Psychotherapeuten und Internet

Background

Communication is part and parcel of every interaction. This raises the question of the role of modern media in mental health care. The aim of this explorative study was to investigate the use of modern media in the clinical practice.

Material and methodology

In an Internet survey 234 psychotherapists from Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW) were surveyed about the extent to which they integrate new media in the practice and their opinion about this integration. For this purpose a questionnaire was developed based on the questionnaire of Wangberg et al. (2007).

Results

Most of the psychotherapists already use e-mails as well as mobile communication to contact their patients. The main reason for choosing this modern way of communication is the possibility to simplify the management of formal issues. Psychotherapists were indifferent about the idea of web-based counseling.

Conclusion

Forms of digital media are used as an addition to conventional ways of therapeutic communication but face-to-face interaction cannot be replaced completely which is also indicated by the fact that professionals still highly value personal contact.     

Are faces perceived as configurations more by adults than by children?

Abstract

Adult face recognition is severely hampered by stimulus inversion. Several investigators have attributed this vulnerability to the effect of orientation on encoding relational aspects of faces. Previous work has also demonstrated that children are less sensitive to orientation of faces than are adults. This has been interpreted as reflecting an increasing reliance on configural aspects of faces with increasing age and expertise.

Young, Hellawell, and Hay (1987) demonstrated that for adults the encoding of relations among facial parts is, indeed, sensitive to orientation. When chimeric faces are upright, the top half of one face fuses with the bottom half of the other, making the person depicted in the top half difficult to recognize. This effect (the composite effect) is not seen when the faces are inverted. The present study obtained the composite effect for 6-year-old and 10-year-old children, just as for adults. The composite effect was found to an equal degree at all ages tested and was seen both in tasks involving highly familiar faces and in those involving newly learned, previously unfamiliar faces. Thus, these data provided no support for the hypothesis of increasing reliance on configural aspects of faces with increasing age, at least in the sense tapped by this procedure.

However, the data did confirm an Age X Orientation interaction. In recognizing both familiar and previously unfamiliar faces, 6-year-olds were less affected by inversion than were 10-year-olds, who, in turn, were less affected than were adults. Increasing vulnerability to inversion of faces with age was independent of the composite effect. Apparently, there are two distinct sources to the large effect of inversion that characterizes adult face encoding: one seen throughout development and one acquired only with expertise.     

Two‐year‐old children interpret abstract,purely geometric maps

In two experiments, 2.5‐year‐old children spontaneously used geometric information from 2D maps to locate objects in a 3D surface layout, without instruction or feedback. Children related maps to their corresponding layouts even though the maps differed from the layouts in size, mobility, orientation, dimensionality, and perspective, and even when they did not depict the target objects directly. Early in development, therefore, children are capable of noting the referential function of strikingly abstract visual representations.     

Eine Schlafstörung kommt selten allein

In the clinical routine insomnia disorders are often merely seen as symptoms of the underlying disease and are therefore not considered relevant enough for diagnostic clarification and initiation of specific treatment. The following article intends to give an overview of the differential diagnosis of nonorganic insomnia and underlines the importance of cognitive behavioral therapy in this context, which is substantiated by two case studies.     

Learned Resourcefulness,Drinking, and Smoking in Young Adults

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between learned resourcefulness and two common addictive behaviors, namely, drinking and smoking. Male and female college students (N = 175) completed the Self-Control Schedule (SCS), the Quantity-Frequency-Variability questionnaire, and a smoking history form. Learned resourcefulness was related to self-reported patterns of alcohol consumption; specifically, heavy drinking subjects were lower in learned resourcefulness than were light and moderate drinkers who, in turn, were lower in learned resourcefulness than were infrequent drinkers and abstainers. Learned resourcefulness was only modestly related to smoking, with students who had never smoked evidencing somewhat higher learned resourcefulness than ex-smokers and current smokers. Overall, these data provide correlational support for the notion that learned resourcefulness may protect young adults against substance abuse.     

The emergence of kind-based object individuation in infancy

Four experiments investigated whether 12-month-old infants use perceptual property information in a complex object individuation task, using the violation-of-expectancy looking time method (Xu, 2002; Xu & Carey, 1996). Infants were shown two objects with different properties emerge and return behind an occluder, one at a time. The occluder was then removed, revealing either two objects (expected outcome, if property differences support individuation) or one object (unexpected outcome). In Experiments 1-3, infants failed to use color, size, or a combination of color, size, and pattern differences to establish a representation of two distinct objects behind an occluder. In Experiment 4, infants succeeded in using cross-basic-level-kind shape differences to establish a representation of two objects but failed to do so using within-basic-level-kind shape differences. Control conditions found that the methods were sensitive. Infants succeeded when provided unambiguous spatiotemporal information for two objects, and they encoded the property differences during these experiments. These findings suggest that by 12 months, different properties play different roles in a complex object individuation task. Certain salient shape differences enter into the computation of numerical distinctness of objects before other property differences such as color or size. Since shape differences are often correlated with object kind differences, these results converge with others in the literature that suggest that by the end of the first year of life, infants' representational systems begin to distinguish kinds and properties.     

Assessing and predicting supervisors' evaluations of psychotherapists – an empirical study

Objective: The aim of this study was to analyze the dimensions used by supervisors to evaluate trainee therapists and to detect how supervisors' assessments are influenced by features of the case and of the therapist.

Method: Data from 226 patients with diverse mental and social disorders who had been treated by 22 trainee therapists under the supervision of 12 supervisors were analyzed by factor- and regression analyses. Supervision was implemented as part of a psychotherapy training program. After treatment, each supervisor was asked to evaluate the trainee by using a list of 38 items proposed by Kanfer, Reinecker and Schmelzer (1996 Kanfer, FH, Reinecker, H and Schmelzer, D. 1996. Selbstmanagement-Therapie, Berlin: Springer.  [Google Scholar]). Case characteristics and therapists' features were assessed by questionnaires and checklists and related to the supervisors' evaluations.

Results: The statistical analyses indicated that supervisors could not easily integrate the multitude of relevant aspects into a differentiated schema of evaluation. A two-factor model best fitted the data. The two factors focus on specific aspects of therapeutic behavior. The evaluations were mainly related to the experience of the trainee therapist and to therapy outcome. For trainee therapists with more experience, the standards of comparison were set higher resulting in less positive evaluations.

Discussion: The results are discussed with reference to a process-oriented view of supervision and therapist evaluation. It was concluded that supervisors of behavior therapy seem to weight therapist-related and case-related information differently. However, the way supervisors integrate these types of information into evaluations of trainee therapists still remains rather vague.     

Infants' discrimination of number vs. continuous extent

Seven studies explored the empirical basis for claims that infants represent cardinal values of small sets of objects. Many studies investigating numerical ability did not properly control for continuous stimulus properties such as surface area, volume, contour length, or dimensions that correlate with these properties. Experiment 1 extended the standard habituation/dishabituation paradigm to a 1 vs 2 comparison with three-dimensional objects and confirmed that when number and total front surface area are confounded, infants discriminate the arrays. Experiment 2 revealed that infants dishabituated to a change in front surface area but not to a change in number when the two variables were pitted against each other. Experiments 3 through 5 revealed no sensitivity to number when front surface area was controlled, and Experiments 6 and 7 extended this pattern of findings to the Wynn (1992) transformation task. Infants' lack of a response to number, combined with their demonstrated sensitivity to one or more dimensions of continuous extent, supports the hypothesis that the representations subserving object-based attention, rather than those subserving enumeration, underlie performance in the above tasks.     

The representations underlying infants' choice of more: object files versus analog magnitudes

A new choice task was used to explore infants' spontaneous representations of more and less. Ten- and 12-month-old infants saw crackers placed sequentially into two containers, then were allowed to crawl and obtain the crackers from the container they chose. Infants chose the larger quantity with comparisons of 1 versus 2 and 2 versus 3, but failed with comparisons of 3 versus 4, 2 versus 4, and 3 versus 6. Success with visible arrays ruled out a motivational explanation for failure in the occluded 3-versus-6 condition. Control tasks ruled out the possibility that presentation duration guided choice, and showed that presentation complexity was not responsible for the failure with larger numbers. When crackers were different sizes, total surface area or volume determined choice. The infants' pattern of success and failure supports the hypothesis that they relied on object-file representations, comparing mental models via total volume or surface area rather than via one-to-one correspondence between object files.