Sympathetic nervous system synchrony: An exploratory study of its relationship with the therapeutic alliance and outcome in couple therapy.

In previous research, we found that sympathetic nervous system synchrony, measured via electrodermal activity (EDA), occurs between participants at the start of couple therapy. The aim now was to test whether this synchrony changes during the therapy process, and how any changes may be related to clients' and therapists' evaluations of the working alliance, and the outcome of therapy. Twelve different couple therapy processes were analyzed (24 clients, plus 10 therapists, working in pairs; hence, 4 persons per session) using EDA concordance indices and questionnaires (Outcome Rating Scale, Session Rating Scale, and Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation-Outcome Measure). EDA synchrony between the couples increased from the beginning to the end of therapy. This seemed to be connected to a positive linear trend in female clients' well-being during the therapy process. There were no statistically significant changes in the EDA synchrony between the cotherapists, or between the clients and the therapists. We found specific changes in the EDA synchrony to be related to changes in the therapeutic alliance, and/or changes in the clients' well-being. Heightened EDA synchrony was frequently related to a better outcome; nevertheless, there was one instance in which decreasing synchrony seemed to be more beneficial. It appears that couple therapy can bring spouses closer together also on a physiological level, which could be especially important for the well-being of women. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The Added Value of Studying Embodied Responses in Couple Therapy Research: A Case Study.

This article reports on the added value of embodied responses identified through sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activity in couple therapy research. It focuses on moments of change and the timing of therapeutic interventions or therapeutic moves in a couple therapy session. The data for this single-case study comprise couple therapy process videotapes recorded in a multi-camera setting, and measurements of participants' SNS activity. The voluntary participants were a marital couple in their late thirties and two middle-aged male psychotherapists. The division into topic segments showed how the key issue of seeking help, which was found to comprise three separate components, was repeatedly dealt with in the session. SNS activity showed different degrees of synchronization between the couple, between the therapists, and between the couple and therapists during the dialogue pertaining to these three components. The issue of timing emerged as a complex, even ambivalent, phenomenon. Arousal in the therapists was in line with their therapeutic activity, whereas in the clients it was more anticipatory. The approach used here rendered visible some of the intensity that therapeutic dialogue can generate when dealing with issues of relationship change in the couple context and showed how this intensity can be dialogically regulated in the therapeutic system.

Este artículo informa sobre el valor agregado de las respuestas materializadas reconocidas mediante la actividad del sistema nervioso simpático (SNS) en la investigación sobre la terapia de pareja. Se centra en los momentos de cambio y en la elección del momento oportuno de las intervenciones terapéuticas o en los pasos terapéuticos de una sesión de terapia de pareja. Los datos para este estudio de un solo caso comprenden las cintas de vídeo del proceso de terapia de pareja grabadas en un entorno con varias cámaras y las mediciones de la actividad del SNS de los participantes. Los participantes voluntarios fueron un matrimonio de treintaimuchos y dos psicoterapeutas hombres de mediana edad. La división en segmentos por temas demostró cómo el asunto clave de buscar ayuda, que ahora sabemos que consta de tres componentes individuales, se trató repetidamente en la sesión. La actividad del SNS demostró diferentes grados de sincronización entre la pareja, entre los terapeutas, y entre la pareja y los terapeutas durante el diálogo relativo a estos tres componentes. La cuestión de la elección del momento oportuno surgió como un fenómeno complejo e incluso ambivalente. La agitación en los terapeutas fue acorde con su actividad terapéutica, mientras que en los pacientes fue más anticipatoria. El enfoque utilizado aquí dejó ver algo de la intensidad que puede generar el diálogo terapéutico cuando se tratan cuestiones de cambio en las relaciones en el contexto de la pareja y demostró cómo esta intensidad puede regularse dialógicamente en el sistema terapéutico.

Sympathetic Nervous System Synchrony in Couple Therapy.

The aim of this study was to test whether there is statistically significant sympathetic nervous system (SNS) synchrony between participants in couple therapy. To our knowledge, this is the first study to measure psychophysiological synchrony during therapy in a multiactor setting. The study focuses on electrodermal activity (EDA) in the second couple therapy session from 10 different cases (20 clients, 10 therapists working in pairs). The EDA concordance index was used as a measure of SNS synchrony between dyads, and synchrony was found in 85% of all the dyads. Surprisingly, co-therapists exhibited the highest levels of synchrony, whereas couples exhibited the lowest synchrony. The client-therapist synchrony was lower than that of the co-therapists, but higher than that of the couples. A Video Abstract is available next to the online version of this article on the JMFT web site.

Brain State Before Error Making in Young Patients With Mild Spastic Cerebral Palsy.

In the present experiment, children with mild spastic cerebral palsy and a control group carried out a memory recognition task. The key question was if errors of the patient group are foreshadowed by attention lapses, by weak motor preparation, or by both. Reaction times together with event-related potentials associated with motor preparation (frontal late contingent negative variation), attention (parietal P300), and response evaluation (parietal error-preceding positivity) were investigated in instances where 3 subsequent correct trials preceded an error. The findings indicated that error responses of the patient group are foreshadowed by weak motor preparation in correct trials directly preceding an error.

The Embodied Attunement of Therapists and a Couple within Dialogical Psychotherapy: An Introduction to the Relational Mind Research Project.

In dialogical practice, therapists seek to respond to the utterances of clients by including in their own response what the client said. No research so far exists on how, in dialogs, therapists and clients attune themselves to each other with their entire bodies. The research program The Relational Mind is the first to look at dialog in terms of both the outer and the inner dialogs of participants (clients and therapists), observed in parallel with autonomic nervous system (ANS) measurements. In the ANS, the response occurs immediately, even before conscious thought, making it possible to follow how participants in a multiactor dialog synchronize their reactions and attune themselves to each other. The couple therapy case presented in this article demonstrates how attunement is often not a simple "all at the same time" phenomenon, but rather a complex, dyadic or triadic phenomenon which changes over time. In the case presented, there was strong synchrony between one therapist and one client in terms of their arousal level throughout the therapy session. It was also observed that high stress could occur when someone else was talking about something related to the participant, or if that person mirrored the participant's words. Overall, it seems that in evaluating the rhythmic attunement between therapists and clients it is not enough to look at single variables; instead, integrated information from several channels is needed when one is seeking to make sense of the embodiment.

Borderline intellectual functioning: a systematic literature review.

The literature related to people with borderline intellectual functioning (BIF) was systematically reviewed in order to summarize the present knowledge. Database searches yielded 1,726 citations, and 49 studies were included in the review. People with BIF face a variety of hardships in life, including neurocognitive, social, and mental health problems. When adults with BIF were compared with the general population, they held lower-skilled jobs and earned less money. Although some risk factors (e.g., low birth weight) and preventive factors (e.g., education) were reported, they were not specific to BIF. The review finds that, despite the obvious everyday problems, BIF is almost invisible in the field of research. More research, societal discussion, and flexible support systems are needed.

Error detection and response adjustment in youth with mild spastic cerebral palsy: an event-related brain potential study.

This study evaluated the brain activation state during error making in youth with mild spastic cerebral palsy and a peer control group while carrying out a stimulus recognition task. The key question was whether patients were detecting their own errors and subsequently improving their performance in a future trial. Findings indicated that error responses of the group with cerebral palsy were associated with weak motor preparation, as indexed by the amplitude of the late contingent negative variation. However, patients were detecting their errors as indexed by the amplitude of the response-locked negativity and thus improved their performance in a future trial. Findings suggest that the consequence of error making on future performance is intact in a sample of youth with mild spastic cerebral palsy. Because the study group is small, the present findings need replication using a larger sample.

Benefits of multi-domain feature of mismatch negativity extracted by non-negative tensor factorization from EEG collected by low-density array.

Through exploiting temporal, spectral, time-frequency representations, and spatial properties of mismatch negativity (MMN) simultaneously, this study extracts a multi-domain feature of MMN mainly using non-negative tensor factorization. In our experiment, the peak amplitude of MMN between children with reading disability and children with attention deficit was not significantly different, whereas the new feature of MMN significantly discriminated the two groups of children. This is because the feature was derived from multi-domain information with significant reduction of the heterogeneous effect of datasets.

Stimulus evaluation, event preparation, and motor action planning in young patients with mild spastic cerebral palsy: an event-related brain potential study.

The study investigated stimulus evaluation time, event preparation, and motor action planning of patients with mild spastic cerebral palsy and a peer control group in the age range of 9 to 18 years. To this end, participants were carrying out a stimulus recognition task. Findings indicated an overall slowness and inaccurate reaction time performance of the patient group. An event-related potential analysis revealed that the stimulus evaluation processing, indexed by the parietal P300, was intact in the group of patients. Also event preparation and action planning, indexed by respectively the frontal late contingent negative variation and the frontal P2, were intact in the group of patients. It was concluded that patients' motor slowness reflected poor motor execution processes.

Visual attention study in youth with spastic cerebral palsy using the event-related potential method.

Youth with mild spastic cerebral palsy (n = 14) and a peer control group were compared on an oddball paradigm. Here, visual stimuli were presented with low and high probability and participants were instructed to count in silence the number of rare stimuli. The infrequent stimulus typically elicits an enhanced frontal central N2 and a centroparietal P300 event-related brain potential, reflecting orientation and evaluation of stimulus novelty. No differences in latency and amplitude of the N2-P300 complex were found between the 2 groups, indicating that some fundamental attention processes are intact in youth with mild spastic cerebral palsy.

Effects of vigorous late-night exercise on sleep quality and cardiac autonomic activity.

Sleep is the most important period for recovery from daily load. Regular physical activity enhances overall sleep quality, but the effects of acute exercise on sleep are not well defined. In sleep hygiene recommendations, intensive exercising is not suggested within the last 3 h before bed time, but this recommendation has not been adequately tested experimentally. Therefore, the effects of vigorous late-night exercise on sleep were examined by measuring polysomnographic, actigraphic and subjective sleep quality, as well as cardiac autonomic activity. Eleven (seven men, four women) physically fit young adults (VO(2max) 54±8 mL·kg(-1)·min(-1) , age 26±3 years) were monitored in a sleep laboratory twice in a counterbalanced order: (1) after vigorous late-night exercise; and (2) after a control day without exercise. The incremental cycle ergometer exercise until voluntary exhaustion started at 21:00±00:28 hours, lasted for 35±3 min, and ended 2:13±00:19 hours before bed time. The proportion of non-rapid eye movement sleep was greater after the exercise day than the control day (P<0.01), while no differences were seen in actigraphic or subjective sleep quality. During the whole sleep, no differences were found in heart rate (HR) variability, whereas HR was higher after the exercise day than the control day (54±7 versus 51±7, P<0.01), and especially during the first three sleeping hours. The results indicate that vigorous late-night exercise does not disturb sleep quality. However, it may have effects on cardiac autonomic control of heart during the first sleeping hours.

Mismatch negativity (MMN) elicited by duration deviations in children with reading disorder, attention deficit or both.

According to several studies auditory discrimination as measured by mismatch negativity (MMN) is compromised in participants with reading disorder. However, studies on duration discrimination have produced conflicting findings [Baldeweg, T., Richardson, A., Watkins, S., Foale, C., & Gruzelier, J., 1999. Impaired auditory frequency discrimination in dyslexia detected with mismatch evoked potentials. Annals of Neurology, 4, 1-9; Corbera, S., Escera, C., & Artigas, J., 2006. Impaired duration mismatch negativity in developmental dyslexia. Neuroreport, 17, 1051-1055]. Auditory sensitivity has not been as actively investigated among children with attention deficit, although attention problems often co-occur with dyslexia. The present study is a reanalysis of MMN data gathered from control children and children with reading disorder (RD) and/or attention deficit (AD). In our previous analysis [Huttunen, T., Halonen, A., Kaartinen, J. & Lyytinen, H., 2007. Does mismatch negativity show differences in reading disabled children as compared to normal children and children with attention deficit? Developmental Neuropsychology, 31, 453-470.], the only significant difference between the groups was in the lateralization of the MMNs in the RD and the control group: the MMNs of the RD group were more pronounced over the left hemisphere, while those of the control group appeared larger over the right hemisphere. A reanalysis was conducted to study whether the group definition criteria and/or overlap of the attention and reading deficits in the AD group might have affected the results. For this purpose participants were divided to four groups: control children, children with RD, children with AD, and children with both RD and AD. MMN was elicited by duration deviations in a continuous sound. Significant differences were observed in the MMN peaks between the control group and all clinical groups: the MMNs were diminished in the right hemisphere in the RD group, in all frontal and central channels in the RD+AD group, and the MMN peaks appeared earlier in frontal channels in the AD group.

Optimal digital filtering versus difference waves on the mismatch negativity in an uninterrupted sound paradigm.

Conventionally, mismatch negativity (MMN) is analyzed through the calculation of the difference waves. This helps to eliminate some exogenous event-related potential (ERP) components. However, this reduces the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This study aims to test whether or not the optimal digital filtering performs better than the difference waves procedure in quantitative ERP analyses in an uninterrupted sound paradigm. The participants were 102 children aged 8-16 years. The MMN was elicited in a passive oddball paradigm presenting an uninterrupted sound consisting of two alternating tones (600 and 800 Hz) of the same duration (100 msec) with infrequent shortenings of one of the 600 Hz tones (50 or 30 msec). In the grand average, both the 50 and 30 msec tones showed a clear MMN-like activity. Each 100 msec tone elicited some rhythmic activity with relatively consistent ERP waveforms. The difference waves calculated from the offset of the deviant stimuli (time correction due to shortening of the deviant stimuli) failed to separate the MMN from this activity, and produced spurious ERPs at early latencies. The optimal digital filtering freed the MMN from this rhythmic activity, improved the SNR, and thus stabilized the quantitative amplitude and latency analyses of the MMN. The frequency range for optimal extraction of the MMN in this paradigm was 2-8.5 Hz.

Does mismatch negativity show differences in reading-disabled children compared to normal children and children with attention deficit?

An auditory event-related potential (ERP) component called mismatch negativity (MMN) was examined in three groups of children (n = 63) aged 8-14 years. A control group comprised healthy children in second or sixth grade of comprehensive school (n = 21). The two clinical groups included children with reading disability (RD) (n = 21) and children with attention deficit (AD) (n = 21). MMN was elicited in a passive oddball paradigm by duration changes in a continuous sound, consisting of two alternating (600 and 800 Hz) 100 msec tones. The deviant tones were either 30 or 50 msec in duration. Both deviants elicited a clear MMN in all groups. Statistical analyses showed no systematic difference in the MMN peak latencies or amplitudes between the groups. A significant difference between the RD group and the control group was observed in the lateralization of the MMN peak amplitudes.