Neural and behavioral correlates of emotion recognition in children and adults.

Event-related potentials (ERPs), accuracy scores, and reaction times were used to examine the recognition of emotional expressions. Adults and 7-year-old children saw upright and inverted chromatic slides of the facial expressions of happiness, fear, surprise, and anger, and were asked to press a button for either "happy" or "angry" faces. A positive-going waveform (P300) was apparent at parietal scalp (Pz) and at left and right temporal scalp.

Brief psychotherapy of personality disorders.

Thirty-two patients with personality disorder diagnoses were randomly assigned to two treatment conditions that vary on several techniques of brief dynamic psychotherapy. Seventeen patients constituted a waiting list control group. The two brief psychotherapies showed significant improvement on target complaints, SCL-90, and Social Adjustment Scale-SR compared with the control subjects.

Infant proneness-to-distress temperament, maternal personality, and mother-infant attachment: associations and goodness of fit.

66 mother-infant pairs were examined when the infants were 9 and 13 months. The purpose of this report was to examine relations between infant proneness-to-distress temperament, maternal personality characteristics, and mother-infant attachment. There were no main-effect relations between infant proneness-to-distress temperament as assessed at 9 months and infant attachment classification at 13 months.

Local anesthesia for neonatal circumcision. Effects on distress and cortisol response.

A controlled, double-blind investigation was conducted to determine whether the dorsal penile nerve block using lidocaine hydrochloride without epinephrine would effectively reduce behavioral distress and adrenocortical responses to routine neonatal circumcision. The subjects were healthy male newborns whose parents had requested circumcision. Equal numbers (n = 20) were randomly assigned to circumcision with lidocaine, saline, or no injection.