How do group meetings make a community Therapeutic?

Summary Following an abrupt shift from a therapeutic community with emphasis on group meetings to a hierarchical medical model on a mental hospital floor, disturbed patients required extensive individual nursing care. This increased work load for the nursing staff resulted in admissions having to be limited to the rare cases who needed little or no nursing care. As patients were discharged, the vacancy rate went up to approximately 20% for a week and remained high for another two weeks. Nursing staff-patient relations deteriorated.Subsequently, it was possible to resume the emphasis on the groups of a therapeutic community and to observe the contrast. The experience showed how groups can effect and support a therapeutic community. It clarified some of the mechanisms by which groups positively affected disturbed patients. Some mechanisms by which the staff, community, and group meetings favorably influenced the nursing staff-patient relationship and intrastaff communications became clear also.     

Enhancing young people's social competence and health behavior: An important challenge for educators, scientists, policymakers, and funders

Large numbers of America's young people engage in multiple high-risk behaviors that may jeopardize their health and social development. Given the gravity of this situation, many federal agencies and national organizations have called for the implementation of school-based K-12 social competence and health promotion programs. Unfortunately, there is a gap between the comprehensive programs that policymakers are asking educators to implement and the limited scope, duration, and intensity of state-of-the-art health promotion programs that scientists have developed and evaluated. As a result, most schools currently adopt well-marketed programs that lack documented effectiveness. Although current research indicates that brief, well-designed, theory-driven competence promotion and health education programs produce short-term benefits, there have been no controlled, longitudinal field studies to evaluate the long-term effects of K-12 efforts. This paper proposes that policymakers and funding agencies support long-term collaborations among educators and scientists to develop and evaluate K-12 comprehensive social competence and health education programs and identifies critical issues that funded projects should address.     

Perceived corporate ethical values and individual cynicism of working students

This study explored a proposed relationship between the corporate ethical values and cynicism of 195 working students. Analysis indicated students' perceived ethical values were negatively related to individual cynicism after accounting for several variables.     

Rightward biases in free-viewing visual bisection tasks: implications for leftward responses biases on similar tasks

Neurologically normal individuals exhibit strong leftward response biases during free-viewing perceptual judgments of brightness, quantity, and size. When participants view two mirror-reversed objects and they are forced to choose which object appears darker, more numerous, or larger, the stimulus with the relevant feature on the left side is chosen 60-75% of the time. This effect could be influenced by inaccurate judgments of the true centre-point of the objects being compared. In order to test this possibility, 10 participants completed three visual bisection tasks on stimuli known to elicit strong leftward response biases. Participants were monitored using a remote eye-tracking device and instructed to stare at the subjective midpoint of objects presented on a computer screen. Although it was predicted that bisection errors would deviate to the left of centre (as is the case in the line bisection literature), the opposite effect was found. Significant rightward bisection errors were evident on two of the three tasks, and the leftward biases seen during forced-choice tasks could be the result of misjudgments to the right of centre on these same tasks.     

Unilateral forced nostril breathing affects dichotic listening for emotional tones

Unilateral forced nostril breathing (UFNB) through the left nostril is associated with enhanced spatial abilities, whereas UFNB through the right nostril is associated with enhanced verbal abilities. However, the effects of UFNB on standard tasks of laterality (e.g., dichotic listening) are unknown. This study employed dichotic listening for word targets, which typically exhibits a right ear advantage (REA), and dichotic listening for emotional targets, which typically exhibits a left ear advantage (LEA). Participants were asked to breathe either through their dominant nostril (congruent UFNB) or to breathe through their non-dominant nostril (incongruent UFNB) for the entire testing session. There was a significant three-way interaction between the type of dichotic listening task, nostril dominance, and nostril assignment, with the expected REA for word targets and the expected LEA for emotional targets-with one exception. Right nostril dominant participants assigned to the congruent condition exhibited an LEA for emotional targets (p < .05). The other three groups exhibited the expected LEA/right hemisphere advantage for the detection of emotional targets and all groups exhibited the expected REA/left hemisphere advantage for detection of word targets. As such, possible bias induced by tactile stimulation of the contralateral face cannot account for these results. Thus, our data are consistent with a selective enhancement of right hemispheric lateralized functions by right nostril UFNB.     

Treating boys with low school achievement and behavior problems: comparison of two kinds of intervention

Children with low school achievement frequently have behavior problems and interpersonal difficulties that pose a risk for psychosocial maladjustment. 39 boys were assessed and randomly assigned to one of two group treatment conditions: (a) interpersonal cognitive problem-solving for whom training was provided through oral and written language activities that met children's social and academic needs and (b) a language workshop, during which only academic difficulties were treated. Parents of children in both groups received group attention. Posttreatment assessments indicated that boys in both conditions showed significant improvements on school achievement and behavior problems, as they were measured by behavior scales reported by mothers and by an academic achievement test. Children in the problem-solving group improved significantly more than the other group on most measures. These results suggest that work with interpersonal cognitive problem-solving skills combined with reading and writing activities is a useful means to produce improvements in child behavior and school achievement.     

Sex differences in the effect of articulatory or spatial dual-task interference during navigation

Women are more likely to employ landmark-based strategies when navigating, and they are superior at employing this type of strategy. The cause of this sexually dimorphic behaviour is unknown. Seventy-nine undergraduates performed a matrix navigation task wherein the symbols within the matrix were highly nameable. Participants were either given landmark-based or Euclidean-based instructions for navigation within the matrix. During navigation, participants were subjected to either articulatory or spatial interference. The articulatory interference selectively impaired women's ability to navigate correctly, regardless of the type of instruction. The performance of the men was not affected differentially by the two types of interference. When given a test of symbol recognition following the navigation task, women recognized more of the symbols employed in the task. Collectively, this result suggests that women rely on linguistic information more than men do when navigating, regardless of the type of instruction.