Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Anxiety Disorders: Three Case Studies Exemplifying a Unified Treatment Protocol

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is an innovative acceptance-based behavior therapy that has been applied broadly and successfully to treat a variety of clinical problems, including the anxiety disorders. Throughout treatment ACT balances acceptance and mindfulness processes with commitment and behavior change processes. As applied to anxiety disorders, ACT seeks to undermine excessive struggle with anxiety and experiential avoidance––attempts to down-regulate and control unwanted private events (thoughts, images, bodily sensations). The goal is to foster more flexible and mindful ways of relating to anxiety so individuals can pursue life goals important to them. This article describes in some detail a unified ACT protocol that can be adapted for use with persons presenting with any of the major anxiety disorders. To exemplify this approach, we present pre- and posttreatment data from three individuals with different anxiety disorders who underwent treatment over a 12-week period. The results showed positive pre- to posttreatment changes in ACT-relevant process measures (e.g., reductions in experiential avoidance, increases in acceptance and mindfulness skills), increases in quality of life, as well as significant reductions in traditional anxiety and distress measures. All three clients reported maintaining or improving on their posttreatment level of functioning.     

Language‐specific stress perception by 9‐month‐old French and Spanish infants

During the first year of life, infants begin to have difficulties perceiving non‐native vowel and consonant contrasts, thus adapting their perception to the phonetic categories of the target language. In this paper, we examine the perception of a non‐segmental feature, i.e. stress. Previous research with adults has shown that speakers of French (a language with fixed stress) have great difficulties in perceiving stress contrasts ( Dupoux, Pallier, Sebastián & Mehler, 1997 ), whereas speakers of Spanish (a language with lexically contrastive stress) perceive these contrasts as accurately as segmental contrasts. We show that language‐specific differences in the perception of stress likewise arise during the first year of life. Specifically, 9‐month‐old Spanish infants successfully distinguish between stress‐initial and stress‐final pseudo‐words, while French infants of this age show no sign of discrimination. In a second experiment using multiple tokens of a single pseudo‐word, French infants of the same age successfully discriminate between the two stress patterns, showing that they are able to perceive the acoustic correlates of stress. Their failure to discriminate stress patterns in the first experiment thus reflects an inability to process stress at an abstract, phonological level.     

Internal conflict,language, and metaphor: Implications for psychotherapy

The term conflict has only metaphorical validity when applied to internal dynamics, because an organism can never actually be at war with itself. Drawing upon Maturana's theory of living systems, we argue that the concept of conflict has been taken too literally by therapists and clients. Instead of eliminating conflict, we urge therapists to focus on the interpersonal implications of language habits and to explore with clients the options for more effective action in the social community.The authors would like to express their appreciation to G. Craig Caputo, Elsa R. Efran, Joseph Fiorito, Charles E. Gallagher, Christopher K. Germer, Richard J. Leffel, M. Penny Levin, Alan J. Lipman, Michael D. Lukens, Robert J. Lukens, and Richard Sadowsky, each of whom read earlier drafts and contributed valuable suggestions.     

Birkhoff revisited: beauty as a function of effect and means

The beauty of visual patterns is quantified, starting from the assumption that beauty is maximal when a maximum of effect is attained with a minimum of means applied. Birkhoff has based his theory of beauty on this assumption, but his specification of means and effect differs from the one presented here. In our conception, effect is specified as the number of independent regularities (R) of a pattern not accounted for by the simplest interpretation of the pattern. This variable is closely allied to the concept of conjunctive ambiguity. The irregularities of a pattern that are not constrained by additional regularities (P) make up the means term of the means-effect analogy. An index of beauty (M) is defined, M = R - P. It is shown that there is substantial correlation between M and preference judgments for a set of Birkhoff's polygons. It is further demonstrated that M has relevance to describe properties of the relation of beauty to complexity, data of experiments on the aesthetic attractivity of combinations of patterns, and preferences for certain proportions of simple figures above others.