Notes for a cultural history of family therapy

The official history of family therapy describes its beginnings as a daring technical and philosophical departure from traditional individual treatment in the 1960s, inspired especially by the "system thinking" of Gregory Bateson. This celebrated origin story needs to be supplemented with a longer and larger history of both practice and thought about the family, and that is the subject of this article. The longer history goes back to the founding of social work by Mary Richmond, of pragmatism by William James, and of the organic view of social systems intervention by John Dewey. Seen against this background, family therapy is, among other things, a consequence of the development of persistent elements of American professional culture, experience, and philosophy. The taking of this historical-anthropological view discloses also the origins of two other histories that have made their contribution to the development of family therapy: a science of observing communication processes that starts with Edward Sapir and leads to contemporary conversation analysis, and a history of mesmerism in the United States that culminates in Milton Erickson and his followers.     

Personality pathology among individuals with a lifetime history of anorexia nervosa

Anorexia nervosa (AN) appears to be associated with certain personality features. The degree to which personality pathology persists after the acute phase of illness is unclear. This study aimed to investigate personality pathology in a large sample (n = 153) of women with histories of AN using the Dimensional Assessment of Personality Pathology (DAPP) and to evaluate the persistence of pathological personality features by comparing women with acute (n = 83) and remitted AN (n = 55). Women with AN demonstrated high levels of emotional dysregulation, social inhibition and compulsivity relative to age-matched healthy women (n = 124). Identity problems, intimacy problems and schizotypal features were highlighted as important. The same 14 pathological personality dimensions were significantly elevated in both ill and remitted participants, though remitted individuals' scores were reduced on 4 of the subscales. These results indicate that pathological personality features in AN are persistent traits, although some features may become exaggerated in the acute phase.     

Velar movements during speech in a patient with apraxia of speech.

A fiberscopic observation of velar movements during speech was made of a patient diagnosed as having apraxia of speech. Repeated utterances of the same word showed a marked variability in terms of the pattern of velar movements accompanied at times by a phonetic change. In spite of such a variability, the general successional pattern of velar gestures for a given phonetic context approximated the normal pattern. During the production of nasal and nonnasal consonants the velum tended to take “neutral” positions. Anticipatory coarticulation was present, but some deviation from normal patterns was occasionally observed. Based on these observations, possible mechanisms responsible for the syndrome called apraxia of speech were discussed.     

Systematic slowed speech: a new treatment for stuttering.

The purpose of the present study was to determine the effectiveness of a treatment for stuttering based on systematic slowing of speech and anxiety management. Subjects were six stutterers between the ages of 21 and 36. Assessment tasks consisted of recorded conversations with strangers, reading and telephone conversations with strangers, conducted pre- and post-treatment and once a month following treatment for six months. Participants were taught to read and speak progressively at 50, 70 and 90 words a minute over a two week period and received anxiety management training to facilitate maintenance of slowed speech outside of treatment sessions. The results indicated a significant treatment effect for both reading and conversation that was maintained for six months. The telephone task, which was used as a measure of generalization, improved significantly but did not maintain over time.     

Notes on the history of adolescent inpatient and residential treatment

This study surveys some of the major theoretical contributions to the evolvement of concepts about adolescence. Historical perspectives regarding the development of inpatient and residential institutions are outlined, followed by brief discussions of follow-up studies evaluating both forms of treatment. Finally, a general overview of outcome research is provided, focusing on the underlying, changing attitudes toward the adolescent phase of development.     

Auditory lateralization for speech in language-impaired children.

The ability of five language-impaired (LI) children and five matched controls, aged 7-10 years, to discriminate natural pairs of consonant-vowel syllables contrasted on place of articulation and voicing, presented to the right or left ear with white noise in the contralateral ear, was investigated. The general pattern of errors indicated that LI children had more difficulty than controls in discriminating place of articulation contrasts only when they were presented to the left ear, as well as a difficulty in discriminating voice contrasts selective to the right ear. The results are discussed in terms of acoustic integration and suggest that bihemispheric dysfunction is a basis for specific language impairment.     

Primary grade children's memory for parts of speech.

Developmental differences in elementary school (kindergarten, first and second grade) children's free recall for parts of speech were investigated using sentences with normal and scrambled word order. The children were presented four sentences with normal syntax and four sentences with scrambled word order. There were significant effects of age, syntax, and rate of presentation; these replicated previous research. The unusual finding was that the kindergarten children, when presented with scrambled word strings, recalled more verbs than either the first or second grade children. It was hypothesized that this occurred because either the kindergarten children failed to detect the scrambled nature of syntaxless strings, or there is a change in the comprehension strategies which de-emphasizes the role of the verb.     

Effect of subvocalization on memory for speech sounds.

Subjects in two groups were presented with sequences of 6 consonant-vowel syllables for ordered recall. Subjects in both groups were trained to suppress subvocalization. Only subjects in the feedback group were asked to suppress subvocalization during the experiment, while subjects in the no-feedback group were allowed to subvocalize during the memory task. Analysis of the electromyographic records showed a large decrease in subvocalization in the feedback condition, and results of the memory task revealed an increase in errors for this group. However, a comparison of errors within each group revealed an identical pattern of overall errors and intrusion errors on subvocalization and nonsubvocalization trials, and these results were identical in both groups. The results suggest that requiring subjects to simultaneously suppress subvocalization and remember syllables depresses performance slightly, but encoding of speech sounds in short-term memory occurs independently of subvocal activity during the memory task.     

Magnitude estimation scaling judgments of speech intelligibility and speech acceptability.

20 female students in speech-language pathology provided magnitude estimation scaling responses for the speech intelligibility and acceptability of audio-taped speech samples varying systematically the number of consonant sounds produced correctly. Analysis indicated no significant over-all differences between listeners' judgments of intelligibility and acceptability; however, listeners tended to judge samples with fewer than 50% of the consonants correct as more acceptable than intelligible, and they judged samples with more than 50% consonants correct as less acceptable than intelligible.     

Connectionist modeling of speech perception.

Connectionist models of perception and cognition, including the process of deducing meaningful messages from patterns of acoustic waves emitted by vocal tracts, are developed and refined as human understanding of brain function, psychological processes, and the properties of massively parallel architectures advances. The present article presents several important contributions from diverse points of view in the area of connectionist modeling of speech perception and discusses their relative merits with respect to specific theoretical issues and empirical findings. TRACE, the Elman/Norris net, and Adaptive Resonance Theory constitute pivotal points exemplifying overall modeling success, progress in temporal representation, and plausible modeling of learning, respectively. Other modeling efforts are presented for the specific insights they offer, and the article concludes with a discussion of computational versus dynamic modeling of phonological processes.     

Anxiety and ritualized speech.

The experiment examines the effects on a number of words that seem irrevelant to semantic communication. The Units of Ritualized Speech (URSs) considered are: 'I mean', 'in fact', 'really', 'sort of', 'well', and 'you know'. Two hypotheses are tested: (i) that URS rate will increase with anxiety; and (ii) that the speaker's preferred URS will increase with anxiety. Subjects were interviewed on topics they had previously rated as anxiety-provoking and non-anxiety-provoking. Hypothesis (i) was supported, but hypothesis (ii) was not. More specifically, the use of 'I mean' and 'well' increases when the speaker is anxious. Explanation for this is sought in the grammatical location of these two units. Sex differences in the use of URSs, correlations between URSs and their relationship to other forms of disfluency are also considered.