Psychometric properties of the "Spanish Burnout Inventory" in Chilean professionals working to physical disabled people

While the most commonly employed burnout measure has been the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), researchers have been troubled by some of the psychometric limitations of this instrument. The aim of this study was to analyze the psychometric properties of the "Spanish Burnout Inventory" (SBI). The psychometric properties were analysed with data from a sample of 277 Chilean professionals working to physical disabled people. The psychometric properties of the SBI were examined through the following analyses: confirmatory factor analysis, reliability Cronbach's alpha, and concurrent validity with the MBI. The hypothesized four factor model obtained an adequate data fit for the sample (chi2(164) = 285.32, p < .001, GFI = .96, RMSEA = .052, NNFI .93, CFI = .94). Results confirmed the hypothesis formulated. The Cronbach's alpha coefficient was higher than .70 for the four scales of the instruments. Results supported the concurrent validity with the MBI. As a whole, the results of these study provided evidence on the adequate psychometric properties of the SBI for the study of burnout in the Chilean cultural context.     

Towards a social model approach to counselling disabled clients

The social model of disability has emerged over the past 30 years in Britain to challenge the dominant individual, particularly medical and tragedy, models. This social model is borne from the experiences of disabled people and essentially defines disability as the discrimination faced by people with impairments. This paper explores the possible conflicts between some counselling approaches that can individualise and personalise problems and disability as a political issue. Drawing on research with counsellors and disabled clients, we illustrate the social construction of disability as an individualised problem within the counselling process. Considering the implications for counselling practice, we argue for an approach to counselling which recognises the social model of disability as the basis for social change.     

How to count people

How should we count people who have two cerebral hemispheres that cooperate to support one mental life at the level required for personhood even though each hemisphere can be disconnected from the other and support its “own” divergent mental life at that level? On the standard method of counting people, there is only one person sitting in your chair and thinking your thoughts even if you have two cerebral hemispheres of this kind. Is this method accurate? In this paper, I argue that it is not, and I advocate an alternative I call the Multiple Person View.     

Persuading people to stop smoking

Forty smokers attending a chest clinic were given a questionnaire designed to measure motivation to stop smoking. The effects of three variables on their smoking level were investigated: (1) advice from the chest physician to stop smoking; (2) subjection to a further ‘motivating’ interview by a psychologist: (3) the wearing of a white coat by the psychologist during his interview. The questionnaire proved a useful predictor of smoking reduction over a 3-month follow-up period. Advice from the chest physician had a significant effect in getting people to reduce smoking over 3 months but the extra ‘motivating’ interview was ineffective. Patients responded to the white coat by reducing their smoking level significantly, irrespective of whether the psychologist wearing the white coat was advising them to reduce smoking or not. These results suggest that the advice-giving role of the doctor could be used more effectively than it currently is in preventive medicine, and that the psychologist has an important role to play in measuring the successful parameters of such advice and hence improving its quality.     

Re-empowering a disabled family network

In this paper, we will present a case history of a disabled network which includes a multiproblem family and the social service agencies serving it. We will describe a five-step model for effective intervention into the entire system. Social service agents frequently become overwhelmed and therefore impotent in their attempts to help multiproblem families. In such cases, agents reflect the family's dysfunction by becoming dysfunctional themselves and their actions serve to increase the family's alienation from its community by reinforcing its stigmatized self-image. Our model focuses on building boundaries and creating hierarchies which encourage individuation within the family and empowers the network to effectively meet family needs.     

Reading deficits in learning disabled children

The purpose of this study was to determine whether LD children exhibited problems in the processes of attention, memory, or syntactical awareness when decoding written prose. Eighteen LD children and 18 normal controls were matched for initial word recognition skills. Subjects were then trained to read a list of individual words to criterion. Subsequently, they were tested on their ability to decode the same words in paragraph form, presented both immediately after training, and then again one week later. Half the children read paragraphs following standard English syntax, while the other half read a syntactically scrambled version of the same paragraph. The results indicated that a major contributing factor in the reading (decoding) difficulties demonstrated by the LD children derived from problems of acquisition and retrieval from long-term memory storage. The results were discussed in terms of their implications for the developmental lag theory of learning disabilities.     

Language skills in developmentally disabled children

Language measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary, story telling, and immediate verbal memory, as well as two perceptual tests, were administered to a group of developmentally disabled children, and three groups of normal children, one matched for chronological age, one for mean length of utterance, and one for performance on one of the perceptual tests. When diagnostic subgroups of “autism,” “childhood schizophrenia,” and “other severe disturbance” were formed using standard diagnostic tools, no language differences were found between diagnostic subgroups. When compared with the normal control groups, many of the language skills of the entire group of disabled children, and of the autistic children alone, were rather evenly delayed, showing only a relative sparing of the naming function, and a relative deficit on immediate verbal memory. Furthermore, a high correlation was found in a small subsample between the difficulty levels of morphemes in the disabled children and those reported for young normal children. Experienced special-education and early-childhood teachers could not discriminate the stories of the disabled children from those of young normal children. Analysis of the disabled children's error strategies, however, revealed features of their language not found in normal children's language: (1) extreme perseveration in test answers and stories, (2) attention to minor features of test stimuli, and (3) failure to adopt alternate, flexible communicative strategies. We conclude that the language acquisition of the developmentally disabled children is delayed but not deviant in its semantic and syntactic competence, and that current diagnostic practice does not differentiate linguistically distinct subgroups. We further argue that where developmentally disabled children do exhibit aberrant features of language, such deviance parallels similar features in other cognitive skills, and is not unique to language.     

Event-related EEG oscillations to semantically unrelated words in normal and learning disabled children

Learning disabilities (LD) are one of the most frequent problems for elementary school-aged children. In this paper, event-related EEG oscillations to semantically related and unrelated pairs of words were studied in a group of 18 children with LD not otherwise specified (LD-NOS) and in 16 children with normal academic achievement. We propose that EEG oscillations may be different in LD NOS children versus normal control children that may explain some of the deficits observed in the LD-NOS group. The EEGs were recorded using the 10/20 system. EEG segments were edited by visual inspection 1000ms before and after the stimulus, and only correct responses were considered in the analysis. Time-frequency (1-50Hz) topographic maps were obtained for the increases and decreases of power after the event with respect to the pre-stimulus average values. Significant differences between groups were observed in the behavioral responses. LD-NOS children show less number of correct responses and more omissions and false alarms than the control group. The event-induced EEG responses showed significant differences between groups. The control group showed greater power increases in the frequencies 1-6Hz than the LD-NOS group from 300 to 700ms. These differences were mainly observed in frontal regions, both to related and non-related words. This was interpreted as a deficit in attention, both to internal and external events, deficits in activation of working memory and deficits in encoding and memory retrieval in the LD-NOS children. Differences between groups were also observed in the suppression of alpha and beta rhythms in the occipital regions to related words in frequencies between 8 and 17Hz from 450 to 750ms. LD-NOS children showed shorter durations of the decreases in power than the control group. These results suggest also deficits in attention and memory retrieval. It may be concluded that LD-NOS children showed physiological differences from normal children that may explain their cognitive deficiencies.     

Ambulatory characteristics of the visually disabled

Ground-reaction force patterns were examined in three groups: sighted, blindfolded, and blind. Fifteen subjects, aged 19 to 41, participated in the study. Ten walking trials were collected over a 5-meter distance. The data were analyzed by normalization for body weight, extraction of specific ground-reaction force parameters through force-time curve analysis routines, and averaging across the ten trials for each subject. Results of a one-way analysis of variance indicated that there were no significant differences when force patterns were analyzed in terms of mediolateral and vertical ground-reaction force components. Blind subjects were shown to have significantly greater (p < 0.05) maximum braking and propelling forces.     

We talk to people,not contexts

Philosophical Studies - According to a popular family of theories, assertions and other communicative acts should be understood as attempts to change the context of a conversation. Contexts, on...