Emotion Ideology Mediates Effects Of Risk Factors On Alexithymia Development

Despite its connection to mental and behavioral health complications, elevated alexithymia tends to be associated with low responsiveness and high resistance to psychological intervention. To further understanding of potential treatment targets for clients with alexithymic traits, the present study explored the (a) independent contributions of various risk factors to statistical predictions of alexithymic trait severity, (b) generalizability of risk factor contributions across two culturally distinct samples, and (c) potential for emotion ideology (i.e., beliefs about emotion and emotional experience) to mediate such contributions. Preliminary results suggest emotion socialization and child abuse may be salient contributors to alexithymia severity, whereas effects of trauma exposure may be limited to samples with high overall exposure to alexithymia risk-factors. Moreover, emotion ideology mediates the relation between risk-factor exposure and alexithymia severity. Thus, psychotherapeutic interventions targeting emotion ideology may be beneficial when working with clients with elevated alexithymia

Weekly Fluctuations in Nonjudging Predict Borderline Personality Disorder Feature Expression in Women

OBJECTIVES: Borderline personality disorder (BPD) features have been linked to deficits in mindfulness, or nonjudgmental attention to present-moment stimuli. However, no previous work has examined the role of fluctuations in mindfulness over time in predicting BPD features. The present study examines the impact of both between-person differences and within-person changes in mindfulness. DESIGN: 40 women recruited to achieve a flat distribution of BPD features completed 4 weekly assessments of mindfulness (Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire; FFMQ) and BPD features. Multilevel models predicted each outcome from both 1) a person’s average levels of each facet and 2) weekly deviations from a person’s average for each facet. RESULTS: Average acting with awareness, nonjudging, and nonreactivity predicted lower BPD features at the between-person level, and weekly deviations above one’s average (i.e., higher-than-usual) nonjudging predicted lower BPD feature expression at the within-person level. CONCLUSIONS: Within-person fluctuations in the nonjudging facet of mindfulness may be relevant to the daily expression of BPD features over and above dispositional mindfulness

Authors’ reply to the Letters to the Editor of T. Smoljanovic et al. concerning “An update on bone substitutes for spinal fusion”, Eur Spine J (2009) 18:783–799 by M. Miyazaki et al.

WOS: 000280577500024

Including a brief substance-abuse motivational intervention in a couples treatment program for intimate partner violence

Substance abuse (SA) and intimate partner violence (IPV) frequently co-occur providing challenges to researchers and treatment professionals alike. Researchers have struggled to understand the nature of the relationship between these two difficult issues. Are they wholly un-related, indirectly related, or is there a causal relationship between the two? Treatment professionals face the dilemma of how to provide treatment to clients who abuse substances and who are violent with heir intimate others. Most treatment for these two disorders is provided separately with varying degrees of effort to coordinate them. Models of combined treatment are few, and none address couples in which both partners are violent and/or abuse substances. In this paper, we briefly review the literature on SA and IPV and then describe a brief substance abuse awareness intervention, based on Motivational Interviewing, that we have integrated into our conjoint couples treatment model for IPV