Standardized patients: A fixed-role therapy experience in normal individuals

Abstract

This article describes how standardized patients (SPs), people trained to portray a patient role in a consistent fashion, view their role-playing experiences. Focus groups with 37 SPs (63% participation rate) were used to explore what impact, if any, playing a number of fixed roles had on them and their lives. Personal insights and changes reported by SPs are examined in terms of personal construct theory. The implications of these findings for both teaching clinicians and for therapeutic work with clients are discussed. The findings illustrate continuing relevance of G. Kelly's (1955) observations about the usefulness of role-playing and enactment techniques.     

Angry faces hold the eyes

Efficient processing of complex social and biological stimuli associated with threat is crucial for survival. Previous studies have suggested that threatening stimuli such as angry faces not only capture visual attention, but also delay the disengagement of attention from their location. However, in the previous studies disengagement of attention was measured indirectly and was inferred on the basis of delayed manual responses. The present study employed a novel paradigm that allows direct examination of the delayed disengagement hypothesis by measuring the time it takes to disengage the eyes from threatening stimuli. The results showed that participants were indeed slower to make an eye movement away from an angry face presented at fixation than from either a neutral or a happy face. This finding provides converging support that the delay in disengagement of attention is an important component of processing threatening information.     

Autonomous teamwork and psychological well-being

Few studies investigated the assumed positive effects of autonomous groups on individual psychological well-being. In the present study we investigated the hypotheses that (1) group autonomy is positively related to psychological well-being, (2) this relationship is mediated by individual autonomy, individual task variety, individual workload, and social support. One hundred and thirty-eight members of autonomous teams in a supermarket chain completed questionnaires about their task perceptions and psychological well-being. The hypotheses were largely supported by structural equations analyses. Results are discussed and implications proposed.     

Modification of performance on the Span of Apprehension Task in a group of young people with early onset psychosis

The aim of the study was to examine the effect of contingent monetary reinforcement and enhanced instructions on Span of Apprehension (SPAN) performance in a group of young people with early onset psychosis. Twenty-five participants (mean age 16.7) received a 3- and 12-letter version of the SPAN task six times: baseline, three x intervention, post-test, and 10-day follow-up. No significant effects of time were found in the 3-letter condition, indicating a ceiling effect for accuracy. In the 12-letter condition detection rates improved significantly reaching a maximum at the third intervention (p < 0.001). Performance showed a temporary decline at post-test, but performance returned to the maximum level at the 10-day follow-up. The study suggests that SPAN performance can be improved in young people with early onset psychosis using relatively simple interventions and that performance gains are relatively durable.     

Engaging Diversity's Underbelly: A Story from an Immigrant Parish Community

: This story explores an intervention conducted in a Catholic parish community in New York City. The intervention, conducted by the author and a Jesuit priest, focused on issues of unity and diversity among the various Chinese immigrant subgroups in the parish (primarily Cantonese- and Mandarin-speakers). Issues of class, power, and a history of colonialism in the Catholic Church are explored as central to the relations among culturally diverse Chinese American community members and between the members and the practitioners and the church authority. The author especially focuses on how the dynamics that played out in the intervention reflected wider issues of economics, labor practices, and political elitism in the wider Chinatown community. A central part of the author's argument is about power relationships between this parish community and Chinatown and how these power relationships are embedded within broader racial and economic oppression within the United States.     

Revisiting Thurstone's and Coombs' scales on the seriousness of crimes and offences

The classical studies by Thurstone (1927b) and Coombs (1967) on the seriousness of crimes and offences are replicated here for a sample of male and female students. Eighty subjects used both forced choice and graded dominance ratios to assess all pairs of 10 crimes/offences. The direct ratio estimates correlate very highly with pair-comparison probabilities, thus making it possible to interpret the former as direct estimates of dominance probabilities. These data can be scaled with excellent fit in Thurstone's sense. The resulting scales are quite similar to those obtained by Thurstone and Coombs. An analysis of the individual data shows, however, that 69 per cent of the average data are aggregated over a variety of distinct subgroups of individuals who partition the crimes/offences into subsets that are incomparable in their seriousness. Thurstone's and Coombs' seriousness scales must therefore be considered a population lawfulness.     

A direct approach to individual differences scaling using increasingly complex transformations

A family of models for the representation and assessment of individual differences for multivariate data is embodied in a hierarchically organized and sequentially applied procedure called PINDIS. The two principal models used for directly fitting individual configurations to some common or hypothesized space are the dimensional salience and perspective models. By systematically increasing the complexity of transformations one can better determine the validities of the various models and assess the patterns and commonalities of individual differences. PINDIS sheds some new light on the interpretability and general applicability of the dimension weighting approach implemented by the commonly used INDSCAL procedure.     

The McMaster family therapy outcome study: an overview of methods and results

A multifaceted outcome design was used to investigate the results of brief, system-oriented family therapy. The present report describes the methods used and provides an, overview of clients' status on a variety of outcome measures. Treatment was brief and involved the entire family in most cases. Therapists varied in discipline (psychiatry, social work, psychology or nursing) and experience (students to very senior status). A variety of measures were obtained at the beginning of treatment, at treatment closure, or after a six month follow-up. Independent interviewers conducted the six month follow-up. Measures were obtained regarding the parents' and children's level of intellectual functioning, children's academic achievement, and disruptive school behaviour. Therapists' ratings of the families' change in treatment and prognosis were also obtained at treatment closure. At follow-up, measures of the children's academic achievement and disruptive school behavior were repreated and the interviewers determined the family's satisfaction with the services they received. The results indicate that the majority of families did well on most of the measures considered. No significant change was found in terms of the children's academic performance, but there was a significant decline in their disruptive school behaviour.This project was funded by grants from the Medical Research Council of Canada, and Health and Welfare Ministry, Canada.     

A procedure for analyzing metric asymmetric proximity matrices (author's transl)

A method is discussed and illustrated which yields a geometric representation of asymmetric proximity matrices. Assuming the observations are metric the data matrix is uniquely decomposed into a symmetric and a skew-symmetric matrix-valued component. The former entails a spatial configuration vis some MDS technique; the formation contained in the latter can then be integrated into this space in various ways.