Browsing by discipline "Psykologi"

Introduction The purpose of this review is to point out different variants of acquired prosopagnosia and to review and discuss if the variants are distinctive of one another by their neural mechanisms and clinical symptoms. Discussion about diagnostics and rehabilitation of acquired prosopagnosia will also be made. Conclusions were based on two research questions. First, it was hypothesized that the neural findings would support the existence of different variants of acquired prosopagnosia. Second, it was questioned what forms of rehabilitation would help the most. Methods The source material was defined with help of three reviews of high quality which were published in Frontiers in Bioscience during the year 2014. Sources were rounded out with OvidMedline search. Terms of search used were prosopagnosia, acquired prosopagnosia, developmental prosopagnosia, congenital prosopagnosia, rehabilitation, covert recognition, ICD-10-CM and neural mechanism. Results and Conclusions Based on this review, a point can be made that the neural findings partly support the existence of different variants of acquired prosopagnosia; the apperceptive variant is usually a consequence of injury in the posterior occipital temporal axis whereas the anterior injury causes the associative variant in most of the cases. Distinctiveness of these variants is also supported by double dissociative symptoms which include covert recognition and the imagery of faces. There is some initial research from which a conclusion could be made that rehabilitation could benefit patients with acquired prosopagnosia. There is not much information about acquired prosopagnosia in Finland. Raised awareness of acquired prosopagnosia amongst healthcare professionals could help diagnostics and to give more optimal treatment. Patients with acquired prosopagnosia usually learn effective but cognitively demanding coping mechanisms. Research in treatment possibilities could help professionals to rehabilitate more effectively but also understand the psychosocial problems that may rise up with the disorder.

Objectives. Online communication has become central for adolescents’ everyday lives during the last two decades. Because friendships are vital for psychosocial development in adolescence, it is important to know how online communication affects adolescents’ friendships. The topic has been researched via four hypotheses. The Displacement hypothesis suggests that online communication is harmful for real-life friendships, whereas the Stimulation hypothesis claims that the internet is a useful environment to maintain real-life friendships. The Rich Get Richer hypothesis suggests that people who already have good existing friendships, will benefit most from online communication. The Social Compensation hypothesis suggests that internet gives possibility for socially inhibited people to make friends. Methods. Articles were searched with terms adolescent + online communication + friendship and adolescent + online communication + well-being. The topic narrowed down to 10-20-year-old adolescents and their friendships. Online communication was defined primarily as instant messaging but also some research that included other ways of online communication in addition to instant messaging were included. Results and Conclusions. The research so far has shown support mostly to the Stimulation and the Rich Get Richer hypothesis, but also some support to the Social Compensation hypothesis. Online communication increased the quality of existing friendships and these effects were stronger among social adolescents compared to socially inhibited adolescents. Socially anxious and lonely adolescents seem to find online communication easier to approach than face-to-face communication. Moreover, the online communication might increase self-esteem for lonely adolescents, which in part can make it easier to form real-life friendships. These results are important to be considered when attempting to help socially inhibited adolescents, but research should also consider the findings that these adolescents might also compensate face-to-face communication with online communication. The research overall has limitations, since most of the studies are cross-sectional and measurements rely on self-evaluation. Also, the trends of online communication devices are changing constantly, and the research has not had a unified measure for online communication. In future studies, it would be important to pay more attention to the definition of online communication, and to consider the effects of communication via mobile phone and the emerging popularity of more visually oriented online communication devices.

The treatment of social anxiety disorder with internet delivered cognitive-behavior therapy has been studied for the past two decades, but still reviews of studies on the subject could not been found in the databases used in this study. The goal of this review was to examine the efficacy of iCBT in treating social anxiety disorder and to review the treatment protocols used in the efficacy studies. A systematic literature search was conducted in the databases available through EBSCOhost (ia. CINAHL, MEDLINE, eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) & eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost)) with the search term ”((((internet OR web) AND (cognitive behav* therapy)) OR iCBT) AND (social phobia OR social anxiety disorder)))”. Studies which examined the efficacy of iCBT in treating social anxiety disorder with an RCT trial comparing it to waiting list or treatment as usual conditions were included in the review. The search revealed 11 studies filling these requirements, in which three separately developed treatment protocols were studied. Guided iCBT significantly reduces the symptoms of social anxiety disorder and it was significantly more efficacious in reducing symptoms than waiting list, also clinically significant improvement was considerably more common in people receiving the treatment. Only a few studies comparing iCBT to live therapies were found, and even though they had promising results, conclusions could not be made based on two studies. The treatment protocols were similar to each other and there were no substantial differences noted in the efficacies of the different treatments. Treatment satisfaction was high which supports the role of iCBT as an acceptable treatment option. There was variation between the studies in the time therapists used per patient, but even the longest average time therapists used indicated that the therapists used their time more efficiently compared to live treatments. There was a lot of variation between the studies in adherence and completion rates, and the maintenance of adherence should be attended to also in future treatment protocols.

There are now internet-based interventions for most of the common mental health disorders, and the evidence for their effectiveness indicates that these treatments are a promising way to improve the availability of mental health services. Given that there are, however, only few interventions for psychotic disorders, the objective of this review was to describe the content of these interventions and to assess their effectiveness. The reviewed web-based interventions for psychotic disorders consist of psychoeducation, social support and therapeutic exercises. Multimedia content was utilized in psychoeducation, and moderated internet forums were an essential part of interventions that offered social support. The therapeutic sessions consisted of independent exercises, which emphasized ways to recognize harmful thoughts and develop coping skills. The interventions were considered feasible and helpful for the most part. There is also promising evidence for treatment effects, especially with regard to depression and psychosocial functioning. Due to methodological deficiencies, however, the evidence is scarce. In the future researchers should focus on systematic research with strong methodological quality. It is also important that the development of these interventions is user-centered. In addition, there is remarkable variation as far as effectiveness is concerned, and the underlying causes should be unraveled.

Irony is a way of communicating a message in which words and their meaning is in conflict. People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have a tendency to interpret words literally which is a result of their problems in social interaction. It has been reported that people with ASD have difficulties to react to irony in a proper manner which leads to the assumption that they do not understand irony. In my Bachelors thesis I will review studies on irony comprehension of individuals with ASD. The aim of my review is to find from the literature if the assumption that individuals with ASD cannot detect irony is correct and what kind of explanations there are on the underlying issues of their difficulties in irony comprehension. Studies are quite contradictory on how well people with ASD can detect irony. Some suggest that individuals with ASD can detect irony as well as typically developed and others propose that people with ASD cannot detect irony even closely as well as typically developing. But studies are unanimous that people with ASD have great difficulties in the comprehension of irony compared to typically developing. There are many explanations why people with ASD might have difficulties with irony. One is that children with ASD lack the theory of mind, so they have problems in understanding that the speaker has his or her independent intentions that they might want to transmit to the listener when using irony. According to another explanation the disturbance in language development might influence irony perception. Sometimes tasks testing irony perception require the ability to produce difficult verbal outcomes which are difficult for people with ASD. They have also difficulties to perceive prosodic cues overall and irony has a wide variety of possible prosodic cues. In addition to the specific difficulties in, for example prosody and language, people with ASD also have hard time in integrating these multiple different cues automatically. However, there are compensatory mechanisms that help them to overcome these difficulties. They just do not automatically use them when processing language but if they are explicitly told to take in account that there might be irony individuals with ASD are doing better in irony tasks. For future research it would be important to study how well people with ASD detect irony in more natural situations. Furthermore, it should be studied how much they understand irony even when they recognize it because it has been shown that people with ASD do not enjoy irony as much as typically developing.

Borderline personality disorder is a mental disorder which is associated with high levels of subjective suffering and severe decline in everyday functioning. It is considered quite difficult to treat and it has been linked to substantially increased risks of self-injurious behaviour and morbidity due to suicides. The psychopathology and core symptomology of borderline personality disorder can be conceptualized through the feelings of chronic shame and having a shameful self-image. Shame is a highly aversive affect, which has many different unadaptive behavioural and cognitive consequences. Borderline personality disorder has been linked to many abnormalities in emotional processing of shame and in susceptibilies to experiencing affects of shame. Self-compassion is a theme adopted to western psychology from Buddhist traditions. Self-compassion has recently seen an increase of attention in the field of modern psychology. It has been linked to many positive psychological correlates and to reduced general psychopathology. Self-compassion constitutes of an attitude to oneself in which one accepts his/herself subjective difficulties with mindfulness and as an essential part of the common human experience. Self-compassionate attitude toward oneself, also includes the desire to alleviate ones subjective suffering. Based on intuition self-compassion seems to target the main difficulties behind the problems that are faced by people with borderline personality disorder and chronic feelings shame. The objective of this paper was to examine the empirical and theoretical data of the role of shame in explaining the symptomology of borderline personality disorder and the applicability of self-compassion in treatment of psychopathology stemming from intense feelings of shame. Randomized controlled trials, pilot studies of self-compassion based interventions, meta-analyses and systematic reviews were searched from common psychological databases and Google Scholar. Additionally articles were included in this paper after manual scanning of the lists of reference of the selected literature. Even though the information obtained from research on the applicability of self-compassion in treatment of borderline personality disorder and transdiagnostic shame has its limitations, self-compassion may have its unique additional offerings to the treatment of borderline personality disorder. Future research on the mechanisms of change in self-compassion and their neural substrates would be highly useful in order to understand the potential mediating effect of transdiagnostic shame in reduced psychopathology associated with developing a self-compassionate attitude.

Aims. Research on positive impacts of self-compassion has increased during 21th century. Previous studies have shown that self-compassion is associated with more adaptive coping strategies, more effective emotion regulation and better readiness to face up personal weaknesses and life challenges. Furthermore, self-compassion is consistently associated with less psychopathology, especially depression. Chronic pain is a globally significant cause of burden, often existing with comorbid depression. The aim of this bachelor’s thesis was to examine the associations between self-compassion and typical psychopathology in people living with chronic pain as well as to examine how self-compassion is related to close psychological processes in this population. Methods. Literature search was carried out in Scopus and PubMed -databases using keywords self-compassion, selfcompassion and chronic pain. Keywords were limited to exist only in the article title. Intervention studies were excluded from review. Results and conclusions. Studies on positive impacts of self-compassion in people with chronic pain have so far been mainly cross-sectional which does not allow causal implications. Still, the evidence is fairly impressive. Self-compassion is shown to have negative and strong associations with typical psychopathology, especially with depression- and stress-symptoms. There is also tentative indication that self-compassion is a prospective predictor of depressive symptoms. Self-compassion is associated with close psychological processes, particularly acceptance of pain, healthier coping strategies and less experiential avoidance in people living with chronic pain. Together these processes seem to lead to better mental health, better social functioning and less pain disability. Findings suggest that one key element of self-compassion is its motivational impact on action. Enhancing self-compassion is an interesting and potential way to promote health and quality of life in people living with chronic pain. It would also be worth to take into consideration when developing psychological interventions for people suffering from chronic pain.

The idea that fandom is connected to maladaptive development or cognitive deficits seems to underlie psychological studies on celebrity adoration. These studies often describe fandom as celebrity worship and offer hypotheses that seem to be at least in part based on stereotypes. I review the psychological study of fandom that is based on the idea of three types of celebrity adoration between which the adoration ranges from what is perceived as harmless to such that can be described as pathological. I review results that both support and contradict the suggested model and finally, ask if celebrity adoration should be perceived as a personality based coping mechanism rather than a maladaptive state. Celebrity adoration would seem to entail both a cognitive component and lower psychological well-being. In addition, both personality and personality based coping mechanisms are associated with celebrity adoration. I suggest that one explanation to celebrity adoration could be found from personality and psychological well-being. In this context celebrity adoration could be understood as a personality based coping mechanism that is facilitated by stress-related cognitive deficits.

Purpose. In today’s society we have a lot of pressure on us and have fast-paced lifestyles. In this hectic goal-oriented life, handicrafts, representing slow living, have gained popularity and attained media attention. However, handicrafts are not acknowledged in scientific fields as well as music and visual arts. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the relationship between handicrafts and well-being, as well as how handicrafts have been implemented in rehabilitation or therapy of clinical groups comprising different mental health disorders and progressive memory disorders. Methods. The data for this thesis were collected from Google Scholar, Scopus and PubMed. The following keywords were used: knitting, handicrafts, handcrafts, well-being, wellbeing, psycholog*, therapy, stress and anxiety. The Finnish keywords käsityö, psyykkinen hyvinvointi and terapia were also used. Results and conclusions. Since most of the studies in the field are descriptive, we cannot talk about causality but only correlation. Nevertheless, it has been concluded that the handcrafters report handicrafts having many positive effects on their well-being. In addition to the direct mental health benefits, handicrafts seem to have indirect effects on well-being through different kind of cognitive and social phenomena. When it comes to different clinical samples, positive correlation between handicrafts and well-being has also been detected. These results support the hypothesis that handicrafts may have therapeutic effects. Based on the studies conducted so far, it seems justified to use handicrafts in therapy or as a part of therapy or self-care. However, more experimental studies are needed to be able to tell how we can use handicrafts more effectively and for whom it is most suitable.

In this thesis I study special features related to the mental health of the people with intellectual disabilities and focuse on the mental health risks related to intellectual disability. I view disability from the perspective of International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). This biopsychosocial model combines both the medical perspective and the perspective of the disability studies. Mental health risks related to intellectual disability can be divided into two categories: biological and cognitive factors, and social and societal factors. The conclusion of the thesis is that intellectual disability as a deviance of the development of the neural system sets an individual into different position than a person without disabilities according to mental health risks, and that social and societal risk factors continue increasing the risk to mental health problems significantly. Participation restrictions and the social stigma of the intellectual disability are themes that stand out from the social and societal factors. Discussion of the thesis considers options how to have an influence on the social and societal risk factors. Thesis suggests that the most important tool to prevent the mental health problems of the people with intellectual disabilities would be to have as inclusive society as possible.