Attachment--and loss.

Erik Eriksen is a remarkable individual. He has no college degrees yet is Professor of Human Development at Harvard University. He came to psychology via art, which explains why the reader will find him painting contexts and backgrounds rather than stating dull facts and concepts. He has been a training psychoanalyst for many years as well as a perceptive observer of cultural and social settings and their effect on growing up. This is not just a book on childhood. It is a panorama of our society. Anxiety in young children, apathy in American Indians, confusion in veterans of war, and arrogance in young Nazis are scrutinized under the psychoanalytic magnifying glass. The material is well written and devoid of technical jargon. The theme of the volume is that it is human to have a long childhood which will leave a lifelong residue of emotional immaturity in man. Primitive groups and

Childhood and Society.

Principles and Practice of Structural Equation Modeling (2nd ed.)

The self-medication hypothesis of addictive disorders derives primarily from clinical observations of patients with substance use disorders. Individuals discover that the specific actions or effects of each class of drugs relieve or change a range of painful affect states. Self-medication factors occur in a context of self-regulation vulnerabilities--primarily difficulties in regulating affects, self-esteem, relationships, and self-care. Persons with substance use disorders suffer in the extreme with their feelings, either being overwhelmed with painful affects or seeming not to feel their emotions at all. Substances of abuse help such individuals to relieve painful affects or to experience or control emotions when they are absent or confusing. Diagnostic studies provide evidence that variously supports and fails to support a self-medication hypothesis of addictive disorders. The cause-consequence controversy involving psychopathology and substance use/abuse is reviewed and critiqued. In contrast, clinical observations and empirical studies that focus on painful affects and subjective states of distress more consistently suggest that such states of suffering are important psychological determinants in using, becoming dependent upon, and relapsing to addictive substances. Subjective states of distress and suffering involved in motives to self-medicate with substances of abuse are considered with respect to nicotine dependence and to schizophrenia and posttraumatic stress disorder comorbid with a substance use disorder.

The Self-medication Hypothesis of Substance Use Disorders: A Reconsideration and Recent Applications

Personality has consequences. Measures of personality have contemporaneous and predictive relations to a variety of important outcomes. Using the Big Five factors as heuristics for organizing the research literature, numerous consequential relations are identified. Personality dispositions are associated with happiness, physical and psychological health, spirituality, and identity at an individual level; associated with the quality of relationships with peers, family, and romantic others at an interpersonal level; and associated with occupational choice, satisfaction, and performance, as well as community involvement, criminal activity, and political ideology at a social institutional level.

Personality and the Prediction of Consequential Outcomes

Objective: Since major research has only recently begun into adult SepAD in clinical populations, this study examined the phenomenology of patients at-risk for adult SepAD. Method: A sample of 95 adult patients receiving CBT for either mood or anxiety disorders at a mental health outpatient clinic were included in this study. Results: It was found that one-fifth of the patients were at-risk for adult SepAD at the start of therapy. The large majority of the at-risk patients were female, were diagnosed at intake with another anxiety disorder, had a diagnosed DSM-IV-TR Axis-IV psychosocial and environmental problem. It was also found that adult SepAD symptom severity decreased after CBT. Lastly, it was found that adult SepAD symptom severity at the start of therapy reduced the effectiveness of CBT for depression, but not for anxiety. Conclusion: The findings may provide a better insight into phenomenology and possible improvement of the treatment of adult SepAD.

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An examination of separation anxiety disorder symptoms in adults from a clinical population

The role of involvement in interactions of depressed patients with partners and strangers

Longitudinal associations between personality and relational identity formation in early and late adolescence

Associations are examined between parental smoking and smoking onset by their children. Smoking parents are more likely to have children, who start smoking in their teenage years. However, less is known about whether parental quitting is related to adolescent smoking. A cross-sectional national sample of 2,206 adolescents, aged 1014 years and living in two-parent households, were interviewed for the STIVORO annual report on Dutch youth smoking behavior. Adolescent smokers reported they had tried smoking, even one puff. Respondents indicated whether their parents were never, former, or current smokers, and provided, in the case a parent had quit, their age at that time. Logistic regression analyses revealed that there was a gradual increase of likelihood : adolescents with both parents being current smokers were four times more likely to be a smoker compared to adolescents with parents, who had never smoked. Additionally, within the group of adolescents whose parents quit smoking, the findings demonstrated that the earlier the parents stopped smoking in the life of their off-spring, the less likely their children were to start smoking in adolescence. Parental smoking history is associated with smoking initiation in early adolescence. Parental cessation at an early age of their offspring reduces the likelihood of adolescent smoking initiation. Preventive efforts, therefore, should focus on the benefits of parental cessation as early as possible.

/pdf/adolescent-smoking-and-parenting-nzn2sguwam.pdf

William W. Hale

Papers

An examination of separation anxiety disorder symptoms in adults from a clinical population

The role of involvement in interactions of depressed patients with partners and strangers

Longitudinal associations between personality and relational identity formation in early and late adolescence

Adolescent smoking and parenting

Verandering in persoonlijkheid en angst gedurende de adolescentie