Temporal perspective and mental functioning of socially maladjusted youth held in conditions of institutional isolation

Introduction: The aim of the research presented was to determine whether the temporal perspective of socially maladjusted adolescents, held against their will in conditions of institutional isolation, can be linked to the level of their mental functioning. Method: The researchers applied standardized psychological tests in a survey of a group of 311 adolescents (38 females, 273 males), aged 13–18, who were held in a youth education center (YEC) following family court rulings. Results: After a psychological characterization of three groups of adolescents with different temporal perspectives, distinguished on the basis of cluster analysis, it was proven that the temporal perspective of adolescents held in institutional isolation is crucial to the quality of their mental functioning. The participants who scored significantly lower in all dimensions of temporal perspective seemed to be experiencing lower-intensity loneliness, depression and stress. Those, on the other hand, whose perspective was of the present-hedonistic or past-negative types felt lonelier, lived under more stress and suffered from more severe forms of depression. The teenagers whose temporal perspective was past-positive and future-oriented turned out to be most balanced in terms of the investigated psychological variables, which may confirm the importance of a balanced temporal perspective for good quality of life. Conclusions: The strongest effect was found in relation to peer and family loneliness, which indicates the importance of family and peers in the teenagers’ psychosocial development. These findings promote further reflection on the legitimacy of institutional measures used in the rehabilitation of socially maladjusted youth to date, and the search for new, effective kinds of social rehabilitation intervention.

Mental health and psychosocial wellbeing during Covid-19

Worldwide COVID-19 pandemic had led to a prolonged stressful condition and bring about more psychological and social effects in the community. This condition is commonly seen in each group and more commonly it has affected in children, older peoples and even the health workers who are exposed and likely to bring about the condition of stress, anxiety, uneasiness and depression. These prolonged psychosocial issues may result in mental health problems and long-term consequence on the mental functioning and coping capacities of family members. The aim of this article is to explain some of the psychosocial impacts, and more is emphasis given in identifying these psychosocial problems and some of the strategies which can be used to overcome these issues.

Mental, Physical and Social Functioning in Independently Living Senior House Residents and Community-Dwelling Older Adults

Senior houses provide social interaction and support, potentially supporting older people’s physical and mental functioning. Few studies have investigated functioning of senior house residents. The aim was to compare functioning between senior house residents and community-dwelling older adults in Finland. We compared senior house residents (n = 336, 69% women, mean age 83 years) to community-dwelling older adults (n = 1139, 56% women, mean age 74 years). Physical and mental functioning were assessed using the SF 36-Item Health Survey. Loneliness and frequency of social contacts were self-reported. The analyses were adjusted for age, socioeconomic factors and diseases. Physical functioning was lower among men in senior houses compared to community-dwelling men (mean 41.1 vs. 46.4, p = 0.003). Mental functioning or the frequency of social contacts did not differ between type of residence in either sex. Loneliness was higher among women in senior houses compared to community-dwelling women (OR = 1.67, p = 0.027). This was not observed in men. Results suggest that women in senior houses had similar physical and mental functioning compared to community-dwelling women. Male senior house residents had poorer physical functioning compared to community-dwelling men. Women living in senior houses were lonelier than community-dwelling women despite the social environment.

A Personal Account: Attaining Muscle Memory and Higher Mental Functioning

Many articles have been written about elite performers that attain muscle memory and experience flow and zoneness. This article details how the author personally attained higher level performance and explains the feelings experienced during the process. A one-person study was designed to experience muscle memory and explore the mental aspects of putting. Twenty thousand attempts (strokes) were used. The design included four parts; a) Establish Baseline, b) Master Mechanics, c) Experience Muscle Memory, and d) Explore Mental Aspects. The conversion rate for the first 1,000 attempts during baseline was 58.3 percent and for the last 1,000 attempts was 90.4 percent. The concept of deliberate practice was used throughout the study showing performance increases. When experiencing muscle memory it was found to be boring and far from fun. When the mental aspects were explored the concepts of flow and pre-live generated enthusiasm and joy.

Subjective time, place, and language in Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses

Fiction has often shown that our sense of time can be affected by the spaces and things around us. In particular, the houses in which characters live can make the passing of time dilate, accelerate, even to seem to skip or stop. These interactions between place and time may represent more than metaphor or literary artifice, but rather genuine cognitive processes of embodied subjective time. This is demonstrated in an analysis of Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses, supplementing traditional stylistic analysis with cognitive poetics to explore an influence of the central house, the Sea House, on the young protagonist’s experience of time. Exploring the text through the fictional mental functioning of a main character offers a new way to understand The Life of Houses, and, more broadly, the cognitive approach set out in this article—one which takes into account various active and interactive influences on subjective time—may have implications for the interpretation of other works which analyse the connections between time, place, and self.

The Contribution of Executive Functions When Reading Multiple Texts: A Systematic Literature Review

In the present-day knowledge society, people need to critically comprehend information across multiple sources that express diverse and contradictory viewpoints. Due to the complexity associated with this process, an important role can be played by Executive Functions, that is, cognitive control processes used to regulate mental functioning and behavior when automatized elaborations are not sufficient. The aim of this article is to review existing research on the roles of executive functions when reading from multiple texts. To identify the appropriate studies, we conducted a search in the following databases: Web of science, Scopus, PsycInfo, Eric. The search string was created by combining the terms used in past literature reviews on executive functions and multiple-texts comprehension. From the total number of 4,877 records identified, seven articles met all the inclusion criteria and were analyzed. Given the scarcity of studies on the topic, we decided to examine also eight articles reporting indirect evidence about the association between executive functions and multiple-text comprehension. Our review revealed that the study of the association between executive functions and multiple-texts comprehension is underdeveloped. The results seem to suggest that working memory is involved in surface comprehension, whereas results about sourcing and intertextual integration processes are mixed. Indirect evidence suggests that other executive functions, such as planning or monitoring, may be involved when learning from multiple texts. More research on this topic is needed given the increasing complexity of the contexts in which reading activities take place.

Dreams and Trauma Changes in the Manifest Dreams in Psychoanalytic Treatments – A Psychoanalytic Outcome Measure

Although psychoanalysts are interested in symptom reduction as an outcome, they are looking for instruments to measure sustaining changes in the unconscious mental functioning. In this article it is discussed that conceptually well-founded transformation of manifest dreams analyzed with precise empirical methods could be considered as a promising indicator for such therapeutic changes. We are summarizing a dream generation model by Moser and von Zeppelin which has integrated a large interdisciplinary knowledge base of contemporary dream and sleep research. Based on this model the authors have developed a valid and reliable coding system for analyzing manifest dreams, the Zurich Dream Process Coding System (ZDPCS). One exemplary dream from the beginning and one from the third year of a severely traumatized, chronic depressed patient from the LAC Depression Study collected in psychoanalytic sessions as well as in the sleep laboratory have been analyzed applying the ZDPCS. Authors hypothesize that transformation in dreams as measured with the ZDPCS is the result of memory processes of traumatic embodied memories in the state of dreaming.

A strange case of gendercide: fascination, psychotic features, archaic elements, and phantasmatic metamorphosis

This is a strange case of murder: a mafia pentito, an informer, reveals after ten years that the death of a man which had been considered natural, had in fact been a murder. The victim, a loan shark associated with crime people, was the companion of his lover at the time. The strange aspect is the way in which the mobster, with a couple of hired killers and helped by the woman, organised the murder: a shot of pesticide while the man was lying in bed with the woman. This modality was suggested by a veterinarian friend of the mobster who claimed that the pesticide would not be detected. The interviewer's imagination/vision of a metamorphosis while he was interviewing the woman in a forensic setting; the dream he had immediately after the interview; the bizarre construction of the crime; the seductive abilities of the woman linked to the choice and the type of partners she had and the bonds she had created; and the almost dreamlike description of the crime itself, suggest the emergence of primitive mechanisms of mental functioning: splitting, the use of massive projections of partial aspects and projective identification. A fragile and hidden common thread is hypothesised in this work. A common thread whose core is the desire for the narcissistic realisation of a woman who, in order to achieve it, puts eros at the service of thanatos. A red thread that connects all the different events, the real and the phantasmatic ones: from seeking a role as a woman of the criminal underworld to the magic fascination of an archaic Sicily, evoking primitive mechanisms of functioning typical of psychosis.

Decision Maker Profiling Using Their Mental Behavior Pattern

This study describes a method to assist the task of predicting the result of the decision-making process of an individual based on psychological and emotional aspects and using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. This study presents indicators created for profile identification, which are organized in primary and circumstantial categories. These indicators are merged according to the ultimate purpose of profile identification, including the expected behavioral pattern for a person who performs a decision-making process. The person behavior hypothesis was successfully tested and can be approximated by an indicator such as mental functioning pattern, and the mental functioning pattern hypothesis can signal the most likely decisions of an individual. Four debtor decision variables were assessed in a debt negotiation process, in order to validate the method, which is applicable to other decision-making domains. The best signaling of the most likely decision of the debtor was seven times greater than that of a random prediction, while the gain of the worst decision signaling variable was 20%.