Family therapy research: Comment on “research as a family therapy intervention technique”

Wright's emphasis on and illustration of the use of family therapy research as a unique intervention technique for therapy is an important contribution to the practice literature. Equally important, however, is the isomorphic shift in focus of the family therapy researcher. Rather than focusing only on process or outcome research, family therapists should become more interested in their clients as research subjects. Though rarely discussed in the family therapy literature, the competencies of family therapists as researchers and the utility of research in a family therapy context is critical to being a well-rounded professional. Examples are provided of how this emphasis is being introduced in a PhD family therapy program.     

Privileged Access by Irrelevant Speech to Short-term Memory: The Role of Changing State

Memory for visually presented items is impaired by speech that is played as an irrelevant background. The paper presents the view that changing state of the auditory material is an important prerequisite for this disruption. Four experiments studied the effects of sounds varying in complexity in an attempt to establish which features of changing state in the auditory signal lead to diminished recall. Simple unvarying or repetitive speech sounds were not sufficient to induce the irrelevant speech effect (Experiment 1): in addition, simple analogues of speech, possessing regular or irregular envelopes and using a range of carriers, failed to imitate the action of speech (Experiment 2). Variability of between-utterance phonology in the irrelevant stream (Experiment 3) emerged as a crucial factor. Moreover, predictability of the syllable sequence did not reduce the degree of disruption (Experiment 4) suggesting that supra-syllabic characteristics of the speech are of little importance. The results broadly support the idea that disruption of short-term memory only occurs when the speech stream changes in state. It is argued that disruption occurs in memory when cues to serial order based on phonological representations of heard material interfere with the phonological codes of visual origin. It is suggested that cues to changing state of the speech input contaminate those associated with items of visual origin, which are already in a phonological store.     

Raids upon the random in family therapy training: Discovering what becomes significant

How do you provide family therapy training in a primarily rural state with limited resources? A model for training therapists and supervisors that well may offer guidance to other states that face such a challenge is described here. A meta supervision approach over long distance was used in the three-year project that is described in this paper. Self-reports from the 31 participants who completed the program reveal some interesting positive reactions.     

Social anxiety and the shame of psychosis: a study in first episode psychosis

Social anxiety disorder (SaD) or social phobia is a co-morbid affective disorder in schizophrenia, present in up to one in three individuals. We employ 'social rank' theory to predict that one pathway to social anxiety in schizophrenia is triggered by the anticipation of a catastrophic loss of social status that the stigma of schizophrenia can entail. A group of 79 people with a first episode of psychosis were assessed for social anxiety: hypotheses were tested comparing 23 socially anxious and 56 non-anxious patients on measures of cognitive appraisals of shame/stigma of psychosis and perceived social status, controlling for depression, psychotic symptoms and general psychopathology. Participants with social anxiety experienced greater shame attached to their diagnosis and felt that the diagnosis placed them apart from others, i.e., socially marginalised them and incurred low social status. We propose a stigma model of social anxiety that makes testable predictions about how the shame beliefs may contaminate social interaction and thereby exacerbate and maintain social phobia.     

A behavior-genetic study of parenting quality, infant attachment security, and their covariation in a nationally representative sample

A number of relatively small-sample, genetically sensitive studies of infant attachment security have been published in the past several years that challenge the view that all psychological phenotypes are heritable and that environmental influences on child development--to the extent that they can be detected--serve to make siblings dissimilar. Using the twin subsample (N = 485 same-sex pairs) of the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, the authors provide evidence that parenting quality and infant attachment security observed at 24 months, as well as their covariation, are a product of shared and nonshared environmental (but not genetic) variation among children. In contrast, genetic differences between infants played a prominent role in explaining observations of temperamental dependency.     

Revisiting the university front

The article argues that the most important trends in the recent metamorphosis of higher education, especially of university teaching and research, cannot be understood without placing them in the context of general developments in political life. Both processes reveal alarming features and there is a link between them. In recent decades a religion has established its dominance in the public policy field. Its dogmas are called “liberalization”, “economic man”, “individual preference”, “the free market”, “competition” and “efficiency”. The consequences of the progressive imposition of this doctrine on the universities—including on the relation between teaching and research—are well documented but not always well understood. It is argued that the “commercialization” of higher education and research means in reality their hyper-bureaucratization, via the imposition of so-called evaluation, assessment and accreditation schemes, the latest avatars of the managerialist ideology. Might the final result be the disintegration of the university as an institution?     

Age-related changes in attentional tracking of multiple moving objects

In a multiple-object tracking (MOT) task, young and older adults attentively tracked a subset of 10 identical, randomly moving disks for several seconds, and then tried to identify those disks that had comprised the subset. Young adults who habitually played video games performed significantly better than those who did not. Compared to young subjects (mean age = 20.6 years) with whom they were matched for video game experience, older subjects (mean age = 75.3 years) showed much reduced ability to track multiple moving objects, particularly with faster movement or longer tracking times. Control measurements with stationary disks show that the age-related decline in MOT was not caused by a general change in memory per se. To generate an item-wise performance measure, we examined older subjects' proportion correct according to the serial order in which individual disks were identified. Correct identification of target disks declined with the order in which targets were reported, suggesting that attentional tracking produced graded, rather than all-or-none, outcomes.     

Reformulating and testing the perfectionism model of binge eating among undergraduate women: a short-term, three-wave longitudinal study

The perfectionism model of binge eating (PMOBE) is an integrative model explaining why perfectionism is related to binge eating. This study reformulates and tests the PMOBE, with a focus on addressing limitations observed in the perfectionism and binge-eating literature. In the reformulated PMOBE, concern over mistakes is seen as a destructive aspect of perfectionism contributing to a cycle of binge eating via 4 binge-eating maintenance variables: interpersonal discrepancies, low interpersonal esteem, depressive affect, and dietary restraint. This test of the reformulated PMOBE involved 200 undergraduate women studied using a 3-wave longitudinal design. As hypothesized, concern over mistakes appears to represent a vulnerability factor for binge eating. Bootstrapped tests of mediation suggested concern over mistakes contributes to binge eating through binge-eating maintenance variables, and results supported the incremental validity of the reformulated PMOBE beyond perfectionistic strivings and neuroticism. The reformulated PMOBE also predicted binge eating, but not binge drinking, supporting the specificity of this model. The reformulated PMOBE offers a framework for understanding how key contributors to binge eating work together to generate and to maintain binge eating.