The construction of counselling psychology in Britain: A discourse analysis of counselling psychology texts

Counselling psychology is a relatively recent arrival on the professional psychological scene in Britain. This paper examines the ways in which this new branch of professional psychology has been constructed by the counselling psychology community. Articles which embodied this construction process from the 1990 and 1996 volumes of the journal Counselling Psychology Review were subjected to discourse analysis. The main themes of the 1990 articles concerned the construction of identity and legitimation, achieved largely through representations of similarity with and difference from related professions at a general level, whereas in the 1996 articles, the emphasis was on more fine-grained constructions of similarity and difference. Implications for the future construction of counselling psychology are considered.     

The pi mechanisms of W S Stiles: an historical review

The origins, development, and status of the pi mechanism theory are reviewed. The paper is divided into four sections. In the first section Stiles's general ideas about 'color mechanisms' are examined, and it is concluded that foremost amongst these is a mathematical theory that specifies certain formal rules or laws that should govern a certain class of observations. In the case of pi mechanisms, the class of observations is that of two-color thresholds, and the defining laws are the two well-known displacement laws. Five other laws that two-color increment-threshold observations should obey, if the latter are governed by ideal pi mechanisms, are abstracted from Stiles's writings. In the second section literature pertinent to the testing of the seven Stilesian laws is reviewed, and it is asked whether or not the seven pi mechanisms of Stiles do in fact obey the laws. In the third section the relation of the pi mechanism concept to physiological concepts is examined, and its relation to the 'cone fundamental' is discussed; the evidence pertinent to the question: "Are any of the pi mechanisms of the single-fundamental type?" is then reviewed. The last section is devoted to the evolution of Stiles's ideas in the period after 1959 when Stiles's own investigations and those of others propelled him to reject the initial (1953) pi mechanism theory as an adequate characterization of the data of the two-color threshold.     

Attitudes of adolescents toward adolescent psychiatric treatment

Perceptions held by adolescents about the value and social stigma of both psychiatric hospitalization and outpatient therapy for adolescents are examined. Perceptions about preferred forms of treatment for specific adolescent problems are also analyzed. The results indicate that attitudes are significantly influenced by proximity to treatment setting, i.e., adolescents currently being treated are more positive than adolescents who have been previously or never treated. Contextual and attributional explanations are considered.     

Neural correlates of temporal-order judgments versus those of spatial-location: deactivation of hippocampus may facilitate spatial performance

The retrieval of temporal-order versus spatial-location information was investigated using fMRI. The primary finding in the hippocampus proper, seen in region of interest analyses, was an increase in BOLD signal intensity for temporal retrieval, and a decrease in signal intensity for spatial retrieval, relative to baseline. The negative BOLD signal change with spatial memory processing, while unexpected, is consistent with the recent fMRI literature indicating decreased BOLD can be associated with neuronal activation, and it is argued that the deactivation observed here may facilitate spatial performance. Spatial-location judgments also yielded a stronger (positive) response in the right midfrontal gyrus, while temporal-order judgments (autobiographic condition only) showed greater activity in the left superior temporal gyrus, suggesting greater working memory demands and greater semantization for each judgment type, respectively. Finally, all conditions activated the left midfrontal gyrus, although autobiographic memories showed additional activity in the medial frontal gyrus.     

Functional neuroimaging studies of reading and reading disability (developmental dyslexia)

Converging evidence from a number of neuroimaging studies, including our own, suggest that fluent word identification in reading is related to the functional integrity of two consolidated left hemisphere (LH) posterior systems: a dorsal (temporo-parietal) circuit and a ventral (occipito-temporal) circuit. This posterior system is functionally disrupted in developmental dyslexia. Reading disabled readers, relative to nonimpaired readers, demonstrate heightened reliance on both inferior frontal and right hemisphere posterior regions, presumably in compensation for the LH posterior difficulties. We propose a neurobiological account suggesting that for normally developing readers the dorsal circuit predominates at first, and is associated with analytic processing necessary for learning to integrate orthographic features with phonological and lexical-semantic features of printed words. The ventral circuit constitutes a fast, late-developing, word identification system which underlies fluent word recognition in skilled readers.