Adapted DBT programme for individuals with intellectual disabilities and problems managing emotions: staff awareness training

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present the development and evaluation of an original training package for staff members on an awareness of an adapted Dialectical behaviour Therapy programme, the ‘I Can Feel Good’ programme (Morrissey & Ingamells, 2014) designed for individuals with intellectual disabilities and problems managing emotions. The quality and effectiveness of the training was assessed and is reported in this paper. Design/methodology/approach The training was delivered for staff working with individuals with intellectual disabilities in a UK Medium Secure Psychiatric Hospital and was attended by nursing staff. The workshop consisted of six modules: ‘Introduction to the programme’, ‘Mindfulness’, ‘Managing feelings’, ‘Coping in crisis’, ‘People skills’ and ‘Application and summary’. Level of self-reported knowledge, confidence and motivation regarding seven aspects of the training was measured by an evaluation questionnaire completed pre and post training. Findings The results of this study showed that following the training there was a significant increase in self-reported knowledge, confidence and motivation regarding the seven aspects of the training. When perceptions of staff behaviours are observed, although in the right direction, this change was found not to be significant. Originality/value This study highlights the potential for staff training to increase awareness of newly adapted therapeutic programmes for individuals with intellectual disabilities. The staff training may increase their ability and willingness to facilitate the running of such programmes and ability to support learning transfer in group members

The Australian Memory Project: Postcards from the Edge of South Australia. [abstract].

This paper will establish the purpose, reasoning, research context, and initial findings of the Australian Memory Project’s “Postcards in South Australia” digital archive and exhibition. Placing our project in the framework of similar “memory” projects, and describing some of the theoretical underpinnings and outcomes of such projects, goes some way towards building a picture of memory work in the Australian context and the place of our project within that broader framework

Children\u27s Empathy Responses and their Understanding of Mother\u27s Emotions

This study investigated children\u27s empathic responses to their mother\u27s distress to provide insight about child factors that contribute to parental socialization of emotions. Four- to six-year-old children (N=82) observed their mother\u27s sadness and anger during a simulated emotional phone conversation. Children\u27s facial negative affect was rated and their heart rate variability was recorded during the conversation, and their emotion understanding of the conversation was measured through their use of negative emotion words and perspective-taking themes (i.e., discussing the causes or resolution of mother\u27s emotions) in narrative accounts of the conversation. There were positive quadratic relationships between HRV and ratings of facial affect, narrative references to mother\u27s negative emotions, and perspective-taking themes. High and low HRV was associated with high facial negative affect, suggesting well-regulated sympathy and poorly regulated personal distress empathic responses, respectively. Moderate HRV was associated with low facial negative affect, suggesting minimal empathic engagement. High and low HRV were associated with the highest probabilities of both emotion understanding indicators, suggesting both sympathy and personal distress responses to mother\u27s distress facilitate understanding of mother\u27s emotions. Personal distress may motivate attempts to understand mother\u27s emotions as a self-soothing strategy, whereas sympathy-related attempts to understand may be motivated by altruism

Lateral prefrontal cortex activity during cognitive control of emotion predicts response to social stress in schizophrenia

LPFC dysfunction is a well-established neural impairment in schizophrenia and is associated with worse symptoms. However, how LPFC activation influences symptoms is unclear. Previous findings in healthy individuals demonstrate that lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) activation during cognitive control of emotional information predicts mood and behavior in response to interpersonal conflict, thus impairments in these processes may contribute to symptom exacerbation in schizophrenia. We investigated whether schizophrenia participants show LPFC deficits during cognitive control of emotional information, and whether these LPFC deficits prospectively predict changes in mood and symptoms following real-world interpersonal conflict. During fMRI, 23 individuals with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 24 healthy controls completed the Multi-Source Interference Task superimposed on neutral and negative pictures. Afterwards, schizophrenia participants completed a 21-day online daily-diary in which they rated the extent to which they experienced mood and schizophrenia-spectrum symptoms, as well as the occurrence and response to interpersonal conflict. Schizophrenia participants had lower dorsal LPFC activity (BA9) during cognitive control of task-irrelevant negative emotional information. Within schizophrenia participants, DLPFC activity during cognitive control of emotional information predicted changes in positive and negative mood on days following highly distressing interpersonal conflicts. Results have implications for understanding the specific role of LPFC in response to social stress in schizophrenia, and suggest that treatments targeting LPFC-mediated cognitive control of emotion could promote adaptive response to social stress in schizophrenia

Distributed reading: Literary reading in diverse environments

Copyright the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.Reading has always been a contentious and political practice, but this is heightened in the contemporary moment both because of the way the environments in which we read are changing so radically. For Katherine Hayles reading is “a powerful technology for reconfiguring activity patterns in the brain” [Hayles 2010, 193], a view representative of attempts to connect the new neuroscience of reading with age old practices of literary endeavour. For Sven Birkerts, however, “the Internet and the novel are opposites” [Birkerts 2010], a view that suggests that a hierarchy of reading that locks digital readers out of higher order thinking and literary experience. Meanwhile, Anne Mangen finds that electronic reading environments “negatively affect emotional aspects of reading” [Mangen 2016]. But these approaches tend to understand reading as something static that occurs in one space or another. However, in practice our reading is increasingly distributed. Reading can occur in multiple formats, across multiple platforms for the one text or reading experience. A novel begun in print can be read online in a born-digital format and concluded in a scanned digital format, for example. These journeys across platform require deeper investigation. If we think of the printed book as an interface between two orders of thinking, we need to consider how the experience of reading a digitized version of a formerly printed and bound book alters literary reception and student experience. How does the experience of reading across different technological platforms change the reader’s relationship to the content? As more and more electronic reading platforms take on the physical attributes of material reading experiences either by retaining material traces or by emulating them, we might question what experience How do the material traces left on digitised works impact the reading process for reading in literary studies? The lively discourse surrounding Google Books and the human breaches of the material into the immaterial, as the work crosses the borders of formats and interfaces, raises valuable questions about the future of the book, reading in the twenty-first century, and the long and formidable shadow that centuries of material text production casts over Google Books’ electronic utopia. This paper uses both book history and new media interface theory to consider the multitude of diverse experiences that is literary reading across different platforms in and out of the classroom and to consider whether distracted reading can be better understood as distributed reading. It considers critical infrastructure studies as a useful framework through which to think about reading in the digital age

Discovery of a TNF-α Antagonist Using Chondroitin Sulfate Microarrays

We report the first example of synthetic chondroitin sulfate (CS) microarrays to rapidly identify glycosaminoglycan−protein interactions and probe the specificity of proteins for distinct sulfation sequences. Using the microarrays, we identify a novel interaction between CS and TNF-α, a proinflammatory cytokine involved in rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease, and psoriasis. Moreover, we demonstrate that CS-E tetrasaccharides and polysaccharides enriched in the CS-E sulfation motif can inhibit the activity of this therapeutically important cytokine. We anticipate that carbohydrate microarrays will accelerate our understanding of glycosaminoglycan−protein interactions and the role of sulfation in modulating physiological and disease states

Attentional control mediates the relationship between social anhedonia and social impairment

Social anhedonia (SA), a trait-like disinterest in social contact and diminished capacity to experience pleasure from social interactions, is consistently associated with social impairments in both healthy and clinical populations. However, the mechanisms underlying the relationship between SA and social impairment are poorly understood. Attentional control, selecting and focusing on relevant information and inhibiting irrelevant, may be one such mechanism. We examined individual differences in SA, attentional control, and social impairment in 108 healthy adults. High SA related to low attentional control and high social impairment. Moreover, attentional control mediated the relationship between SA and social impairment, establishing attentional control as one mechanism underlying aberrations in the fundamental human need for social contact. Although both attentional deficits and social impairment have been separately noted in SA, the relationship between SA, attentional control and social impairment in this non-clinical sample reflects a novel contribution

Quadratic associations between empathy and depression and the moderating influence of dysregulation

Empathic tendencies have been associated with interpersonal and psychological benefits, but empathy at extreme levels or in combination with certain personal characteristics may contribute to risk for depression. This study tested the moderating role of cognitive emotion regulation in depression’s association with empathy using nonlinear models. Young adults (N=304; 77% female; M=19 years) completed measures of cognitive emotion regulation strategies, depression, and affective and cognitive empathy. Individuals with good regulation had low levels of depression overall and their depression symptoms were lowest when levels of affective empathy were average. Individuals with poor regulation had high levels of depression overall, particularly when levels of empathy were moderate to high. Extremely high and low levels of cognitive empathy were associated with elevated depression, and this association was not moderated by regulation. These findings suggest tendencies to respond empathically to others’ needs is neither an adaptive nor maladaptive characteristic but rather moderate empathy, particularly in the context of good regulation, may offer the greatest protection against depression