Ricardo C. Ainslie

Marital Discord and Child Behavior Problems Parent-Child Relationship Quality and Child Interpersonal Awareness as Mediators

To date, specific mechanisms at work in the link between marital discord and childrens problematic behavior remain unclear. In the present study, three types of variables—marital discord (nonconsensus and arguing-related stress), parent-child relationship quality (global quality and daily time spent together), and child interpersonal awareness (ability to infer emotions in social situations)—were used as predictors of childrens social behavioral profiles in a sample of 45 5-year-olds. Regression analyses were conducted to assess the efficacy of a mediational model for predicting child behavior problems from marital discord. Evidence was found for indirect relations between marital discord and both social withdrawal and aggression: Marital discord predicted lower quality parent-child relationships, which, in turn, predicted high levels of child aggression. For child social withdrawal, the prediction from marital discord was mediated by both parent-child relationship quality and child interpersonal awareness.

Race Murder and Community Trauma: Psychoanalysis and Ethnography in Exploring the Impact of the Killing of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas

INTRODUCTION For the past decade the first author has worked in three small communities in Texas where conflicts related to race have been salient. In Anson, Texas, he explored the impact of a post Jim Crow reality on a community that had been entirely white prior to the Civil Rights Era but was now over a third minority, mostly Latino. In Hempstead, Texas he studied the effects of a school desegregation process that had erased all traces of the local historically African American school, leaving enormous conflict and resentment among African Americans with respect to the local education system. More recently, for the past two-and-ahalf years the authors have been working in Jasper, Texas, exploring the impact of the murder of James Byrd on that community. The methodological basis for the work in all three of these communities has been a psychoanalytic ethnographic approach. That is, this work has drawn significantly from both disciplines to frame an understanding of the work and the processes observed, as well as using them as a methodological guide in approaching these communities and those who live within them. Psychoanalysis is a set of concepts and assumptions about how the mind works, but these concepts can also be a resource for our attempts to understand community conflicts and group processes. For example, in Anson, Texas, the first author used a psychoanalytic understanding of symptoms and their function as symbolic reference points to underlying conflicts, tensions, and anxieties, in order to formulate the conscious and unconscious dimensions of a community conflict (drawing equally, however, from the work of Clifford Geertz and symbolic interactionism, notwithstanding his sharp reservations about psychoanalysis). In Hempstead, he used psychoanalytic theorizing about repression and the power of experiences that are excommunicated from consciousness to understand the legacy of school desegregation. Similarly, he employed a psychoanalytic understanding of the restorative function of making what was once unconscious conscious, that is, reintegrating into the public memory crucial elements of a largely disavowed or heretofore unspeakable history. In Jasper, we are using the psychoanalytic understanding of trauma, as well as the psychodynamics of defense, to understand how a community has managed to absorb a profoundly disturbing racial murder. Psychoanalysis is also a framework that defines a particular kind of engagement, and hence, a particular kind of method. When analysts attempt to take their work beyond the consulting room, they have a great deal to learn from anthropology, given that anthropologists have a long tradition of working with the tensions and ambiguities inherent in field work. However, both disciplines work with the ambiguities of transference and countertransference manifestations and the complexities of establishing and maintaining working alliances, that is to say, the management of the psychodynamics of the interpersonal field. Both disciplines also require the practitioners to reflect on what it means to be entrusted with highly sensitive or confidential information. Of special importance is the fact that both disciplines share a similar sensibility, one that trusts the “material” to be guided by the lives engaged and to evolve in meaningful and unanticipated ways that can be grasped, understood. Both also require vigilance against the imposition of predigested frameworks and understandings, even if not always successful in their efforts to ward off such. All three of these communities have been entered with a notable uncertainty about what it is that would be found in them, yet that ambiguity has not been unsettling. On the contrary, it is quite familiar, being the

Affiliative and Instrumental Marital Discord, Mother's Negative Affect, and Children's Negative Interactions with Unfamiliar Peers.

Indices of marital discord and mother-child affective processes were used to predict levels of negativity children displayed with unfamiliar peers. Thirty-nine mothers and their 5-year-olds were observed with 5–7 other mother-child dyads during a 30-minute free play session. Mother and child negativity were coded and two types of marital discord were assessed via mother self-report: affiliative discord (e.g., distress due to the lack of affiliative behaviors in the marriage) and instrumental discord (e.g., disagreements about the accomplishment of marital tasks, such as finances, time management, and goal setting). Affiliative discord was found to relate to the childs negativity with unfamiliar peers, but instrumental discord was not. Furthermore, maternal negativity moderated the link between marital discord and childs negativity with peers, such that high levels of affiliative discord combined with heightened maternal negativity was associated with child negativity. Practical implications are discussed.

The early developmental context of twinship: some limitations of the equal environments hypothesis.

Using questionnaires distributed to mothers, the characteristics of early development in twinship were investigated. Results indicated twinship to be an at-risk situation with neonatal complications and within-pair differences in the attainment of developmental milestones. The implications of these differences raise questions about the accuracy of the equal environments hypothesis.

On the infant's meaning for the parent: a study of four mother-daughter pairs

Four mother-daughter pairs were systematically followed from the third trimester of pregnancy through the first eight months postpartum by semistructured interviews and by naturalistic observations in the hospital, home and office. These individual case reports illustrate how the psychological meaning of the pregnancy and fetus/infant appeared to have shaped the neonatal perceptions, earlymother-infant relationships, and seemed to correlate with specific mothering behaviors. Theprenatal psychological factors, and the resultant meaning and perception of the infant, are also discussed as potentialrisk indicators and/or foci of therapeutic interventions.

Intervention strategies for addressing collective trauma: Healing communities ravaged by racial strife

Drawing from psychoanalytic notions of the relation between trauma and memory, as well as the importance of “giving voice” and representation as essential elements of a healing process for both individual and collective traumatic experience, this article describes three interrelated, psychoanalytically informed interventions in a Texas community where conflict-laden residues of the Jim Crow era continued to affect race relations. The first intervention (the creation of a space within which Jim Crow– and Civil Rights–era narratives could be spoken and explored) and the second intervention (the creation of a documentary film) were closely linked because they were part of a process in which interviews gave testimony about a decisive, transformational experience. The third intervention created a public event where that which had been denied and excommunicated from the dominant narrative of the communitys educational history could be “spoken.”

Early assessment of psychological risk factors: On the role of husband/father during pregnancy and in the early postnatal period

The earliest phases of the mother-infant relationship may markedly be influenced, for better or worse, by the emotional availability of the father. In our contemporary Western societies young expectant couples are often isolated psychologically. It is suggested that if such circumstances exist and the mother also has psychological risk factors stemming from her past history and/or from her experience with the pregnancy and delivery, the husbands ability to fulfill some special mothering functions toward his wife would tip the balance between adequate coping or manifest disturbance in the mother—infant relationship.

Randomized Controlled Trial of a Computerized Interactive Media-Based Problem Solving Treatment for Depression

This study evaluated the efficacy of an interactive media-based, computer-delivered depression treatment program (imbPST) compared to a no-treatment control condition (NTC) in a parallel-group, randomized, controlled trial conducted in an outpatient psychiatric research clinic. 45 adult participants with major depressive disorder or dysthymia were randomized to receive either 6 weekly sessions of imbPST or no treatment (No Treatment Control; NTC). The primary outcome measure was the Beck Depression Inventory II (BDI-II). There was a significant Group x Time interaction effect [F (1.73, 43)= 58.78; p<.001; η2=.58, Cohens d=1.94], such that the patients receiving imbPST had a significantly greater reduction in depressive symptoms compared to the patients in the NTC condition. Participants in the imbPST group improved their depression symptoms significantly from moderate (BDI-II=21.9±4.20) to mild levels of depression (BDI-II=17.9±4.0) after receiving 3 weekly sessions of imbPST (p<0.001), and progressed to still milder levels of depression after six weekly sessions (BDI-II=14.5±3.7, p<0.001). NTC participants showed no significant reduction in BDI-II scores (BDI-II=21.8±4.2 pre, BDI-II=21.5±5.2 post, N.S.). Additionally, 40% of the imbPST group showed a clinically significant and reliable change in depression levels while none of the NTC group met this criterion. imbPST participants rated the program highly usable on the system usability scale (SUS) after the first session (SUS Session 1=74.6±7.2) and usability scores increased significantly by the last session (SUS Session 6=85.4±5.6). We conclude that imbPST is an effective, engaging, and easily used depression treatment program that warrants further evaluation with heterogeneous depressed populations in a stand-alone, self-administered fashion.