Introduction to Group-Analytic Psychotherapy by S. H. Foulkes

This article will explore special leader issues that emerge in psychodynamically oriented therapy groups with adult children of alcoholics. Particular focus will be on countertransference feelings that get stirred up in group leaders and techniques for dealing with some of these special dilemmas. Specific issues include (a) assumption of sameness between the therapist and the patient (the therapist assuming that he or she “understands” because of having also grown up in an alcoholic family); (b) the “will to restore,” which may be destructive when the therapist, whose own self-esteem is dependent on the patient's progress in therapy, forces a “rush to recovery” on the patient; (c) other personal issues in the life of the therapist that may also resonate with experiences of the patient; (d) “countertransference goodness and availability” as it affects therapists' abilities to set reasonable limits on their patients, as well as reasonable expectations for themselves; and (e) special issues regarding therapist transparency and self-disclosure.     

Dependency and Independence in Young Children

The present study investigated the hypothesis that a positive relation exists between self-concept and moral judgment in young children. In the first experiment 40 kindergarten children between the ages of 5–1 and 6–6 with mental ability scores ranging from 82 to 144 were each administered a self-concept appraisal and a series of Piagetian moral dilemmas. Product-moment correlations and a multiple-regression analysis evaluated the relationship. When the self-concept and moral-judgment scores were collapsed, all of the moral-judgment factors correlated significantly with at least one self-concept factor. A second experiment tested the implications of the first. Eighty-five children between the ages of 5–11 and 8–4 were given the self-concept and moral-judgment measures. An eight-week communications-training session for randomly selected parents of children scoring below the mean on the self-concept measure was held. Posttesting showed no improvement in self-concept for the experimental group. Implications of these experiments are discussed.     

Observations on the Meaning of Behavior in Groups of Chronic Schizophrenics

Abstract

In the United States, there is currently an increase in admissions to psychiatric hospitals, diagnostic heterogeneity, briefer stays, and a lack of inpatient research. Most traditional group therapy models are constructed for longer-term homogeneous patients. Diagnostically homogeneous groups even outperform heterogeneous groups. However, changes in health care have created a clinical dilemma in psychiatric hospitals where groups have become characterized by brief duration, rapid turnover, and diagnostic heterogeneity. A literature review offered little in the way of treatment recommendations, let alone a model or empirical basis, for facilitating these types of groups. Common factors from group therapy studies were extracted. Based on an integration of these studies, a process-oriented psychoeducational (POP) treatment model is recommended. This model is theoretically constructed and outlined for future study.     

Escaping the recent past: Which stimulus dimensions influence proactive interference?

Proactive interference occurs when information from the past disrupts current processing and is a major source of confusion and errors in short-term memory (STM; Wickens, Born, & Allen, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 2:440–445, 1963). The present investigation examines potential boundary conditions for interference, testing the hypothesis that potential competitors must be similar along task-relevant dimensions to influence proactive interference effects. We manipulated both the type of task being completed (Experiments 1, 2, and 3) and dimensions of similarity irrelevant to the current task (Experiments 4 and 5) to determine how the recent presentation of a probe item would affect the speed with which participants could reject that item. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 contrasted STM judgments, which require temporal information, with semantic and perceptual judgments, for which temporal information is irrelevant. In Experiments 4 and 5, task-irrelevant information (perceptual similarity) was manipulated within the recent probes task. We found that interference from past items affected STM task performance but did not affect performance in semantic or perceptual judgment tasks. Conversely, similarity along a nominally irrelevant perceptual dimension did not affect the magnitude of interference in STM tasks. Results are consistent with the view that items in STM are represented by noisy codes consisting of multiple dimensions and that interference occurs when items are similar to each other and, thus, compete along the dimensions relevant to target selection.     

The effects of familiarity on thought--action fusion

The present study examined whether beliefs about the importance of thoughts (i.e., thought–action fusion; TAF) are related to the target subject of the negative thought. One hundred and seven undergraduate students were randomly assigned to imagine either a beloved relative or a stranger being diagnosed with cancer and provided in vivo ratings of anxiety, likelihood, moral wrongness, urge to neutralize, and how upsetting the event would be if it occurred. Results indicated that thinking of a relative being diagnosed with cancer provoked more distress, urges to neutralize, and higher estimates of likelihood, as well greater use of mental neutralizing behaviors, compared to thinking of a stranger. Contrary to our prediction, the groups did not differ in their ratings of the moral wrongness. These findings broadly support the assertion that the more personally significant a negative intrusive thought, the more it will provoke distress and urges to neutralize. Results are discussed in terms of the cognitive model of obsessions and clinical implications are addressed.     

Resolving semantic and proactive interference in memory over the short-term

Interference is a major source of short-term errors of memory. The present investigation explores the relationship between two important forms of interference: proactive interference (PI), induced by the need to reject recently studied items no longer relevant to task performance, and semantic interference (SI), induced by the need to reject lures sharing a meaningful relationship with current memoranda. We explore the possibility that shared cognitive control processes are recruited to resolve both forms of interference. In Experiment 1, we find that the requirement to engage in articulatory suppression during the retention interval of tasks that induce either PI or SI increases both forms of interference similarly and selectively. In Experiment 2, we develop a task to examine PI and SI within the same experimental context. The results show interactive effects between factors that lead to the two forms of interference. Taken together, these findings support contextual-cuing models of short-term remembering (Nairne, Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 53–81 2002), where the context in which retrieval occurs can influence susceptibility to interference. Lastly, we discuss several theoretical hypotheses concerning the cognitive control processes that are recruited to resolve SI and PI in short-term remembering.     

Estimating the population of survivors of suicide: seeking an evidence base

Shneidman (1973) derived an estimate of six survivors for every suicide that, in the ensuing years, has become an assumed fact underlying public health messaging campaigns in support of suicide prevention and postvention programs worldwide, in spite of it lacking either empirical testing or validation. This report offers a first test designed to derive estimates of suicide survivors and raises an array of empirical questions needing further study to reasonably address the impact of suicide on others.     

Using Participatory System Dynamics Modeling to Examine the Local HIV Test and Treatment Care Continuum in Order to Reduce Community Viral Load

Achieving community‐level goals to eliminate the HIV epidemic requires coordinated efforts through community consortia with a common purpose to examine and critique their own HIV testing and treatment (T&T) care system and build effective tools to guide their efforts to improve it. Participatory system dynamics (SD) modeling offers conceptual, methodological, and analytical tools to engage diverse stakeholders in systems conceptualization and visual mapping of dynamics that undermine community‐level health outcomes and identify those that can be leveraged for systems improvement. We recruited and engaged a 25‐member multi‐stakeholder Task Force, whose members provide or utilize HIV‐related services, to participate in SD modeling to examine and address problems of their local HIV T&T service system. Findings from the iterative model building sessions indicated Task Force members’ increasingly complex understanding of the local HIV care system and demonstrated their improved capacity to visualize and critique multiple models of the HIV T&T service system and identify areas of potential leverage. Findings also showed members’ enhanced communication and consensus in seeking deeper systems understanding and options for solutions. We discuss implications of using these visual SD models for subsequent simulation modeling of the T&T system and for other community applications to improve system effectiveness.     

脑成像在心理学研究领域的价值

现在普遍使用的脑成像技术给心理学研究增加了新的数据和资料。和任何新的方法一样,我们需要决定如何以适当的方式应用这项技术。这项技术如何以现有的方法所不能的方式帮助回答理论问题？这项技术最好是作为因变量还是作为预测变量来使用？它如何与其它感兴趣的心理变量相关？这种新的成像技术有助于我们了解大脑的运作及其与心理学的关系。研究人员需要弄清楚如何利用这项技术提供的信息加深对心理现象的理解。     

Health Anxiety: Latent Structure and Associations with Anxiety-related Psychological Processes in a Student Sample

Although currently classified as a somatoform disorder, cognitive-behavioral models conceptualize hypochondriasis (HC) as a severe form of health anxiety. The Short Health Anxiety Inventory (SHAI) is a measure derived from this conceptualization that measures health anxiety symptoms across the range of severity. Previous studies have reported inconsistent findings regarding this measure’s factor structure, but these studies employed factor analytic tools that did not account for the categorical nature of SHAI items. The present psychometric study was designed to address these inconsistencies using categorical factor analysis. Using data from a large student sample we found that the SHAI had two factors: Illness Likelihood and Illness Severity. We also examined the relationship between these domains and cognitive variables associated with other anxiety disorders. Results suggested that the psychological processes present in obsessive-compulsive disorder and panic disorder are also associated with health anxiety. Implications for the conceptualization and classification of severe health anxiety are discussed.