Body image among victims of sexual and physical abuse.

This study tries to understand the differences in body experience between victims of sexual abuse and physical abuse. Ninety-eight women completed questionnaires that measured personal information, body-image aberration, body sensitivity and control, and body investment. Findings indicated that victims of sexual abuse demonstrate less body maintenance and protection in addition to greater injury to body sensitivity and control than victims of physical abuse.

An in-session exploration of ruptures in working alliance and their associations with clients' core conflictual relationship themes, alliance-related discourse, and clients' postsession evaluations.

This exploratory study examined (a) the relationship among the occurrence of ruptures in the working alliance, the emergence of client's core conflictual relationship themes (CCRT), and focus of discourse within therapeutic sessions and (b) the relationship between ruptures in the working alliance and client's postsession evaluations of session's smoothness and depth. The authors included 151 sessions from five therapies conducted in a student counseling center. Sessions were content analyzed by independent raters, and a self-report questionnaire was given to clients after each session.

Mental pain: a multidimensional operationalization and definition.

An operationalization of mental pain is presented in three studies. The first study describes the operationalization of mental pain and the factor structure of the items produced by a content analysis of self-reports yielding a scale with nine factors: the experience of irreversibility, loss of control, narcissistic wounds, emotional flooding, freezing, estrangement, confusion, social distancing, and emptiness. Study 2 tested the relationship between mental pain and depression and anxiety in a normal population.

Pain perception in recovered bulimia nervosa patients.

Objective: Decreased pain sensitivity is found in individuals who are ill with bulimia nervosa (BN). The purpose of this study is to determine whether altered pain perception persists after recovery from bulimia nervosa (RBN).

Methods: Eleven women who were recovered from BN for more than 1 year were compared with 15 healthy volunteer women.