Counseling for the transition to adulthood as joint, goal-directed action

Transition is important in the career literature as it identifies times at which people are often likely to consult counselors about issues for which they need help. However, the counseling literature has not provided a conceptualization of, or research on, the joint, goal-directed actions and projects of the counselor and the client, which explicitly reflect the goal-directed nature of the transition itself. To address this issue, 12 counseling dyads, representing 37 counseling sessions, were studied. In these dyads, counseling was observed as the joint, goal-directed action between professional counselors and youth who sought assistance with their transition to adulthood. The data were collected using the action-project method. The counseling sessions were video-recorded, then immediately played back for the counselor and client separately to gather their recalled thoughts and feeling during counseling. Detailed qualitative analysis of the data set addressed the research question, “What are the goal-directed projects that counselors and their clients jointly construct, articulate, and enact relevant to the transition to adulthood?” The findings indicated the relationship and identity are intertwined goal-directed projects within counseling as well as outside of it. These projects contributed to the reframing and reorganization of clients' transition projects outside of counseling in occupational, educational, and familial domains. The findings suggest important implications for counseling youth in transition, that is, counselors and clients explicitly address their joint relationship and identity goals in an effort to realize a mutually satisfactory and important transition to adulthood.     

Integration of the pleasant events and activity restriction models: development and validation of a "PEAR" model of negative outcomes in Alzheimer's caregivers

This study examined an activity restriction/pleasurable activities mismatch model for psychosocial and health-related outcomes. A total of 108 spousal caregivers of patients with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) were assessed for their experience of social and recreational activities over the past month as well as their perception of how restricted they were for engaging in social and recreational activities. Participants were divided into three groups based on their reported activities and activity restriction: HPLR = High Pleasant Events + Low Activity Restriction (i.e., reference group; N = 28); HPHR/LPLR = Either High Pleasant Events + High Activity Restriction or Low Pleasant Events + Low Activity Restriction (N = 43); LPHR = Low Pleasant Events + High Activity Restriction (N = 37). We hypothesized that participants reporting low pleasant events combined with high activity restriction (LPHR) would demonstrate greater disturbance relative to other two groups in multiple outcome domains, including: (a) greater mood disturbance, (b) greater use of negative coping factors, (c) reduced use of positive coping strategies, (d) reduced report of psychological resource factors (e.g., personal mastery, self-efficacy), and (e) increased report of subjective health difficulties (e.g., sleep disturbance). Results generally supported our hypotheses, suggesting that assessment of both constructs is important for best predicting quality of well-being in AD caregivers, and potentially for establishing maximal effect in behavior therapy for caregivers.     

Event completion: event based inferences distort memory in a matter of seconds

We present novel evidence that implicit causal inferences distort memory for events only seconds after viewing. Adults watched videos of someone launching (or throwing) an object. However, the videos omitted the moment of contact (or release). Subjects falsely reported seeing the moment of contact when it was implied by subsequent footage but did not do so when the contact was not implied. Causal implications were disrupted either by replacing the resulting flight of the ball with irrelevant video or by scrambling event segments. Subjects in the different causal implication conditions did not differ on false alarms for other moments of the event, nor did they differ in general recognition accuracy. These results suggest that as people perceive events, they generate rapid conceptual interpretations that can have a powerful effect on how events are remembered.     

Is Character Fate,or Is There Hope to Change My Personality Yet?

Different perspectives on personality development propose a range of possible degrees to which traits are free to change, from hardly at all to very much. This essay reviews the empirical evidence on just how consistent and changeable personality traits are across the life course. To gain a thorough perspective on personality trait development, we review developmental studies that focus on three different types of change: rank‐order consistency, mean level change, and individual level change. Starting in late childhood, personality traits exhibit modest levels of rank‐order consistency that increase with age. In addition personality traits show mean level changes, especially in young adulthood, that are consistent with the idea of increasing maturity. Finally, despite these general trends in personality continuity and change, there is evidence that individuals may change in ways that contradict general trends and that these individual differences in change are related to life experiences.     

Reducing emergency medical service use in patients with chronic psychotic disorders: results from the FAST intervention study

Patients with schizophrenia have disproportionately high rates of emergency medical service use, likely contributing to the high cost this illness places on society. The aim of this study was to examine the impact of a theory-based, behavioral intervention on immediate and long-term use of emergency medical services. Older patients with schizophrenia (n=240) were randomized to receive either a behavioral, skills-building intervention known as Functional Adaptation and Skills Training (FAST) or a time-equivalent attention-control condition (AC). Logistic regression analyses indicated that AC participants were nearly twice as likely to use emergency medical services in general (OR=2.54; p=0.02) and emergency psychiatric services in particular (OR=3.69; p=0.05) during the active intervention phase of the study. However, there were no differences between the interventions in terms of emergency service use during the long-term follow-up phase of the study (i.e., 6-18 months post-baseline). The FAST intervention appears efficacious for reducing the short-term risk of using emergency medical services. However, the long-term efficacy of the FAST intervention appears less clear. Future studies may want to provide more powerful maintenance sessions to encourage continued use of skills in patients' real-world settings.     

Traumatized mothers can change their minds about their toddlers: Understanding how a novel use of videofeedback supports positive change of maternal attributions

This study explored the use of a brief experimental intervention that integrates principles of infant-parent psychotherapy, videofeedback, controlled exposure to child distress in the context of parental posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and stimulation of parental reflective functioning (RF). The Clinician Assisted Videofeedback Exposure Session (CAVES) was applied to 32 interpersonal violence-exposed mothers of very young children (8-50 months) with respect to change of maternal perception of her child. While we found no significant reduction over two videotaped assessment visits with a mental health professional, we did find a significant reduction in the degree of negativity of maternal attributions towards her child following the videotaped visit focused on the CAVES (p<.01). Maternal RF, a mother's capacity to think about mental states in herself and her child, accounted for 11% of the variance in reduction of maternal negativity after accounting for baseline levels of negativity. Clinician-assisted videofeedback appears to support emotional self-regulation of mothers with violence-related PTSD. Focusing with a therapist on videofeedback of child separation distress exposes mothers to avoided mental states of helplessness and perceived loss of protection. Negative maternal attributions may mark violent trauma-associated emotion dysregulation and projected self-representations of the maltreated mother.     

Making Sense of Abuse: Case Studies in Sibling Incest

This case study focused on the process of making sense of abuse in two Latino families experiencing sibling incest. Participants included five male children ranging in age from 8 to 15 that were members of two families dealing with the issue of sibling incest. The purpose of this study was to build understanding of how families experience sibling incest and its role in their families. Clinical data from therapy sessions was analyzed to reveal that families made sense of the incest in different ways including abuse as normal and abuse as a mistake. Central concepts that explained how the families responded to the sibling incest included (1) level of family cohesion, (2) role of secrecy, and (3) view of outside systems. The findings suggest that treatment needs to include an in-depth assessment regarding these issues.     

Recognizing National Hockey League greatness with an ignorance-based heuristic.

This study examined whether people adhered to the recognition heuristic (i.e., inferred that a recognized hockey player had more total career points than an unrecognized player) and whether using this heuristic could yield accurate decisions. On paired comparisons, having participants report whether they recognized each player plus any knowledge they had about each player permitted players to be classified as either unrecognized (UR), merely recognized (MR), or recognized with additional knowledge (RK), thus producing six possible trial types. Participants adhered to the recognition heuristic on 95% of MR-UR trials and were accurate on 81% of those trials. They chose the recognized player on 98% of RK-UR trials, yielding 94% accuracy. Women had less knowledge and recognized fewer players than men, yet they were nearly as accurate as men. Future research should examine the conditions under which the recognition heuristic is an adaptive strategy.     

Patients’ Tests and Clinicians’ Emotions: A Clinical Illustration

Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy - Psychotherapists can experience various kinds of emotions in response to their patients’ communications and behaviors over the course of therapy. These...     

Self-efficacy and work-related performance: the integral role of individual differences

The present study estimated the unique contribution of self-efficacy to work-related performance controlling for personality (the Big 5 traits), intelligence or general mental ability, and job or task experience. Results, based on a meta-analysis of the relevant literatures, revealed that overall, across all studies and moderator conditions, the contribution of self-efficacy relative to purportedly more distal variables is relatively small. Within moderator categories, there were several cases in which self-efficacy made unique contributions to work-related performance. For example, self-efficacy predicted performance in jobs or tasks of low complexity but not those of medium or high complexity, and self-efficacy predicted performance for task but not job performance. Overall, results suggest that the predictive validity of self-efficacy is attenuated in the presence of individual differences, though this attenuation does depend on the context.