Follow-up of a full-scale network assembly

The authors conducted two full-scale network assemblies for the family network of a suicidal adolescent. Findings from the clinical follow-up and telephone interviews with 21 of 65 participants revealed benefits for the index family and the network members who participated in the meetings. A ripple effect in which the participants' own personal networks improved was also demonstrated. Benefits included resolution of a suicidal crisis, better understanding of depression and family stress, more adaptive responses to depression and suicidal risk, and improved personal relationships. No casualties from this intervention were discovered. This report is intended to stimulate future, more systematic outcome studies.     

Rational-emotive therapy applied to relationship therapy

RET is a comprehensive mode of relationship therapy that takes a double-barreled psychotherapeutic approach of helping all the partners in a relationship to accept responsibility for their own disturbances and failings and to work at correcting these-while, at the same time, helping them to understand and work actively at changing the marital or family system in which they are relating and the conditions in this system that are contributing to their practical and emotional problems. Rational-emotive relationship therapy is a form of cognitive behavior therapy that includes the following features: (1) It importantly stresses the cognitive or philosophic causes of emotional disturbance and of family disruption. (2) It teaches partners that they largely disturb themselves and that they can effectively refuse to continue to do so. (3) It almost always employs a number of cognitive, emotive, and behavioral techniques but employs them not merely to achieve symptomatic change but to help couples achieve a profound philosophic reconstruction that will, hopefully, lead to elegant and permanent change. It clearly acknowledges the biological as well as the sociological bases of disturbance, and therefore stresses vigorous and forceful, active-directive methods that will impinge upon and help alter the strongly held disturbances that partners frequently experience. (5) It holds to a rigorously scientific and yet highly humanistic outlook in both its theory and its practice. (6) It stresses a phenomenological, intraindividual, and depth-centered approach to understanding and tackling human disturbance, but at the same time uses practical problem-solving and skill-straining methods of changing family situations and interactions.     

Gender-role orientations in older child-free and expectant couples

Psychosocial aspects of variant fertility decisions were investigated to determine factors that differentiate individuals who chose to become parents for the first time after age 30 and their peers who chose to remain child free. Forty women, aged 30 to 38, half of whom were child free and half expecting their first child, and 34 of their husbands were interviewed and completed the Role Questionnaire. The pattern of data suggests that the relatively traditional gender-role orientations of the expectant individuals may be an important factor that discriminates the two groups. The Rapoports' concept of “identity tension line” is used to integrate the results of the study and to explore findings that indicate different degrees of traditionalism in regard to work and family roles.     

Speech monitoring skills in Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and normal aging.

We examined the abilities of 15 patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT), 22 patients with Parkinson's Disease (PD), and 141 healthy subjects (ranging in age from 30 to 79 years) to detect and correct their own speech errors. Each subject was shown the Cookie Theft picture of the BDAE (Goodglass & Kaplan, 1972. The assessment of aphasia and related disorders. Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger.) and instructed to tell the examiner the "...story of what's happening in the picture." Self-monitoring performance was assessed by tabulating the number of uncorrected errors as well as repaired errors. We divided repairs into two types based on the psycholinguistics literature (van Wijk & Kempen, 1987. Cognitive Psychology, 19, 403-440). Speech corrections were judged to be lemma repairs when the reparandum was a single word, and reformulation repairs when a new syntactic constituent was added to the reparandum. Patients with DAT corrected only 24% of their total errors and patients with PD only 25%. Healthy subjects, by contrast, corrected from 72 to 92% of their total errors. Patients with DAT tended to rely on reformulation repairs while patients with PD used both repair types about equally often. While healthy elderly Ss (in the 70s group) utilized lemma repairs more often than the reformulation strategy, all other healthy Ss used both strategies about equally often. Across all groups naming performance correlated negatively with numbers of undetected errors. Results point to a previously unrecognized communication disorder associated with PD and DAT and manifested by an impairment in the ability to correct output errors. This impairment may be related to attentional and frontal dysfunction in the two patient groups.     

How i manage to be a rational rational emotive behavior therapist

This paper gives three important grandiose demands and absolutistic musts by which therapists and supervisors of therapy commonly disturb themselves and how the author manages to make himself aware of and to surrender these demands both inside and outside of the office.Paper presented at the 103rd Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, August14, 1995 in the Symposium, Leaving It at the Office—Preventing and Ameliorating Distress. Sponsored by Divisions, 17, 29, 30, & 42. New York Hilton Hotel Towers, Second Floor Gramercy Suite A.     

Appraisal of behavioral measurement techniques for assessing dental anxiety and fear in children: A review

The aim of this article is to review and evaluate behavioral and physiological measurement techniques frequently used to assess dental anxiety and fear in children. Attention is given to the data collected, the empirical findings obtained, and the availability of normative data. The main focus, however, is on the reliability and validity. Results show that all questionnaires are open to criticism. Of the behavioral measures, Melamed's Behavior Profile Rating Scale is to be preferred to Frankl's Rating Scale, Venham Rating Scales, and Visual Analogue Scales. The main reasons are that Melamed's BPRS measures the behavior of the child more precisely and that it has superior psychometric properties. Furthermore, because of their practical, conceptual, and psychometric problems, physiological measures at this stage are found to be less appropriate for assessing dental fear in children. It is concluded that a behavioral measure is not always the ideal, but often the only available technique for assessing dental fear in children.     

Application of high-performance computing to the management of social science and demographic data

The costs of conducting censuses and surveys have always been high. Nonetheless, demographic, social, environmental, and health scientists have found it possible to gather quantities of data that far exceed the capabilities of any contemporary computing technology to extract fully the information contained in the data. Recent developments in computing and information science technology offer the promise of supporting innovative approaches to managing and analyzing data that can dramatically increase the ease of access to the information hidden within these data. This presentation describes a highly integrated system of data, metadata, instructional tutorials, hardware, and software designed to minimize the technical barriers to working with large and complex data sets. The objective is to provide easy, low-cost, fast, and meaningful access to these data for a broad spectrum of users.