In this extensively revised and expanded new edition of the classic, The Psychiatric Interview in Clinical Practice, the authors continue to address the challenges inherent in clinical interviewing—the complexities of defense mechanisms, conflicts, wishes, and fantasies—as they did in their original 1971 edition while also acknowledging the task of adapting their interview strategies to a new era of psychiatry. New perspectives on psychopathology often emphasize descriptive phenomenological approaches and encourage psychiatric interviewing that is overly focused on describing symptoms and establishing diagnoses. The Psychiatric Interview in Clinical Practice stresses that the clinician needs to learn about patients, their problems, their illness, and their lives. From this readers will understand the universal presence of personality types and the importance of the personality as a determining factor in the unfolding of the psychiatric interview. Students learning psychiatry often ask, "But what do I say to the patient?" In 20 new and updated chapters, The Psychiatric Interviewanswers that question by using clinical vignettes from the authors' everyday work, what they said in a wide variety of clinical situations and what they felt and thought that led them to say it. Specifically this new edition includes, 

• New chapter sections addressing the process of eliciting a patient's psychodynamic history and the role of information technology in the psychiatric interview.
• New chapters on narcissistic, masochistic, anxious, traumatized, and borderline patients, emphasizing the importance of personality type in determining the evolution of psychiatric disorders and providing copious clinical detail illustrating both what to do and what not to do when interviewing these patients.
• A new chapter presenting a contemporary perspective on "the patient of different background," in which the authors offer valuable guidance on how to approach racial, ethnic, cultural, age, and sexual-orientation differences between interviewer and patient.
• Updated chapters on psychotic patients, patients with schizophrenia, and cognitively impaired patients, and on depressed, obsessive-compulsive, and histrionic patients, incorporating new, emotionally moving vignettes of interviewer-patient interchanges garnered from the authors' extensive clinical experience.
• Updated chapters on hospitalized, psychosomatic, and emergency patients, which are not only psychotherapeutically instructive but also brimming with practical advice for medical students, house staff, doctors, nurses, and social workers.

Although The Psychiatric Interview in Clinical Practice is about psychiatric interviewing, many readers will likely recognize aspects of themselves in some of the clinical descriptions. The hope is that this self-recognition will lead to greater self-understanding and self-acceptance as well as to greater understanding and acceptance of others. The clinical examples are about real people, including the authors themselves, their friends, students, and patients. The authors selected situations or traits that are so common and typical that nearly all readers would be able to relate to them. The Psychiatric Interview in Clinical Practice promises to be an enjoyable read as well as a tremendous learning experience for trainees in all of the mental health professions, from medical students and psychiatric residents to psychologists, social workers, and nurses.

Objective: To understand how the Swedish legal system perceives and handles mentally handicapped children who may have been victimized. Method: Twenty-two judicial districts in Sweden provided complete files on 39 District Court cases (including the Appeals Court files on 17 of these cases) involving children with learning difficulties or other handicaps as alleged victims of abuse, threat and neglect. The children (25 girls and 14 boys) averaged 11.8 years of age when first allegedly victimized. Sexual abuse was the most frequently alleged crime (33 cases). Court transcripts, court files and expert assessments of the alleged victims' handicaps and their possible consequences were examined to elucidate the ways in which courts evaluated the credibility of the alleged victims. Results: The children's reports of their victimization were expected to have the characteristics emphasized by proponents of Statement Reality Analysis (SRA) and Criterion Based Content Analysis (CBCA) in order to be deemed credible. Expert reports were seldom available or adequate. Because many reports were poorly written or prepared by experts who lacked the necessary skills, courts were left to rely on their own assumptions and knowledge when evaluating children's capacities and credibility. Conclusions: Children with learning difficulties or other handicaps were expected to provide the same sort of reports as other children. To minimize the risk that judgments may be based on inaccurate assumptions courts need to require more thorough assessments of children's limitations and their implications. Assessments by competent mental health professionals could inform and strengthen legal decision-making. A standardized procedure that included psycho-diagnostic instruments would allow courts to understand better the abilities, capacities, and behavior of specific handicapped children. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Introduction: The aim with this study was to deepen the understanding of contextual aspects in child psychiatric clinical work with boys displaying antisocial behaviour. Method: An explorative, qualitative approach, based on team narrations of authentic cases, was used. Results: The results indicate that clinicians consider a multitude of case characteristics when working with this heterogeneous group of boys. The assessment and treatment planning procedure appeared to be intertwined. The teams were unspecific regarding how needs were translated into treatment plans. The behaviour of a boy was discussed to sometimes evoke feelings of fear among parents and clinicians, thus alerting the need for instant interventions. Furthermore, the teams described a lack of consent and collaboration with other agencies. Unclear responsibilities sometimes seemed to affect the possibility to intervene properly. Conclusions: The findings of this study are discussed in relation to evidence-based practices and illustrate how complicated the management of boys with antisocial behaviour can be. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

In this paper, we apply the basic idea of a trade-off between the level of concentration and distractibility to test whether a manipulation of task difficulty can shield against distraction. Participants read, either in quiet or with a speech noise background, texts that were displayed either in an easy-to-read or a hard-to-read font. Background speech impaired prose recall, but only when the text was displayed in the easy-to-read font. Most importantly, recall was better in the background speech condition for hard-to-read than for easy-to-read texts. Moreover, individual differences in working memory capacity were related to the magnitude of disruption, but only in the easy-to-read condition. Making a task more difficult can sometimes facilitate selective attention in noisy work environments by promoting focal-task engagement. © 2014 The Authors.

This article reports 2 experiments that examine techniques to shield against the potentially disruptive effects of task-irrelevant background speech on proofreading. The participants searched for errors in texts that were either normal (i.e., written in Times New Roman font) or altered (i.e., presented either in Haettenschweiler font or in Times New Roman but masked by visual noise) in 2 sound conditions: a silent condition and a condition with background speech. Proofreading for semantic/contextual errors was impaired by speech, but only when the text was normal. This effect of speech was completely abolished when the text was written in an altered font (Experiment 1) or when it was masked by visual noise (Experiment 2). There was no functional difference between the 2 ways to alter the text with regard to the way the manipulations influenced the effects of background speech on proofreading. The results indicate that increased task demands, which lead to greater focal-task engagement, may shield against the distracting effects of background speech on proofreading.

Recent studies indicate that being intensely imitated for a brief period of time increases social interest among children with autism. The aim of this study was to replicate and extend these findings. Twenty children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were randomly assigned to one of two interaction strategies: imitation (n = 10) or contingent (n = 10). The children had little or no functional speech, and their developmental age averaged 25 months (mean chronological age =6:5 years). Both conditions were presented with repeated sessions of a modified version of Nadel's 'still-face' paradigm (still-face/intervention/ still-face/spontaneous play). The analysis revealed a significant increase of both proximal and distal social behaviours (touch and look at person) for the imitation condition, which confirms previous reports. In addition, an increase in elicited imitaticr., as measured with the PEP-R developmental assessment procedure, was also observed for children in the imitation condition, but not in the contingent condition. This finding extends earlier reports in that it suggests that the social expectancies unlocked by imitation also spread to tasks outside the experimental setting. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The relationship between recall memory, visual recognition memory, social communication, and the emergence of language skills was measured in a longitudinal study. Thirty typically developing Swedish children were tested at 6, 9 and 14 months. The result showed that, in combination, visual recognition memory at 6 months, deferred imitation at 9 months and turn-taking skills at 14 months could explain 41% of the variance in the infants' production of communicative gestures as measured by a Swedish variant of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDI). In this statistical model, deferred imitation stood out as the strongest predictor. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

MIR, a focused multimedia strategy, is a newly developed method that has been successful in boosting literacy and communicative development among children with autism (Basil & Reyes, 2003; Heimann et al, 1995: Tjus, Heimann & Nelson, 1998, 2001. 2004; Tjus, 1998). It is a method that establishes a motivating learning environment by combing attractive multimedia material with good teacher support and thus creates a better foundation for developing language and communication skills. MIR combines three building blocks: (1) Multimedia programs that offer immediate feed-back of text material through clear animations and digitized speech representing the same semantic content in different modes. (2) Interaction. The teacher acts as a supportive dialogue partner. (3) Recasting. When appropriate the teacher uses recasts based on the child-s verbal utterances or written sentences created within the multimedia environment. MIR is based on a cognitive theory that aims at specifying the fundamental components necessary for language learning for children with various disabilities. A basic assumption is that several important factors (linguistic, social, cognitive and motivational) need to converge in order for language delayed processes to continue. The MIR strategy has proven effective in creating a rapid progress in learning for children with autism spectrum disorders. Significant gains in literacy have been documented for both reading and phonology and the method has also been effective in motivating children with autism to enter into interesting conversations with their teacher. These results plus a specially developed multimedia tool will be presented and discussed in the presentation. 

Speech perception runs smoothly and automatically when there is silence in the background, but when the speech signal is degraded by background noise or by reverberation, effortful cognitive processing is needed to compensate for the signal distortion. Previous research has typically investigated the effects of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and reverberation time in isolation, whilst few have looked at their interaction. In this study, we probed how reverberation time and SNR influence recall of words presented in participants first- (L1) and second-language (L2). A total of 72 children (10 years old) participated in this study. The to-be-recalled wordlists were played back with two different reverberation times (0.3 and 1.2 s) crossed with two different SNRs (+3 dBA and +12 dBA). Children recalled fewer words when the spoken words were presented in L2 in comparison with recall of spoken words presented in L1. Words that were presented with a high SNR (+12 dBA) improved recall compared to a low SNR (+3 dBA). Reverberation time interacted with SNR to the effect that at +12 dB the shorter reverberation time improved recall, but at +3 dB it impaired recall. The effects of the physical sound variables (SNR and reverberation time) did not interact with language.

The purpose of this experiment was to explore whether listening positions (close or distant location from the sound source) in the classroom, and classroom reverberation, influence students score on a test for second-language (L2) listening comprehension (i.e., comprehension of English in Swedish speaking participants). The listening comprehension test administered was part of a standardized national test of English used in the Swedish school system. A total of 125 high school pupils, 15 years old, participated. Listening position was manipulated within subjects, classroom reverberation between subjects. The results showed that L2 listening comprehension decreased as distance from the sound source increased. The effect of reverberation was qualified by the participants baseline L2 proficiency. A shorter reverberation was beneficial to participants with high L2 proficiency, while the opposite pattern was found among the participants with low L2 proficiency. The results indicate that listening comprehension scores-and hence students grade in English-may depend on students classroom listening position.

Young and old subjects were investigated to examine whether: the effects of priming are influenced by aging there is independence between primed word-fragment completion and recognition performances, and the dependence between different tests is influenced by aging. A successive test paradigm was employed involving repeated assessment of to-be-remembered words by means of recognition and primed word-fragment completion. The results show that implicit memory declines with increasing age, and that correlations between different memory tests decrease with age. The outcome suggests that age-related memory decline involves several forms of memory, including primed word-fragment completion, and is reflected in correlations between measures of implicit and explicit memory.