Intensive Gestalt Group Therapy with Schizophrenics

Abstract

Teaching group therapy is an essential aspect of graduate studies within the helping professions. Existing models discuss four basic elements required for such training: experience, observation, supervised practice, and theory. The present paper offers a model for a group therapy seminar based on these four elements and organized along developmental concepts. Clinical observations of 120 psychology students who participated in the seminar were gathered over a five-year period. Teaching techniques included supervised observation, fish-bowl, one-way mirror, and a final paper integrating theory and practice. The seminar enabled students to practice and to theorize about group processes, both as participants and as co-leaders. Seminar outcomes and conclusions are discussed.     

Getting lost

This paper seeks to explore the process, challenges and journey of setting up counselling within a boys’ public school setting, as an independent practitioner. It looks at the structure and way in which the service was set up and what had to be changed and adapted as time went on. The school had a strong reputation for pastoral care but had come to recognise that there were some issues that it was neither possible nor appropriate for school staff to deal with. So, whilst the school could and did provide containment for many of its pupils, there were those who got lost or were outside of the culture. This seemed to get reflected in my own experience. Setting up counselling in a school is not straightforward, and like the process of therapy itself, it takes time and is not a linear process. Although the service grew steadily, there were factors that led to my finally resigning from the post – I also got lost in the system. There is also a comparison with setting up a service under the auspices of an organisation at the same time.     

Let me take the wheel: Illusory control and sense of agency

Illusory control refers to an effect in games of chance where features associated with skilful situations increase expectancies of success. Past work has operationalized illusory control in terms of subjective ratings or behaviour, with limited consideration of the relationship between these definitions, or the broader construct of agency. This study used a novel card-guessing task in 78 participants to investigate the relationship between subjective and behavioural illusory control. We compared trials in which participants (a) had no opportunity to exercise illusory control, (b) could exercise illusory control for free, or (c) could pay to exercise illusory control. Contingency Judgment and Intentional Binding tasks assessed explicit and implicit sense of agency, respectively. On the card-guessing task, confidence was higher when participants exerted control than in the baseline condition. In a complementary model, participants were more likely to exercise control when their confidence was high, and this effect was accentuated in the pay condition relative to the free condition. Decisions to pay were positively correlated with control ratings on the Contingency Judgment task, but were not significantly related to Intentional Binding. These results establish an association between subjective and behavioural illusory control and locate the construct within the cognitive literature on agency.     

Internet Safety and the Silver Surfer: The Relationship Between Gist Reasoning and Adults' Risky Online Behavior

Currently, fewer older adults are online compared with younger generations. However, with many new initiatives aiming to significantly increase the number of older internet users, they will increasingly be exposed to potential victimisation from internet fraud, a fundamental issue affecting all adult internet users. Despite this, little research has examined online risk‐taking across the adult lifespan or adults' reasoning about risky online behaviors. Using fuzzy trace theory, we investigated adults' online risk‐taking behavior and intentions, and whether these behaviors were related to different ways of reasoning about risk, namely, gist reasoning (using qualitative, intuitive knowledge) and verbatim reasoning (using quantitative, specific knowledge). Participants (326 adults, 18–79 years old, M_age = 49.54 years) reported their past risk‐taking behavior, future online risk intentions, gist and verbatim reasoning about online risk, sensation seeking, and time spent online. Age was negatively correlated with past risk‐taking, time online, future risk intentions, and sensation seeking. However, time spent online was positively related to future risk intentions, suggesting that spending more time using the internet could lead individuals to take more risks. Increased verbatim reasoning predicted increased intentions to take online risks, while gist reasoning predicted reduced intentions to take risks online. Our findings extend online risk research applying fuzzy trace theory to adolescents and young adults and suggest that online safety training incorporating gist‐based reasoning strategies could benefit all adults and, in particular, older generations. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Maintenance of Parent-Implemented Discrete-Trial Instruction during Videoconferencing

Access to behavior-analytic professionals who can implement interventions like discrete-trial instruction (DTI) may be limited for families living in rural communities. We trained four rural parents of children with autism to implement DTI accurately with a confederate using in vivo behavioral skills training. The DTI skills that parents demonstrated with a confederate generalized to working with their children. We then assessed whether periodic supervision during videoconferencing maintained parents’ DTI skills following training. Parents accurately implemented untrained DTI programs with their children and maintained accurate implementation over several months of remote supervision occurring twice a week, weekly, and biweekly. Videoconferencing may be an effective way for individuals responsible for direct implementation to maintain contact with behavior analysts who are not locally accessible.     

Increasing Class Participation in College Classrooms with the Good Behavior Game

Participation in college classrooms remains low, despite evidence that increased participation contributes to better grades. Incorporating active student educational strategies may help combat poor participation. The Good Behavior Game is a tool for improving various behaviors of children and adolescents in schools. However, strategies similar to the Good Behavior Game have not yet been assessed with young adults in college classrooms. We used an alternating treatments design to evaluate effects of a modified version of the Good Behavior Game on participation across three introductory psychology courses at a public university. We collected baseline data on class participation and then compared two variations of the Good Behavior Game—one included delivering a preferred reward to individuals on the winning team and one did not include a reward. Incorporating components of the Good Behavior Game increased class participation with and without a preferred reward, relative to baseline. Students reported preferring the game with a reward relative to the game with no reward and not playing the game. Because class participation has been correlated with better course grades, incorporating features of the Good Behavior Game may be a feasible approach for improving college students’ education.     

Evaluating the efficacy of the Headsprout© reading program with children who have spent time in care

This study investigated whether Headsprout©, an internet‐based phonics program designed on behavioral principles, is an effective supplementary tool to improve literacy skills of children who have spent time in care and are at risk of reading failure. Participants were 8 children (aged 5 to 10) who had spent over 3 years in care and were fully adopted at the time of the study. Participants' literacy skills were assessed prior to intervention using 2 standardized reading attainment tests. Participants were then randomly assigned to either treatment or a waiting list comparison group. There were 2 Headsprout© treatments, but all participants in the treatment group completed 1 HeadsproutStartCopTextStartCopText© lesson 4 times per week, under the supervision of the first author, while participants in the comparison group interacted with the first author 4 times per week engaging in nonliteracy‐based computer activities. Results from 2 standardized reading attainment tests showed an improvement in word recognition age and oral reading fluency for the HeadsproutStartCopTextStartCopText© learners but scores either remained the same or decreased over a 4‐month period for participants in the comparison group. The findings support the wider use of HeadsproutStartCopTextStartCopText© with at‐risk children though more research is clearly warranted at this time.     

Does sensitivity to criticism mediate the relationship between theory of mind and academic achievement?

This study adds to the growing research on school outcomes associated with individual differences in preschoolers’ theory of mind skills by considering whether “costs” of theory of mind (e.g., sensitivity to criticism) actually help to foster children’s academic achievement. A group of 60 Italian children was tested during the last year of preschool (Time 1, mean age = 5 years 6 months) and in their first year (Time 2, mean age = 6 years 5 months) and second year (Time 3, mean age = 7 years 5 months) of primary school. Children’s theory of mind, verbal ability, and social skills were evaluated at each time point. In addition, children’s sensitivity to teacher criticism was assessed at Time 2 and teachers’ ratings of children’s academic achievement were gathered at Time 3. Mediation analyses showed that, independent of verbal ability and social skills, sensitivity to criticism at Time 2 mediated the association between theory of mind at Time 1 and academic achievement at Time 3. These findings highlight the importance of investigating the educational consequences of individual differences in preschoolers’ theory of mind.     

A direct link between gaze perception and social attention

How information is exchanged between the cognitive mechanisms responsible for gaze perception and social attention is unclear. These systems could be independent; the "gaze cueing" effect could emerge from the activation of a general-purpose attentional mechanism that is ignorant of the social nature of the gaze cue. Alternatively, orienting to social gaze direction might be directly determined by the operation of cognitive mechanisms specifically dedicated to gaze perception. This second notion is the dominant assumption in the literature, but there is little direct support for this account. Here, we systematically manipulated observers' perception of gaze direction by implementing a gaze adaptation paradigm. Gaze cueing was reduced only in conditions where perception of specific averted gaze stimuli was impaired (Experiment 1). Adaptation to a pointing stimulus failed to impact gaze cueing (Experiment 2). Overall, these data suggest a direct link between the specific operation of gaze perception mechanisms and the consequential orienting of attention.     

Comprehension of argument structure and semantic roles: evidence from English-learning children and the forced-choice pointing paradigm

Research using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm (IPLP) has consistently shown that English-learning children aged 2 can associate transitive argument structure with causal events. However, studies using the same methodology investigating 2-year-old children's knowledge of the conjoined agent intransitive and semantic role assignment have reported inconsistent findings. The aim of the present study was to establish at what age English-learning children have verb-general knowledge of both transitive and intransitive argument structure using a new method: the forced-choice pointing paradigm. The results suggest that young 2-year-olds can associate transitive structures with causal (or externally caused) events and can use transitive structure to assign agent and patient roles correctly. However, the children were unable to associate the conjoined agent intransitive with noncausal events until aged 3;4. The results confirm the pattern from previous IPLP studies and indicate that children may develop the ability to comprehend different aspects of argument structure at different ages. The implications for theories of language acquisition and the nature of the language acquisition mechanism are discussed.