Techniques to accelerate dynamic psychotherapy.

The techniques described above outline specific ways to deepen the patient's affective experience within an emotionally close therapeutic relationship. When effective, they all enhance the patient/therapist bond, raise self-esteem, reduce defensiveness and anxiety, and facilitate emotional healing. Psychodynamic treatment, long or short, is a complex process uniquely constructed by each therapist/patient pair. AEDP strategies are not intended as recipes for treatment. Good dynamic work depends on the therapist's ability to grasp the patient's capacities and limitations, understand relational dynamics, and interact with the patient in an empathically attuned, emotionally receptive, and flexible way. In that context, these strategies can be helpful tools to facilitate and accelerate the process. The choices made by AEDP--privileging adaptive strivings over defensive reactions, the stance of emotional engagement rather than neutrality and abstinence, the focus on health and change over pathology and stasis--are informed by traditional STDP aims to maximize depth, effectiveness, and efficiency. AEDP's contribution is a set of techniques relying on a response repertoire that is available to a wide range of therapists. Therapists can use these techniques to be more effective while simultaneously retaining the experience of speaking with patients in an authentic voice.

Parents' involvement in children's schooling: a multidimensional conceptualization and motivational model.

This study had 2 goals. The first was to examine a multidimensional conceptualization of parent involvement in children's schooling, defined as the allocation of resources to the child's school endeavors. A second goal was to evaluate a model in which children's motivational resources (i.e., perceived competence, control understanding, and self-regulation) are mediators between parent involvement and children's school performance. 300 11-14-year-old children and their teachers participated. Factor analyses of a set of parent involvement measures supported the hypothesized 3 dimensions of parent involvement: behavior, intellectual/cognitive, and personal. Path analyses revealed indirect effects of mother behavior and intellectual/cognitive involvement on school performance through perceived competence and control understanding, and indirect effects of father behavior on school performance through perceived competence. The results argue against a unidimensional understanding of parent involvement and support the view of the child as an active constructor of his or her school experience.

Prosodic structure in language understanding: evidence from tone sandhi in Mandarin.

Two experiments show that prosodic information plays a crucial role in the processing of sentences of Standard Mandarin Chinese, where local lexical ambiguities may occur due to the operation of a tone sandhi rule. In Chinese, each word is associated with a tone; in this paper, the term "Mandarin tone sandhi" refers to a phonological rule that changes the first of two consecutive low tones (Tone 3) to a rising tone (Tone 2). As a result, a two-syllable sequence with a rising tone followed by a low tone is ambiguous. In Experiment 1, listeners identified lexical tones for ambiguous, unambiguous, and nonsense words in phrasal contexts where the tone sandhi rule might have applied. Comparable results in the lexical versus nonsense conditions indicate that judgments did not rely simply on lexically stored tonal information, but also made reference to the tonal context of the phrase. In Experiment 2, subjects chose the most likely written English translation for auditory sentences of Mandarin. Global prosodic information was manipulated to create different levels of "prosodic closeness" between two critical items in a tone sandhi environment, while the syntactic relation between these items was held constant. Results show that listeners relied on the prosodic structure of the phrases to determine whether or not the tone sandhi rule had applied, and consequently to identify individual lexical items. The evidence is taken to support the notion that prosodic structure influences auditory language comprehension processes.

Latency of sequential eye movements: implications for reading.

The best available estimates indicate that the average minimum latency of saccadic eye movements (175-200 msec) approaches the mean duration of fixations in reading (200-250 msec). This fact presents a problem for models of reading which assume that an eye movement is initiated only after substantial information is processed on a fixation. Three experiments are reported that support earlier estimates of saccadic latency; the experiments were conducted under conditions in which the length of measured latencies could not reflect a motoric refractory period, spatial uncertainty, or temporal uncertainty.

Masking of foveal and parafoveal vision during eye fixations in reading.

A window or visual mask as moved across text in synchrony with the reader's eye movements. The size of the window or mask was varied so that either information in foveal or parafoveal vision was masked on each fixation. In another experiment, the onset of the mask was delayed for a certain amount of time following the end of the saccade. The results of the experiments point out the relative importance of foveal and parafoveal vision for reading and further indicate that most of the visual information necessary for reading can be acquired during the first 50 msec that information is available during an eye fixation.

Visual significance of pupillary response to an auditory task.

Subjects simultaneously performed visual and auditory detection tasks. Pupillary dilation accompanies increased cognitive load such as that caused by the auditory tasks. Errors in the visual task increased when the auditory task became more difficult. The increase was greater when the effects of pupillary dilation were blocked by an artificial pupil.