Dynamically oriented group therapy with alcoholics: Making it work despite the prevailing bias

A bias exists in the psychiatric community against dynamically oriented group therapy with alcoholics. The basis for this bias lies primarily in negative experiences of practitioners who have attempted to use traditional therapy with alcoholic patients who continued to drink. At Appleton Outpatient Clinic, we have found that dynamically oriented group therapy is a highly suitable treatment modality for alcoholic patients when negative biases of treators can be addressed and when initial preparatory work is done with patients. This preparatory work includes: (a) building a working alliance around abstinence and providing adequate supports to make this possible; (b) explicit contracting that establishes clear treatment goals and consequences should the goals not be met; (c) preparatory short-termgroup experiences.This paper was presented at the 1988 annual meeting of the American Group Psychotherapy Association.     

Emerging quality improvement measures in genetic counseling

The need to establish guidelines for total quality management in genetic counseling is now recognized as new genetic technologies are being introduced into genetics services and primary care. Genetic counselors have an important role in developing methods for assuring quality in the genetic counseling process. Emerging quality improvement measures as well as selected examples from the Quality Assurance Program in the Genetics Services Division at the Foundation for Blood Research are presented as examples of direct genetic counselor involvement. Suggestions for future directions of quality improvement activities for genetic counselors are discussed.     

Toward a Definition of Family Resilience: Integrating Life-Span and Family Perspectives

Family resilience is a relatively new construct that describes how families adapt to stress and bounce back from adversity. Literature pertaining to resilience as a family-level variable is reviewed. An overview of the developmental psychopathology literature dealing with individual resilience is also presented. Implications for extending the study of family resilience drawn from research on individual resilience are discussed and a definition of family resilience is proposed.     

A family‐therapy approach to child abuse: countering resistance

Abusing and high-risk families have been seen over three years at a new treatment resource with a family therapy orientation. The families present with established resistance to any treatment intervention and many have defeated a succession of previous helping agencies. Initial typology and treatment strategies are described with the aim of more systematic selection of therapeutic techniques.     

Schedule-induced polydipsia and polyphagia in nondeprived rats reinforced by intracranial stimulation

Five rats, which were neither food nor water deprived, working on fixed or variable-interval schedules of reinforcement for intracranial stimulation developed consistent and excessive patterns of postreinforcement eating or drinking. The gradual deterioration of polydipsia and polyphagia in this situation points to a distinction between the acquisition and maintenance of these behaviors.     

Interhemispheric alpha asymmetry and imagery mode

Interhemispheric alpha activity was measured while subjects were engaged in covertly imaging familiar pictorial material using three imagery modes: “shapes and colors,” “words,” or both. The results showed suppression of alpha activity in the hemisphere which is primarily involved in the cognitive mode being used by the subject.     

Methodological study of form constancy development

Comparison of the results of previous studies of form constancy development is difficult because of differences in experimental paradigms used. The present study tested some aspects of the construction and mode of presentation of the comparison series presented by means of the method of limits. A randomized comparison series produced higher form constancy performance than did a serially-ordered series, and there were differences depending on the location of the point of objective equality with respect to the midpoint of the series. In addition, the ordered series resulted in a large error of anticipation at all ages studied. These results thus demonstrate the influence of the comparison series on apparent developmental trends of form constancy. The general trend of constancy performance was found to increase with age, contradicting the conclusions of most previous studies.     

Dynamic effects of food magnitude on interim-terminal interaction

We tested the assumption of a facilitatory relation between periodic food presentation and schedule-induced drinking by examination of (a) elicited drinking, (b) drinking in anticipation of food delivery, and (c) possible indirect effects of food delivery on drinking. We exposed rats to a fixed-time 60-second schedule in which interfood intervals ended in either one or four food pellets with equal probability. In Phases 1 and 3, a stimulus signaled the magnitude of upcoming food presentation. In Phase 2, the stimulus was eliminated. Changes in drinking and “head-in-feeder” distributions within interfood intervals demonstrated that head-in-feeder was controlled directly by food presentation, but drinking was not. Head-in-feeder increased and drinking was reduced when large meals began or ended an interval. In Phases 4 to 6, meal size was manipulated across sessions yielding a positive relation between meal size and schedule-induced drinking. We conclude: (1) Schedule-induced drinking is determined by distributions of food-related behavior and results from indirect effects of food delivery; and (2) the amount of schedule-induced drinking and the form of the drinking distributions in this experiment can be accurately explained by two assumptions: (a) Food presentation facilitates food-related behavior through elicitation and anticipation; and (b) food-related behavior and drinking are reciprocally, linearly related.