Brief Therapy: Focused Solution Development

This article describes the form of brief therapy developed at the Brief Family Therapy Center. We have chosen a title similar to Weakland, Fisch, Watzlawick, and Bodin's classic paper, "Brief Therapy: Focused Problem Resolution" (20) to emphasize our view that there is a conceptual relationship and a developmental connection between the points of view expressed in the two papers.     

The Death of Resistance

For any conceptual distinction to be useful ( 5 ) within the field of family therapy, it needs to lead to some clear answers to the question: What does this distinction mean for clinical practice? The distinction between (a) the family-as-a-system, and (b) family-therapy-as-a-system leads to a clinical perspective, or stance, that includes a focus on changing. Once this focus is clear, the therapist can help to create the expectation of changing and consequently promote changing. That is, techniques can be developed using positive feedback loops. ¹ 1 It is important to remember throughout this essay that “positive” and “negative feedback loops,”“deviation-amplifying,”“deviation-counteracting processes,” etc., are just heuristic devices or metaphors. Human systems do not have such things. Human systems are described by an observer “as if.”
Moreover, this distinction leads to a therapeutic stance in which not changing is a surprise.     

Early development of letter specialization in left fusiform is associated with better word reading and smaller fusiform face area

A functional region of left fusiform gyrus termed “the visual word form area” (VWFA) develops during reading acquisition to respond more strongly to printed words than to other visual stimuli. Here, we examined responses to letters among 5‐ and 6‐year‐old early kindergarten children (N = 48) with little or no school‐based reading instruction who varied in their reading ability. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure responses to individual letters, false fonts, and faces in left and right fusiform gyri. We then evaluated whether signal change and size (spatial extent) of letter‐sensitive cortex (greater activation for letters versus faces) and letter‐specific cortex (greater activation for letters versus false fonts) in these regions related to (a) standardized measures of word‐reading ability and (b) signal change and size of face‐sensitive cortex (fusiform face area or FFA; greater activation for faces versus letters). Greater letter specificity, but not letter sensitivity, in left fusiform gyrus correlated positively with word reading scores. Across children, in the left fusiform gyrus, greater size of letter‐sensitive cortex correlated with lesser size of FFA. These findings are the first to suggest that in beginning readers, development of letter responsivity in left fusiform cortex is associated with both better reading ability and also a reduction of the size of left FFA that may result in right‐hemisphere dominance for face perception.     

PROGRAMMING FOR SURVIVAL: A MEETING SYSTEM THAT SURVIVES 8 YEARS LATER

Effective and useful interventions often deteriorate when researchers withdraw their direct supervision. We tested the survival of an intervention designed to produce effective weekly meetings in a student housing cooperative without direct researcher supervision. Chairperson performance, proposals completed per hour, and ratings of chairperson performance all increased when resident staff used a training manual, prompting checklist, and performance reviews. Eight years of follow-up revealed continuing high levels of meeting effectiveness. This study demonstrates a methodology for the direct observation and experimental analysis of intervention survival.     

INDUSTRIAL PSYCHOLOGY IN FRANCE

The current status of French industrial psychology is evaluated. Within the social and economic context of contemporary France, varying ideologies and scarce resources have created a gap between applied and academic industrial psychology. Personnel practices and systems and organizational research are noted.