Psychoneuroimmunology: past, present, and future

Provides a brief overview of the history and current status of behavioral immunology research, as well as speculation on likely future directions, and suggests that the field may have broad implications for basic biological sciences and medicine. In addition, the field has clear relevance for health psychology; its relevance to actual health outcomes, however, is not yet known.     

Body image: past, present, and future

This brief editorial article introduces the new scientific journal, Body Image: An International Journal of Research, and describes its rationale and mission in relation to the history and future of the study of body image and human appearance.     

Change blindness: past, present, and future

Change blindness is the striking failure to see large changes that normally would be noticed easily. Over the past decade this phenomenon has greatly contributed to our understanding of attention, perception, and even consciousness. The surprising extent of change blindness explains its broad appeal, but its counterintuitive nature has also engendered confusions about the kinds of inferences that legitimately follow from it. Here we discuss the legitimate and the erroneous inferences that have been drawn, and offer a set of requirements to help separate them. In doing so, we clarify the genuine contributions of change blindness research to our understanding of visual perception and awareness, and provide a glimpse of some ways in which change blindness might shape future research.     

Pastoral research: past, present, and future

In healthcare environments of excellence, clinically trained chaplains are valued members of the medical treatment team. There are skills and values they hold in common with medicine and allied health disciplines: enhancing the health and well-being of the patient as a unity of body, mind, and spirit within a unique family and cultural system. This article examines the past, present, and future of pastoral research, including the chaplain's moral imperative to examine practice and to share what is found.     

Native Americans and alcohol: past, present, and future

Native Americans have higher rates of alcohol use, frequency of use, and increased rates of fetal alcohol syndrome, compared with other ethnic groups (J. Hisnanick, 1992; P. A. May, 1996; J. M. Wallace et al., 2003). High prevalence rates of alcohol misuse among Native Americans must be understood in light of their unique history, which has resulted in trauma and exposure to many risk factors for problem alcohol use. Many risk factors have been identified in the general population; however, only some of these risk factors have been examined among Native American populations. The unique history and world view of Native Americans mean that, often, risk factors operate differently from the way they do in other populations. The authors discuss interventions and promising treatments.     

Counselling in primary care: past, present and future

The rapid growth of counselling in primary care has happened unofficially and almost by stealth over recent years until it has established a niche within many primary health care teams. If it is to survive following the latest reform of the NHS, it has some serious challenges to face. These challenges are to the very nature of counselling and involve the need to establish the professional identity of the counsellor in primary care. The current bias towards the regulation of health professionals also impinges upon counsellors in this domain, along with the need for their effective management and harmonisation of services within the health service. Evidence for the effectiveness of counselling is a pressing concern in a realm where the random control trial has reigned supreme. Whether or not counselling in primary care is subsumed into other health care professionals' roles is a matter for much speculation. Perhaps counselling will become 'medicalised' or perhaps it will develop further and continue to offer a different perspective on health and healing and remain in place to further enrich the services offered in primary care.     

Vocational maturity: Its past,present, and future development

A review and critical analysis of various approaches used in studying vocational maturity revealed that its viability was generally supported, yet remained questionable because of the conflicting results of previous research and the lack of applying these results to counseling. This analysis provided the basis for conceptualizing vocational maturity development as being analogous to and not separate from personality development. Proposed research studies were mentioned which would test basic relationships between vocational maturity development and various aspects of personality development.     

Visual feature integration theory: past,present, and future

Visual feature integration theory was one of the most influential theories of visual information processing in the last quarter of the 20th century. This article provides an exposition of the theory and a review of the associated data. In the past much emphasis has been placed on how the theory explains performance in various visual search tasks. The relevant literature is discussed and alternative accounts are described. Amendments to the theory are also set out. Many other issues concerning internal processes and representations implicated by the theory are reviewed. The article closes with a synopsis of what has been learned from consideration of the theory, and it is concluded that some of the issues may remain intractable unless appropriate neuroscientific investigations are carried out.     

Hippocampal sequences link past, present, and future

Disrupting the reactivation of hippocampal neurons during sleep impairs memory consolidation in rats. However, the functional importance of reactivation during awake states is unknown. An experiment in which awake reactivation was disrupted suggests that this phenomenon could adaptively guide behavior by linking previous learning with the current state of the world.     

Psychotherapy in the United Kingdom: past, present and future

The 20th century, perhaps 'the age of Freud', has seen the development and growth of psychological therapies. The first half of the century was virtually the province of the psychoanalytic approaches, with the last three decades marking the flowering of many other approaches, and a gradual and general rapprochement between nearly all the major therapies. This history is traced, identifying the major players, including behaviour therapy and humanistic therapies challenging the initially dominant model. The rapid expansion in practitioners and training courses has led to questions of organisation, registration, and relationship between the therapies. The development of UKCP and BCP is examined, examining the size of the constituent elements within these major groupings, their relationship to each other and to counselling and the Independent Practitioners Network. Other developments such as psychotherapeutic studies within universities and the subsequent linking of some psychotherapy trainings to academic qualifications are referred to, while the relationship of British psychotherapy to the European and world scene is briefly described before the author hazards a prediction that it is integrative psychotherapy that will probably expand most in the new century, with counselling asserting its right to be an equal partner in the therapeutic endeavour.     

Guidance in the United Kingdom: past, present and future

The turn of the century is an apposite time to review the development of guidance in the United Kingdom. The concept of guidance, in the terms in which it is now understood, is very much a 20th-century notion. It draws on two distinct but related traditions: the development of the practice of career guidance; and the development of guidance as an educational concept. The history of these two developments, and the relationship between them, are briefly outlined. Some of the conceptual issues they raise are examined, including the important but somewhat problematic interface with counselling. Challenges for guidance in the new millennium are discussed, in relation both to policy and practice and to theory and research.     

Counselling in the United Kingdom: past, present and future

We chart the development of counselling in Britain since the Second World War through to the present and speculate about possible directions counselling may take in the future. Our major, but not exclusive, focus is on counselling as a developing profession and the particular role that the British Association for Counselling has played in this development. To this end, we consider some of the professional issues that have preoccupied practitioners in the field and those that may do so in the future. Thus, amongst others, we consider the relationship between counselling and psychotherapy, the costs and benefits of counselling's increasing visibility in British society, the role that supervision has come to play in the maintenance of professional standards, the debate that has surrounded the issue of counsellor accreditation/registration, the development of standards and ethics and the tension that exists between the relational and technical aspects of counselling. Counselling does not exist in a vacuum, and this is seen most strikingly in the speculations that we make about future developments of counselling. Thus, for example, we argue that counselling will have to grapple with the increasing emphasis that society places on the accountability of human services and with the inexorable progress occurring in the area of technological development. We note that counselling's response to these significant trends will have to be made against the backdrop of the continuing dissolution of barriers between previously distinct areas of human knowledge .     

Commentary: The past and present of the future

Recent research on children's thinking about the future has taken multiple directions, many of which are illustrated in the contributions to this special issue. In this commentary the topic is discussed in the context of research on children's understanding of time, and some of the adaptive challenges of thinking about the future are considered. The studies in this issue show the emergence of some components of thinking about the future in early childhood. More research will be needed to illuminate abilities acquired at later ages and the representations and processes underlying humans’ thinking about the future.