David Oppenheim (University of Haifa)
Announces the Following Workshop

Parental Insightfulness
Assessment Workshop
July 2006, Paris, France:

We are happy to let you know that we are planning an Insightfulness Assessment (IA) coding workshop and we would like to invite you and/or your colleagues/students to participate in the workshop. The IA is a representational assessment which is based on an interview with parents following their viewing of video segments of themselves interacting with their children, and is designed to assess their capacity to "see things from the child's point of view." The IA has been proven to be an effective, methodologically rigorous, and clinically sensitive tool which is associated with parental caregiving and child attachment in both normative and at risk samples (see references below). It is currently used in a variety of studies, including intervention studies in which the IA is a pre- and post measure as well as in studies of children with Autism and other developmental disabilities.

The workshop will take place between July 4-8, 2006 in Paris, France (for those planning on attending the WAIMH conference, the dates are just before the conference). The workshop will involve 5 days of study with a small group of participants. Our work during the workshop will involve understanding the theoretical underpinnings of the Insightfulness Assessment, familiarizing participants with the IA procedure, and, primarily, learning how to code IA transcripts. There will be plenty of room for in-depth discussion about the coding system as well as discussion of technical matters involving its application. The goal of the workshop is to gain a thorough understanding of the IA and work on achieving inter-rater reliability. We believe that both researchers and clinicians may find it beneficial. Researchers who want to use the IA in their studies can complete a reliability check following the workshop.

For more information please feel free to contact us (David at oppenhei@psy.haifa.ac.il and Nina at nkoren@psy.haifa.ac.il).

David Oppenheim, Ph.D. Nina Koren-Karie, Ph.D.

Selected References

Koren-Karie, N., Oppenheim, D., Dolev S., Sher, E., & Etzion-Carasso, A. (2002). Mothers’ insightfulness regarding their infants’ internal experience: Relations with maternal sensitivity and infant attachment. Developmental Psychology, 38, 534-542.

Oppenheim, D. & Koren-Karie, N. (2002). Mothers’ insightfulness regarding their children’s internal worlds: The capacity underlying secure child-mother relationships. Infant Mental Health Journal, 23, 593-605.

Oppenheim, D., Goldsmith, D., & Koren-Karie, N. (2004). Maternal Insightfulness and preschoolers’ emotion and behavior problems: Reciprocal influences in a day-treatment program. Infant Mental Health Journal, 25, 352-367.

Koren-Karie, N., Oppenheim, D., & Getzler, R. (2004). Mothers who were severely abused during childhood and their children talk about emotions: Co-construction of joint narratives in light of maternal trauma. Infant Mental Health Journal, 25, 300-317.

Friedman, A. (2005). Maternal mind-mindedness: Relations with maternal insightfulness and infant behavior at one year. Unpublished masters thesis, University of Haifa.