Strengthening Communities: A Qualitative Assessment of Opportunities for the Prevention of Adverse Childhood Experiences in the Wake of the Opioid Crisis

Journal of Child and Family Studies - The opioid crisis is a significant challenge for health and human service systems that serve children, youth, and families across the United States. Between...     

Response to MacIntosh’s Systematic Review of Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy: A Brief Note from the Classical Perspective

ABSTRACT

Working with couples from a classical perspective can be thought of as an oxymoron, unlike working from object relations and relational viewpoints, often seen to be the more natural fits. This article offers a fresh look at those parts of the classical perspective that relate very clearly to working with two partners in a couple. Freud’s theories in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) and On Narcissism (1914a) provide theoretical background for the work. Concepts such as transference (between partners, between the partner[s] and the therapist) and countertransference are shown to be manifested in complex ways with couples. Being mindful of unresolved developmental issues—for example, Oedipal and separation-individuation issues—which may have played a part in partner choice and in the resulting problems, allows the therapist to offer deep interpretations of within- and between-partner conflicts. Interestingly, unresolved Oedipal issues, particularly, may form an important part of the countertransference.     

Perceptual grouping based on temporal structure: Impact of subliminal flicker and visual transients

In two experiments we examined the perceived grouping of grids of equidistant dots, which are rapidly modulated over time so that alternate rows or columns are presented out of phase. In Experiment 1, we report that observers were able to group the grids consistent with the temporal modulation reliably, even at contrasts/frequencies for which flicker was not detectable. Moreover, flicker thresholds decreased with stimulus duration, whilst grouping thresholds did not change. In Experiment 2, we examined the impact of visual transients, by measuring performance when, either a mask or a contrast ramp was presented before and after the stimulus. Performance dropped substantially for both conditions, but remained significantly above chance. The results are discussed in relation to the role of temporal correlations in stimulus modulations and visual transients in grouping.     

The development of concern for others in children with behavior problems

The development of concern for others and externalizing problems were examined in young children with normative, subclinical, or clinical levels of behavior problems. There were no group differences in observable concern for others at 4-5 years of age. Children with clinical behavior problems decreased significantly in their concern by 6-7 years of age and were reported to have less concern at 6-7 years by mothers, teachers, and the children themselves, relative to other groups. Boys with clinical problems were more callous to others' distress at both time points. Girls showed more concern than boys across risk, time, and measures. Greater concern at 4-5 years predicted decreases in the stability and severity of externalizing problems by 6-7 years, and greater concern at 6-7 years predicted decreases in the stability of problems by 9-10 years. Finally, maternal socialization approaches predicted later concerned responding.     

Dynamics of metacognitive judgments: pre- and postretrieval mechanisms

Two experiments examined the temporal course of pre- and postretrieval mechanisms using a new kind of dynamic metacognitive judgment. Experiment 1 presented participants with primed and unprimed triples of remote associates to a target word and required them to provide repeated metacognitive judgments, 4 times during a 12-s interval, about the likelihood that they would later recognize the target. Both familiarity with the words and the processing time were associated with changes in metacognitive evaluations. Experiment 2 placed pre- and postretrieval mechanisms in opposition by transforming an element of a previously primed question. For transformed questions this led to high initial ratings, which decreased over time, while for novel questions the ratings were initially lower and increased with time. The results are discussed in terms of pre- and postretrieval mechanisms interacting over time.     

Religious Involvement and Health Over Time: Predictive Effects in a National Sample of African Americans

In this study, two telephone interviews that assessed both religious involvement and health‐related quality of life were conducted approximately 2.5 years apart in a national sample of 290 African Americans. Religious involvement was assessed with an instrument that measured both personal religious beliefs (e.g., having a personal relationship with God) and more public religious behaviors (e.g., attending church services). Health‐related quality of life was measured with version 2 of the Medical Outcomes Study 12‐item short form (SF‐12v2). Structural equation models indicated that higher religious beliefs at baseline predicted better physical and mental health 2.5 years later. Higher religious behaviors at baseline contributed smaller, complementary suppression effects. Physical and mental health indicators from the SF‐12v2 at baseline did not predict changes in either religious beliefs or religious behaviors over time. These findings indicate that, for African Americans, personal religious beliefs lead to beneficial health effects over time, whereas individual differences in health do not appear to predict changes in religious involvement.     

Pitting intuitive and analytical thinking against each other: The case of transitivity

Identifying which thinking mode, intuitive or analytical, yields better decisions has been a major subject of inquiry by decision-making researchers. Yet studies show contradictory results. One possibility is that the ambiguity is due to the variability in experimental conditions across studies. Our hypothesis is that decision quality depends critically on the level of compatibility between the thinking mode employed in the decision and the nature of the decision-making task. In two experiments, we pitted intuition and analytical thinking against each other on tasks that were either mainly intuitive or mainly analytical. Thinking modes, as well as task characteristics, were manipulated in a factorial design, with choice transitivity as the dependent measure. Results showed higher choice consistency (transitivity) when thinking mode and the characteristics of the decision task were compatible.     

Lyotard’s performance

Starting with Lyotard’s characterisation of postmodernity as incredulity, this is related to another of his key concepts—that of ‘performativity’. Lyotard appears to deploy performativity to characterise those technologies that bring about the optimisation of efficient performance. However, there is another sense of performativity where it is linked to performance. Performance conditions the possibility of any and all performatives, or to put it another way, as performance is itself enabled by performativity, so too performativity is realised through its performance. Both senses of performativity and the linkage between them are clearly manifested in the space of knowledge production that is the contemporary university. This linkage is itself a feature of the semiotic process within which contemporary knowledge and knowledge production is located and which Lyotard himself recognised, albeit implicitly. The implication of this therefore is that Lyotard himself performs his text and in so doing both manifests and contributes to realising both senses of performativity.     

Short-term memory after all: comment on Sederberg, Howard, and Kahana (2008)

P. B. Sederberg, M. W. Howard, and M. J. Kahana have proposed an updated version of the temporal-context model (TCM-A). In doing so, they accepted the challenge of developing a single-store model to account for the dissociations between short- and long-term recency effects that were reviewed by E. J. Davelaar, Y. Goshen-Gottstein, A. Ashkenazi, H. J. Haarmann, and M. Usher (2005). In this commentary, the authors argue that the success of TCM-A in addressing the dissociations is dependent not only on an episodic encoding matrix but--critically--also on its implicit use of a short-term memory store--albeit exponential rather than buffer-like. The authors also highlight some difficulties of TCM-A in accounting for these dissociations, and they argue that TCM-A fails to account for critical data--the presentation-rate effect--that dissociates exponential and buffer-like models.     

The effects of temporal synchrony on the perceived organization of elements in spatially symmetric and asymmetric grids

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the influence of fast temporally segmented presentations of alternate rows or columns on the perception of grids of either symmetrically or asymmetrically spaced dot-like stimuli. Experiments 1a and 1b demonstrated that observers were able to discriminate between temporally segmented presentations of rows/columns stimuli, but showed a reduced performance in discrimination between non-temporally segmented stimuli and temporally segmented stimuli that were spatially unstructured. Experiment 2 confirmed the influence of temporally segmented presentations of rows and columns using elements whose mean luminance summed to the same as the display background. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the influence of temporal cues reduced when display elements were asymmetrically spaced. The results are discussed in terms of the influence of external spatio-temporal factors on the neural mechanisms of visual grouping.