The autumn issue of the journal “Clinical Psychology and Special Education” (No. 3, 2026) has been published. The release of the issue coincided with the anniversary of Irina Yu. Levchenko, an outstanding Russian researcher in the psychology of children with special educational needs. To mark the occasion, her close colleagues from Moscow City University, Tatiana G. Bogdanova and Svetlana M. Valyavko, opened the issue with a congratulatory message.
The issue features 13 research articles covering a wide range of rapidly developing areas of clinical psychology. Olga A. Sagalakova and her co-authors presented a fundamental theoretical analysis of intrusive suicidal thoughts: by analogy with flashbacks in post-traumatic stress disorder, so-called “flash-forwards” involving one’s future death may reflect disruptions in the internal organization of memory. Valeria D. Bogatova undertook an ambitious attempt to study non-communicative patients with chronic disorders of consciousness. The study convincingly demonstrated that such patients respond significantly more often to communication from their relatives than from hospital staff, pointing to the profoundly social origins of consciousness. Authors from Belarus conducted a comparative analysis of the effects of different psychopharmacological medications on attention and cognitive functioning in patients experiencing their first psychotic episodes — that is, before persistent impairments associated with years of illness and treatment have developed. Researchers from St. Petersburg devoted their work to the study of insight in patients with schizophrenia: impaired insight was found to be associated with negative, but not positive, symptoms. Another St. Petersburg research group analyzed descriptions of social scenes produced by female patients with borderline personality disorder based on picture-story tasks and identified reduced speech content and a predominance of family-related themes. A researcher from Tver identified personality characteristics of women with unexplained (presumably psychogenic) infertility, including alexithymia, hypochondriacal tendencies, and an external locus of control.
Two English-language articles by international researchers hold a special place in the issue. Researchers from Turkey conducted a rigorously controlled study of the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy in reducing hopelessness among divorced women raising children. The therapeutic effect of the psychoeducational program was significantly greater than that of handicraft sessions, although the latter also had a beneficial effect on the women’s mental health by providing mutual support during a difficult life situation. A group of researchers from Iran examined the psychological mechanisms underlying obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression, which frequently co-occur. They found that the lowest levels of emotional self-regulation and mindfulness were characteristic of patients who subsequently developed depressive symptoms in addition to obsessions and compulsions.
The “Methods and Techniques” section features two studies. Anna A. Shvedovskaya and her team presented a pilot study of the effectiveness of a 14-week cognitive stimulation therapy program for older adults, outlining specific directions for monitoring and improving the psychological well-being of the aging population. Natalia V. Babkina and Anna M. Fedoseeva analyzed the experience of specialists at special education schools in administering the Unified Methodology for Socio-Psychological Testing to adolescents with developmental delay. The specialists noted that, when completing the standard 110-item questionnaire, these adolescents required assistance, explanations, additional motivation, and breaks, indicating a need to adapt the methodology for this population.
Finally, research on children with developmental difficulties was traditionally represented by three independent research groups from Moscow State University of Psychology and Education. Elena V. Orekhova and her colleagues showed that children’s ability to recognize words in noise depends not only on the development of auditory perception but also on the choice of stimuli themselves. Children with typical speech and language development, and even children with autism, showed disproportionately easy recognition of words typically acquired during the first year of life compared with acoustically similar words acquired later. Words acquired early in ontogeny retain the fastest lexical access even in adulthood. Ulyana A. Makhokhina and her team described difficulties in reading comprehension in one third of children with autism despite age-appropriate or even advanced reading skills, a pattern corresponding to the phenomenon of hyperlexia described in the international literature. G.L. Kozunova, K.I. Pultsina, and A.O. Prokofiev presented a theoretical review of psychiatric causes of deviant behavior in children and adolescents. The authors analyzed the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-5-TR, 2022) and identified six diagnoses in which antisocial behavior is not merely a frequent associated complication but a defining diagnostic symptom.