Metacognitive improvement and symptom change in a 3-month treatment for borderline personality disorder.

Recognizing and reflecting on one's own and other people's mental states represent a major difficulty for patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Only recently have studies begun exploring whether these capacities increase with successful therapies and if such an improvement is linked with outcome. The present study investigated whether metacognition would improve and if its improvement was related with symptom change in BPD patients. The transcripts from the first and the penultimate session of a ten-session version of good psychiatric management were analysed with the MAS-R scale in a N = 37 BPD sample. Patients, selected from a previously published RCT (Kramer et al., 2014), were assigned either to the good psychiatric management treatment or to the same treatment with the addition of the Motive-Oriented Therapeutic Relationship (Caspar, 2007), a form of therapeutic relationship based on an individualized case formulation. Symptoms were assessed with the OQ-45. Findings partially support the hypotheses. First, improvement in capacities to understand others' mind, to take a critical distance from one's own rigid and maladaptive beliefs, and to use behavioural and attentional strategies to face adversities is found in both treatment groups. Controlling for marital status, only the ability to differentiate between reality and representations remains significant. Second, no link between metacognitive change and symptom change during treatment is found. However, a link is observed between the increase in metacognition and symptom reduction at 6-month follow-up. Results invite to further investigate the role of metacognition in therapy change through different modalities and in longer-term treatments. The development of metacognitive processes and their links with symptom change were examined during a short-term treatment in 37 borderline patients Improvement was found in capacities to understand others' mind, to take a critical distance from own rigid and maladaptive beliefs, and to use behavioural and attentional strategies even in a short-term treatment Controlling for marital status, only the ability to take a critical distance from representations remained significant A link was observed between increase in metacognition and symptom reduction at 6-month follow-up Understanding and tailoring interventions to specific metacognitive difficulties could be associated with symptom change during treatment for BPD patients

Spontaneous Scalarization and Boson Stars

We study spontaneous scalarization in Scalar-Tensor boson stars. We find that scalarization does not occur in stars whose bosons have no self-interaction. We introduce a quartic self-interaction term into the boson Lagrangian and show that when this term is large, scalarization does occur. Strong self-interaction leads to a large value of the compactness (or sensitivity) of the boson star, a necessary condition for scalarization to occur, and we derive an analytical expression for computing the sensitivity of a boson star in Brans-Dicke theory from its mass and particle number. Next we comment on how one can use the sensitivity of a star in any Scalar-Tensor theory to determine how its mass changes when it undergoes gravitational evolution. Finally, in the Appendix, we derive the most general form of the boson wavefunction that minimises the energy of the star when the bosons carry a U(1) charge.Comment: 23 pages, 5 postscript figures. Typing errors corrected. Includes some new text that relates the paper to several previous results. Accepted for publication in PR

Cognitive heuristics in borderline personality disorder across treatment: A longitudinal non-parametric analysis.

The development of a constructive therapeutic alliance may represent an important feature of interpersonal adaptation in clients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). The present study explores cognitive heuristics as dynamic features of change in relationship with the therapeutic alliance in the treatment of BPD. In total, N = 60 clients with BPD, are included in the present study. In the context of brief therapy, the therapeutic alliance (WAI) is assessed from the client and the therapist perspectives after each therapy session; cognitive heuristics are assessed three times (CERS). The data analyses are on the basis of non-parametric clusters (kml3d) linked with the therapeutic alliance. The results showed that clusters of cognitive heuristics trajectories are linked with the client's therapeutic alliance (t(55) = 2.30, p = .03), but they remained unrelated with the evolution of the therapist's alliance. These results are discussed with regard to the interpersonal adaptiveness of cognitive heuristics in the context of BPD undergoing treatment

Dynamical evolution of boson stars in Brans-Dicke theory

We study the dynamics of a self-gravitating scalar field solitonic object (boson star) in the Jordan-Brans-Dicke (BD) theory of gravity. We show dynamical processes of this system such as (i) black hole formation of perturbed equilibrium configuration on an unstable branch; (ii) migration of perturbed equilibrium configuration from the unstable branch to stable branch; (iii) transition from excited state to a ground state. We find that the dynamical behavior of boson stars in BD theory is quite similar to that in general relativity (GR), with comparable scalar wave emission. We also demonstrate the formation of a stable boson star from a Gaussian scalar field packet with flat gravitational scalar field initial data. This suggests that boson stars can be formed in the BD theory in much the same way as in GR.Comment: 13 pages by RevTeX, epsf.sty, 16 figures, comments added, refs updated, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Modeling resilience and sustainability in ancient agricultural systems

The reasons why people adopt unsustainable agricultural practices, and the ultimate environmental implications of those practices, remain incompletely understood in the present world. Archaeology, however, offers unique datasets on coincident cultural and ecological change, and their social and environmental effects. This article applies concepts derived from ecological resilience thinking to assess the sustainability of agricultural practices as a result of long-term interactions between political, economic, and environmental systems. Using the urban center of Gordion, in central Turkey, as a case study, it is possible to identify mismatched social and ecological processes on temporal, spatial, and organizational scales, which help to resolve thresholds of resilience. Results of this analysis implicate temporal and spatial mismatches as a cause for local environmental degradation, and increasing extralocal economic pressures as an ultimate cause for the adoption of unsustainable land-use practices. This analysis suggests that a research approach that integrates environmental archaeology with a resilience perspective has considerable potential for explicating regional patterns of agricultural change and environmental degradation in the past

Boson Stars in General Scalar-Tensor Gravitation: Equilibrium Configurations

We study equilibrium configurations of boson stars in the framework of general scalar-tensor theories of gravitation. We analyse several possible couplings, with acceptable weak field limit and, when known, nucleosynthesis bounds, in order to work in the cosmologically more realistic cases of this kind of theories. We found that for general scalar-tensor gravitation, the range of masses boson stars might have is comparable with the general relativistic case. We also analyse the possible formation of boson stars along different eras of cosmic evolution, allowing for the effective gravitational constant far out form the star to deviate from its current value. In these cases, we found that the boson stars masses are sensitive to this kind of variations, within a typical few percent. We also study cases in which the coupling is implicitly defined, through the dependence on the radial coordinate, allowing it to have significant variations in the radius of the structure.Comment: 19 pages in latex, 3 figures -postscript- may be sent via e-mail upon reques

Boson stars in massive dilatonic gravity

We study equilibrium configurations of boson stars in the framework of a class scalar-tensor theories of gravity with massive gravitational scalar (dilaton). In particular we investigate the influence of the mass of the dilaton on the boson star structure. We find that the masses of the boson stars in presence of dilaton are close to those in general relativity and they are sensitive to the ratio of the boson mass to the dilaton mass within a typical few percent. It turns out also that the boson star structure is mainly sensitive to the mass term of the dilaton potential rather to the exact form of the potential.Comment: 9 pages, latex, 9 figures, one figure dropped, new comments added, new references added, typos correcte

Charged Scalar-Tensor Boson Stars: Equilibrium, Stability and Evolution

We study charged boson stars in scalar-tensor (ST) gravitational theories. We analyse the weak field limit of the solutions and analytically show that there is a maximum charge to mass ratio for the bosons above which the weak field solutions are not stable. This charge limit can be greater than the GR limit for a wide class of ST theories. We numerically investigate strong field solutions in both the Brans Dicke and power law ST theories. We find that the charge limit decreases with increasing central boson density. We discuss the gravitational evolution of charged and uncharged boson stars in a cosmological setting and show how, at any point in its evolution, the physical properties of the star may be calculated by a rescaling of a solution whose asymptotic value of the scalar field is equal to its initial asymptotic value. We focus on evolution in which the particle number of the star is conserved and we find that the energy and central density of the star decreases as the cosmological time increases. We also analyse the appearance of the scalarization phenomenon recently discovered for neutron stars configurations and, finally, we give a short discussion on how making the correct choice of mass influences the argument over which conformal frame, the Einstein frame or the Jordan frame, is physical.Comment: RevTeX, 27 pages, 9 postscript figures. Minor revisions and updated references. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.