In this article, we present a rationale for process-oriented group therapy focused on healing relational injuries associated with loss. We draw on attachment, self-psychology, intersubjectivity, and Yalom & Leszcz’s (2005) model of group psychotherapy to explore how group processes allow clients to work through losses and relational frustrations in the here-and-now. A case vignette and discussion offer practical insight on the ways in which loss manifests in the room and demonstrate the uniqueness of the group setting for reparative processing.     

A randomised controlled trial of cognitive-behaviour therapy for behavioural insomnia of childhood in school-aged children

Chronic sleep problems can lead to the development of Behavioural Insomnia of Childhood - a sleep disorder involving problematic sleep-onset associations (i.e., parental presence), and resulting in impairments for children and family members. The aim of the present paper was to perform a controlled evaluation of cognitive-behaviour therapy (CBT) for Behavioural Insomnia. 42 children (M = 9.3 ± 1.9 yrs, range 7-13 yrs, 18f, 24 m) were randomised to CBT (N = 21) or waitlist control (N = 21). CBT consisted of 6 sessions, and combined behavioural sleep medicine techniques (e.g., sleep restriction) with anxiety treatment techniques (e.g., cognitive restructuring). Compared to waitlist controls, children receiving CBT showed significant improvements in sleep latency, wake after sleep onset, and sleep efficiency (all p ≤ .003), but not total sleep time (p > .05). CBT was also associated with a reduction in problematic sleep associations (p ≤ .001), child-reported total and separation anxiety (both p ≤ .01), with all gains being maintained 6 months post-treatment. This is the first controlled study to demonstrate that multi-component CBT can be effective for the sleep, insomnia, and anxiety symptoms of Behavioural Insomnia of Childhood in school-aged children. Future research is needed to ascertain active treatment components.     

CER suppression, passive-avoidance learning, and stress-induced suppression of drinking in the Syracuse high- and low-avoidance strains of rats (Rattus norvegicus)

The Syracuse strains of Long-Evans rats were selectively bred for good (SHA) or poor (SLA) avoidance learning in a two-way shuttle box, which resulted in a phenotypic difference that is correlated with behavior patterns indicative of emotional reactivity, SLA animals showing evidence of greater emotional reactivity than SHA animals. The first three experiments examined conditioned suppression of bar pressing and compared paired and unpaired conditioned- and unconditioned-stimulus presentations to evaluate the influence of conditioning versus primary aversive stimulation on baseline responding. SLA animals acquired conditioned suppression faster than SHA animals and also showed greater suppression of baseline responding than SHA animals. In Experiment 4, SLA animals learned a passive-avoidance task faster than SHA animals. In Experiment 5, SLA animals showed greater stress-induced suppression of drinking a weak quinine solution than SHA animals. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that SLA animals are more emotionally reactive than SHA animals.     

A quantitative evaluation of the AVITEWRITE model of handwriting learning

Much sensory-motor behavior develops through imitation, as during the learning of handwriting by children. Such complex sequential acts are broken down into distinct motor control synergies, or muscle groups, whose activities overlap in time to generate continuous, curved movements that obey an inverse relation between curvature and speed. The adaptive vector integration to endpoint handwriting (AVITEWRITE) model of Grossberg and Paine (2000) [A neural model of corticocerebellar interactions during attentive imitation and predictive learning of sequential handwriting movements. Neural Networks, 13, 999-1046] addressed how such complex movements may be learned through attentive imitation. The model suggested how parietal and motor cortical mechanisms, such as difference vector encoding, interact with adaptively-timed, predictive cerebellar learning during movement imitation and predictive performance. Key psychophysical and neural data about learning to make curved movements were simulated, including a decrease in writing time as learning progresses; generation of unimodal, bell-shaped velocity profiles for each movement synergy; size scaling with isochrony, and speed scaling with preservation of the letter shape and the shapes of the velocity profiles; an inverse relation between curvature and tangential velocity; and a two-thirds power law relation between angular velocity and curvature. However, the model learned from letter trajectories of only one subject, and only qualitative kinematic comparisons were made with previously published human data. The present work describes a quantitative test of AVITEWRITE through direct comparison of a corpus of human handwriting data with the model's performance when it learns by tracing the human trajectories. The results show that model performance was variable across the subjects, with an average correlation between the model and human data of 0.89+/-0.10. The present data from simulations using the AVITEWRITE model highlight some of its strengths while focusing attention on areas, such as novel shape learning in children, where all models of handwriting and the learning of other complex sensory-motor skills would benefit from further research.