Effects of a Peer Engagement Program on Socially Withdrawn Children with a History of Maltreatment

Children with a history of child maltreatment often have limited social interactions with other children and adults. This study examined the effects of a Peer Engagement Program, consisting of peer mentoring and social skills training with positive reinforcement, in three children with low levels of oral and social interaction. A multiple baseline, single-subject research design was used to test whether introduction of the intervention was associated with increased, directly observed oral interaction and engagement in social activities with peers and adults. The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and the Social Skills Rating Scale (SSRS) were administered before and after intervention. All children showed increased levels of oral and social interaction and improved scores on the SSRS and the CBCL.     

How to blow the Whistle and still have a career afterwards

Filing charges of scientific misconduct can be a risky and dangerous endeavor. This article presents rules of conduct to follow when considering whether to report perceived misconduct, and a set of step-by-step procedures for responsible whistleblowing that describe how to do so once the decision to report misconduct has been made. This advice is framed within the university setting, and may not apply fully in industrial settings. Ms. Gunsalus, an attorney, has been responsible for a wide range of compliance issues and academic policy matters at her university including responding to allegations of scientific misconduct. She served on the United States Commission on Research Integrity and spent six years on the AAAS Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, four of them as chair. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the symposium entitled “Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t: What the Scientific Community Can Do About Whistleblowing” held during the Annual Meeting of the AAAS, Seattle, Washington, 15 February, 1997.     

Nonverbal representation of time and number in adults

A wealth of human and animal research supports common neural processing of numerical and temporal information. Here we test whether adult humans spontaneously encode number and time in a paradigm similar to those previously used to test the mode-control model in animals. Subjects were trained to classify visual stimuli that varied in both number and duration as few/short or many/long. Subsequently subjects were tested with novel stimuli that varied time and held number constant (eight flashes in 0.8-3.2s) or varied number and held time constant (4-16 flashes in 1.6s). Adult humans classified novel stimuli as many/long as monotonic functions of both number and duration, consistent with simultaneous, nonverbal, analog encoding. Numerical sensitivity, however, was finer than temporal sensitivity, suggesting differential salience of time and number. These results support the notion that adults simultaneously represent the number and duration of stimuli but suggest a possible asymmetry in their representations.     

Between the Ability to Imagine and Actually Seeing: The Intersubjective in Reclamation

When working with severely damaged, neglected, and deprived patients, the analyst relies on the faith that the intersubjective analytic space can be the site of a live relationship. In this regard, the unique technique of “reclamation” might be used with patients in a moment of imminent danger or of a sense of psychic death and involves an active response to the sense of emergency in countertransference. Reclamation is based on the analyst/therapist's ability to conduct intersubjective dialogue between the various spaces of internalized object relations, and the author attempts to extend the possibility of its technical application by considering reclamation as intersubjective.     

Recent and emerging trends in marital and family therapy regulation

The number of states in the United States that formally credential marital and family therapists has tripled to 31 during the last decade. This paper reviews and compares the basic licensure and certification requirements in these states, and explores a number of broad issues currently confronting the field of marital and family therapy regulation. Several recommendations for improving the quality of MFT regulation are also provided.president of the Association of Marital and Family Therapy Regulatory Boards.     

Young Freud's linkage with Persia

Abstract

Sigmund Freud's hands helped to mutilate a volume containing a series of “colored plates” like the one replicated in Figure 1 in the text. As a young adult, his personal library included a fairytale whose German text was entitled Die Träumleiter: Ein Marchen. No one has yet been able to authenticate the author's identity beyond the following imprint: “S. Andreas (1832).” The poetic play centers upon a celestial meeting featuring Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dschami. It has been translated into English (The dream ladder: A fairy tale), but still awaits a psychoanalytically informed exegesis.     

Hedonic and nucleus accumbens neural responses to a natural reward are regulated by aversive conditioning

The nucleus accumbens (NAc) plays a role in hedonic reactivity to taste stimuli. Learning can alter the hedonic valence of a given stimulus, and it remains unclear how the NAc encodes this shift. The present study examined whether the population response of NAc neurons to a taste stimulus is plastic using a conditioned taste aversion (CTA) paradigm. Electrophysiological and electromyographic (EMG) responses to intraoral infusions of a sucrose (0.3 M) solution were made in naïve rats (Day 1). Immediately following the session, half of the rats (n = 6; Paired) received an injection of lithium chloride (0.15 M; i.p.) to induce malaise and establish a CTA while the other half (n = 6; Unpaired) received a saline injection. Days later (Day 5), NAc recordings during infusions of sucrose were again made. Electrophysiological and EMG responses to sucrose did not differ between groups on Day 1. For both groups, the majority of sucrose responsive neurons exhibited a decrease in firing rate (77% and 71% for Paired and Unpaired, respectively). Following conditioning, in Paired rats, EMG responses were indicative of aversion. Moreover, the majority of responsive NAc neurons now exhibited an increase in firing rate (69%). Responses in Unpaired rats were unchanged by the experience. Thus, the NAc differentially encodes the hedonic value of the same stimulus based on learned associations.Our search for sustenance and pleasurable stimuli is often balanced by our desire to avoid punishment and harm. Similarly, neural systems responsible for generating approach behavior must be countered by signals that suppress approach behavior under contexts where approach is dangerous or maladaptive (Hoebel et al. 2007). The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is acutely involved in food intake and goal-directed, approach behavior. Pharmacological manipulations of the NAc promote food intake even in sated rats (Maldonado-Irizarry and Kelley 1995; Stratford and Kelley 1997). Lesions or inactivation of the NAc impair conditioned approach behavior (Cardinal et al. 2002; Blaiss and Janak 2009). Interestingly, drugs that lead to inhibition of select regions of the NAc increase positive hedonic responses to palatable taste solutions (Pecina and Berridge 2005). Recordings from individual NAc neurons have mirrored these findings. We and others have shown that consumption of palatable food stimuli is associated with decreases in the firing rate of the majority of responsive NAc neurons (Nicola et al. 2004b; Roitman et al. 2005; Taha and Fields 2005; Wheeler et al. 2008). In addition, decreases in NAc neural activity are associated with bouts of licking behavior for palatable stimuli (Taha and Fields 2006), and disruption of these decreases halt feeding bouts (Krause et al. 2010). Finally, decreases in NAc neural activity are associated with preferred locations previously paired with drug reward (German and Fields 2007). Thus, decreases in NAc activity appear to be closely linked to positive hedonic stimuli, stimuli that have been explicitly paired with them and behavioral approach.The NAc is also responsive to aversive stimuli (Carlezon and Thomas 2009; Levita et al. 2009). The delivery of aversive taste stimuli to rats is associated with increases in the firing rate of the majority of responsive NAc neurons (Roitman et al. 2005; Wheeler et al. 2008). In addition to responding to primary appetitive and aversive taste stimuli, NAc neurons develop responses to predictors of reward and aversion. Individual NAc neurons selectively encode cues that predict either appetitive (Roitman et al. 2005; Day et al. 2006) or aversive (Roitman et al. 2005) stimuli following purely Pavlovian conditioning or a combination of instrumental and Pavlovian conditioning (Setlow et al. 2003; Nicola et al. 2004a). NAc neurons come to encode departure from locations not associated with reward with the majority response being that of excitation (German and Fields 2007). Thus, NAc neurons appear to encode aversive stimuli and withdrawal behavior with increases in activity. These and other findings have led to the recent postulation that reward and aversion are differentially encoded by the activity of NAc neurons (Carlezon and Thomas 2009).Data supportive of the activity hypothesis (Carlezon and Thomas 2009) have been generated by the use of different stimuli to serve as appetitive or aversive primary or predictive stimuli. Thus, selective encoding could be biased by the sensory properties of each stimulus rather than their hedonic valence. When a novel, palatable taste is paired with visceral malaise, a Pavlovian association is made and a conditioned taste aversion (CTA) is established. Subsequent exposure to the once palatable stimulus is met with avoidance or aversion and rejection (Garcia et al. 1974; Schafe et al. 1995). Thus, the same taste stimulus can either be appetitive or aversive, depending on Pavlovian associations. Here, individual NAc neurons were recorded in rats (Paired) before (Day 1) and after a CTA (Day 5) was established and compared with rats that received equal exposure to the same stimuli but in an unpaired manner (Unpaired), and hence no CTA developed. Simultaneously, oro-motor behavior was characterized to provide an index of the associative strength of the taste stimulus. Using this paradigm, we determined that the population response of the NAc does indeed encode hedonic valence.