The self-narrative and acute psychosis

The aim of this study was to apply the narrative approach in analyzing family therapy meetings in cases of acute psychosis. The self-narrative is essential in acute psychosis since it is either collapsed or not coherent enough. The results indicate that it is important to create concrete practices that produce stories concerning the patient in relation to others. The self-narrative must be re-authored by the patient even though it is socially constructed. This is achieved by creating multiple perspectives of self-narratives in so-called therapy meetings with the patient, family members, and staff members representing different professionals.     

Involving the family in the evaluation and treatment of the child patient: A psychodynamic approach

The purpose of this article is to provide psychotherapists with a tool for family evaluation using the basic principles of psychodynamic work; and to introduce a transitional format for therapists who have practiced family evaluations in their training institutions and now need to adapt this model to the private practitioner's office. A case example illustrates: (1) Use of the therapist's unconscious for diagnosis of the child and its family, (2) joining the family's intersubjective space, and (3) use of play and therapist's neutrality as ways that the psychodynamically oriented clinician involves the family in the evaluation and treatment of the child.     

Classical geometric illusion effects with nonclassical stimuli: Angular induction from decomposing lines into point arrays

Angular induction is the process by which one line segment can bias judgment of orientation and/or collinearity of another segment, and it has been established that the magnitude of error is a determinate function of the relative angle between the two. We examined how these known relationships are affected by decomposing the induction segment into an array of scattered points. The bias that was produced by such arrays was found to be consistent with a formal model of angular induction, with the strength of the effect decreasing as the scatter among the points was increased. This decline in strength was almost linear with a logarithmic transform of the dimensions of the stimulus array. We also evaluated the hypothesis that the induction stimulus is detected by one or more channels—for example, neurons—for which the sensitivity profiles are modeled as Gabor wavelets. The change in induction strength with increasing point scatter was not predicted by a single width of channel. However, the combined activity of an ensemble of channels that differed in width did match the perceptual effects if one also stipulated that each channel would respond maximally to a fine-line stimulus.     

Gender,psychological well-being and somatic cardiovascular risk factors

The purpose of this study is to determine associations between cardiovascular risk factors and subjective experience of psychological general well-being with special reference to gender-related differences. One hundred fifty white-collar workers in a car manufacturing plant in Sweden participated in a health care screening program. Subjective experience of psychological well-being was significantly correlated with cardiovascular risk factors among both men and women. There were, however, marked differences between the genders. For men, the following specific psychological variables were significantly correlated with cardiovascular risk factors: estimation of general health, anxiety, self-control and vitality. For women, more complex significant relationships between the two sets of variables were found. Moreover, the direction of the correlations differed between the genders. For example, men with cardiovascular risk factors, such as increased blood pressure, blood lipids and body mass index, reported significantly morepositive estimation of their general health. For women the relation was the opposite with a significantly positive correlation (p-0.004) between experience of good health and a low risk factor profile indicating the concordance between physiological and psychological parameters. Possible reasons for these sex differences are discussed.     

WORD FREQUENCY AND WORD DIFFICULTY:

Abstract— This article compares word counts made using four different collections of text, including one based on collections of electronic text For each of the collections, standard word frequency indices were computed and compared with a carefully developed list of words ranked in order of difficulty as determined by vocabulary tests Correlations between the word frequency indices and word difficulty ranks show that word frequencies for all four corpora are highly correlated with word difficulty Despite these high correlations, the results show also that the difficulty of some words is not estimated accurately by word frequency The reasons for disparities between word frequency and word difficulty are not clear The high correlations obtained for the corpus based on electronic text suggest that this method of text sampling has potential but that caution is advisable in conducting such collections.     

Requiem for “schizophrenia”

In this article a brief overview of the treatment of chronic psychosis for the last two centuries is covered, with particular emphasis on many scientifically demonstrated causes of chronic organic psychosis and their medically successful treatment, including recent neurotransmitter manipulations. With respect for the important contributions of Bleuler, the term “schizophrenic” is considered as an unscientific and unprovable nosological construct, which has hampered the successful resolution of chronic psychosis and has outlived its usefulness in the lexicon of modern psychiatry.     

A repertory grid study of therapist/couple interaction

A case of marital therapy is described in which the presenting problem, one of non-consummation, is treated by the standard Masters and Johnson's technique. Using repertory grids at the start and finish of treatment the changing perceptions of both partners and the therapist were determined. In spite of an ostensibly behavioural treatment, substantial changes occurred in the couple's understanding of the nature of their problem. The changes undergone in the couple's perceptions, and their differences from the therapist's assessments of change give rise to speculations about the nature of the therapeutic interaction and suggest further lines of exploration.