Systemic crisis intervention as a response to adolescent crises: an outcome study

The present study demonstrates the safety and effectiveness of an outpatient program designed to respond to adolescent-precipitated crises by mobilizing and restructuring the family's kinship system. Families of 75 adolescents at risk for hospitalization were followed up to 24 months after treatment with Systemic Crisis Intervention. Measures of offspring and family functioning, suicidal behavior, institutional use, and treatment costs are presented. Results clearly demonstrate the safety, effectiveness, and economic viability of Systemic Crisis Intervention.     

Family system functioning: behavior in the laboratory and the family treatment setting

The Family System Functioning (FSF) scale is a new instrument for measuring dimensions of the intrafamilial environment thought to be important in recovery from major psychiatric illness. Modest statistical correlations were obtained when FSF ratings of laboratory-based family interactions were compared with researcher-guided therapist ratings of FSF based upon the family's behavior in family therapy sessions during the subsequent month. The data from these two settings provide support for the validity of some of the scales. Because of the modest size of the correlations, however, behavior in the laboratory setting may not always be an accurate indicator of how the family will behave in the early weeks of family therapy.     

Processing resources and age differences in working memory

This study investigated the performance of young and old subjects on a modified version of the working memory task developed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974). Subjects were required to verify a set of sentences of varying complexity while they repeated aloud zero, two, or four words. The older subjects took longer to verify the sentences, especially when the sentences were grammatically complex, but the effect of concurrent memory load on verification latency was the same in both groups. These results cast doubt on the notion that there is an age-related decline in one general pool of processing resources. They also suggest that older people have greater difficulty with the active processing aspects, rather than with the passive holding aspects, of working memory tasks.     

Similar as well as dissimilar contextual stimuli increase rated similarity

Contextual stimuli from one category increase the rated similarity of stimuli from a second category. In Experiment 1, associates of one of the members of pairs of target words increased the rated similarity of the members slightly more than did much less similar contextual stimuli. In Experiment 2, contextual category names and good exemplars increased the rated similarity of pairs of poor to medium target exemplars and were also rated as more similar to these targets than the targets were to each other. In both cases, the category names resulted in the stronger effect. This ability of contextually similar stimuli to increase rated similarity opposes the distance-density and averaging-judgmental theories of the effect of context on similarity. However, the theory that a positive association exists between the perceived similarity of stimuli and the strength of the category to which they belong explains how both contextually dissimilar and contextually similar stimuli can increase rated similarity.