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Integrating relationship constructs and emotional experience into false belief tasks in preschool children.

Themes of separation from attachment figures are involved when caregivers are integrated into standard theory of mind tasks in which objects or toys are located. Two experiments test the hypothesis that searching for a caregiver would interfere with false belief performance and be related to a child's emotional awareness. Experiment 1 consisted of a cross-sectional study of three- to five-year-old children administered false belief tasks related to object identity, object location, and caregiver location, i.e., false belief tasks where story characters became separated from a parent and had to locate them. As expected, there were age-related improvements in false belief performance to above-chance levels during object identity and object location tasks, but performance on the caregiver location tasks showed no age-related improvement and at age five was poorer than other tasks. Emotional integration also varied with task. Children who were relatively more aware of emotions were more likely to pass tasks involving objects, and queries of emotions during tasks were related to false beliefs about objects but not caregivers. A second study of children five years of age indicated that it was not caregivers per se that disrupted their performance on false belief tasks. Additional tasks showed that this finding was due to caregivers being animate "behaving" objects whose relocation had been self- as opposed to other-directed, which suggests that false belief performance was related to the intent of the sought item. The developing awareness of the minds of others in five-year-olds and emotional content of the task may interfere with performance in false belief tasks that are social.

Affect↗

Attachment and psychotherapy: an overview.

Attachment theory has an important role in clarifying personality development, and attachment style is increasingly recognised as a key intervening variable between personality and the response to psychotherapeutic interventions. Recent developments in attachment theory and its relationship to practice are reviewed as an introduction to a series of papers on Attachment and Psychotherapy.

Adult↗

Attachment theory and psychoanalysis: some remarks from an epistemological and from a Freudian viewpoint.

The author examines Bowlby's attachment theory and more recent versions of it from an epistemological viewpoint and subjects it to questioning on whether they are in line with central concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis. He argues that Bowlby's basic tenets regarding attachment theory, which later attachment theorists never seriously questioned, do not conform to scientific standards, and that psychoanalytic issues such as the dynamic unconscious, internal conflicts, interaction of drive wishes and the role of defence in establishing substitutive formations are either ignored or not treated in sufficient depth. In the light of this, Fonagy's assertion that psychoanalytic criticism of attachment theory arose from mutual misunderstandings and ought nowadays to be seen as outdated is reversed: psychoanalytic criticism can only be regarded as outdated if either basic tenets of Freudian psychoanalysis, or attachment theory or both are misunderstood.

Freudian Theory↗

[Time perception, maternal tasks, and maternal role behavior among pregnant Japanese women].

The relationship of time perception, maternal tasks, and maternal role behavior was examined in 140 pregnant Japanese women with a short-term longitudinal design. A model developed by Rubin provided the conceptual framework for this research. The Time Perception Scale. Time Production Method, and the Prefatory Maternal Response measured the study variables. Study results revealed significant differences in duration of time, time production, maternal-fetal attachment, and maternal role behavior before and after quickening(fetal movement)occurred. Medium to strong positive relationships among time orientation, maternal-fetal attachment, gratification, and maternal role behavior were found before and after movement. After quickening, a weak relationship between time orientation and duration was found. After controlling maternal-fetal attachment and gratification in pregnancy and maternal role, orientation in time perception accounted for significant amounts of variance in maternal role behavior before and after fetal movement. Results show that the process of becoming a mother, which started before quickening, increased in magnitude after fetal movement. The function of fetal movement is important in developing motherhood. In the process of becoming a mother, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral aspects in becoming a mother are inseparable from each other. Future orientation of time perception contributes to development of maternal role behavior. Having a future orientation during pregnancy may indicate hope or positive expectation. Based on these findings, several recommendations were proposed: (a)to study further the general process of becoming a mother and the role of time perception in developing motherhood, (b)to disseminate information to the general public about the process in development of motherhood, (c)to construct theory to explain the process of becoming a mother, and(d)to conduct future research to clarify the construct of time perception and attachment.

Adult↗

Unrequited love and the wish to kill. Diagnosis and treatment of borderline erotomania.

The author hypothesizes that erotomania, or de Clérambault's syndrome, occurs in two forms: the clinically accepted delusional erotomania, in which patients believe that another person is in love with them; and borderline erotomania, in which no delusion is present, yet an extreme disorder of attachment is apparent in the pursuit of, and in the potential for violence toward, the unrequited love object. The author reviews the empirical literature concerning erotomania and then develops an object relations understanding of the disorder, focusing on the presence of narcissistic, hysterical, paranoid, and psychopathic traits in the erotomanic individual.

Delusions↗

Fragmented attachments: the paranoid-schizoid experience of loss and persecution.

The author discusses paranoid-schizoid patients who have yet to deal with whole-object depressive fears of harming one's object. Their paranoid-schizoid anxiety is more a combination of dread, paranoia, and fear of destroying one's object with neediness, envy, and other oral desires. In this part-self and part-object world, destruction is absolute. Ego functions and object relational capacities such as guilt and grief are not yet fully consolidated. The part-object is not only destroyed but is also equally capable of magically resurrecting itself to seek revenge. Fear of annihilation of the self and object, as well as desperate attempts at keeping each other alive, are the primary focus of this early anxiety state. These infantile fears are at the root of certain difficult treatment situations. Within the transition from paranoid-schizoid to depressive, the ego struggles with highly exaggerated and distorted fantasies of persecution, loss, and primitive guilt by resorting to crude and often self-destructive mechanisms. These include splitting, projective identification, and idealization. During the course of analytic treatment, three overlapping phases are distinguishable. Acting out is the main theme of early treatment. As this externalization of internal conflict is analyzed and contained, a second phase of intrapsychic struggle emerges. The patient exhibits a paralyzing battle between certain ego-object ties and the striving of a defensive death instinct. If the analytic relationship is able to withstand passage through these difficult phases, the patient begins to work through more core issues of persecutory loss and annihilation. Case material is used for illustration.

Adult↗