Laying mother to rest: Working with grief-related nightmares through exposure therapy and imagery

Cognitive behavioural therapy of unresolved grief is usually presented as a fairly rapid approach for reducing psychological problems. The present case study shows how behavioural cognitive and symbolic approaches can be integrated to foster griefwork at several levels. The counselling adopted a behavioural exposure technique specifically for eliminating a significant anxiety-provoking obstacle to mourning, namely the experience of recurrent death-related nightmares that surfaced every time the bereavement was recalled in depth. The client was also encouraged to explore the symbolic meaning of the dream images and in drawings modified these images in ways that helped to alleviate her feelings of long-standing guilt. Drawing as well as verbal representation could also be regarded as an effective form of exposure therapy, helping the client to stay with the anxiety-provoking death-related images. The client once relatively free of nightmares could mourn the loss of the mother more deeply in subsequent less directive counselling sessions.     

S&T indicators for strategic planning and assessment of public research institutions

This article presents an approach we have developed for the assessment of public research institutions in the natural sciences and engineering. The method consists in the exploitation of available S&T databases and indicators, including bibliometrics (databases of scientific as well as technical literature), patents, and internal data. Results are therefore derived through multiple databases. The objective is to profile a specific national R&D community in order to assess the positioning of a public institution or program within the community to which it belongs. It involves obtaining the profile of the evolution of an R&D area, the R&D performers, the financing and support institutions, the users of R&D results, and the interactions between all these actors. A case-study of Canadian research in polymers is presented. Part of this research was financed by the National Research Council of Canada, and by a strategic grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The research benefited from the expertise of Robert Letellier, Robert H. Marchessault, Jacques Martel, and Marielle Piché, and from the technical assistance of Maryse Prud’homme, Marcel Parent, and Benoit Longpré.     

Progressive changes in articulatory patterns in verbal apraxia: A longitudinal case study

This research reports findings in a 10-year study of an apraxic adult, who was one of five subjects described by Shankweiler and Harris, (Cortex, ,2 277–292, 1966). Confusion matrices and feature analysis were used to compare 1965 and 1975 performances. Results indicate that over the 10-year period, errors of place, manner, and omission were markedly reduced. Voicing errors, however, while reduced in total number, still constituted a significant percentage of the patient's residual errors. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Developmental auditory agnosia in the severely retarded: A further investigation

The hypotheses were investigated that (a) ability to recognize the auditory perceptual stimuli for familiar events is a developmental correlate to language acquisition and (b) the low functioning mentally handicapped suffer from auditory agnosia and are impaired in this ability. The subjects were 42 nonretarded children of ages 3 through 6 and 53 severely and moderately retarded, noninstitutionalized students. The retarded subjects were matched by mental age to the chronological age of the nonretarded children. The stimuli were 49 environmental sounds; the task consisted of sound-and-picture matching-to-sample. Group membership and developmental age were the factors in an analysis of variance design. The results revealed a strong effect of developmental age (p <. 0001). The effect of group was not significant, indicating that auditory agnosia may not be common among the lower functioning retarded. The assumption that agnosia may be a major factor underlying the language disability of the severely retarded was reexamined. It was suggested that the severely retarded achieve the requisite perceptual-semantic knowledge base for language too late, after the critical age for spontaneous and efficient language learning has passed.     

A behavioral alternative to an ecological approach to understanding the development of knowing in infancy: A commentary

The concept of affordance is proposed by Goldfield to account for “knowing” in infancy as an ecologically more valid approach than Piaget's notion of representation. While the use of affordances is regarded as an improvement over the concept of representation an argument is put forth that a more parsimonious and scientifically useful approach to the development of knowing in infancy is to be found in a behavioral analysis of a learned association of stimulus cues with behavior patterns.     

Assessment of delusional beliefs during the modification of delusional verbalizations

This study examined the strength of delusional beliefs during the modification of delusional verbalizations of a 51 year-old chronically mentally ill inpatient. The changing-criterion design was used to document the effectiveness of a behavioral treatment package to alter the rate of delusional responses to personal background questions. The results revealed a stepwise decline in the frequency of delusional responses. Generalization effects to novel interviewers were obtained. No changes were obtained on the subject's ratings of delusional beliefs, with the subject assigning ratings of absolute conviction to his beliefs throughout the duration of the study.     

The syllable-length effect in number processing is task-dependent

Two experiments were run in order to investigate the relationship between syllable length of number names and eye-fixation durations during silent reading of one- and two-digit numbers. In Experiment 1, subjects had to read a series of three numbers and recall them orally; in Experiment 2, subjects had to indicate manually whether the value of the middle number was between the values of the outer numbers. The effect of syllable length was controlled for possible confounding effects of number frequency and number magnitude. Findings indicated that fixation duration depended on syllable length of number names in the first task, but not in the second task. The results call into question the claim that phonological encoding is imperative in visual processing; phonological encoding was used only when the numbers had to be recalled, and not when they were coded for computational purposes.     

The current status of competency-based training,part 1: Validity,reliability, logistical,and ethical issues

During recent years considerable attention has been focused on competency-based training. Yet there is a lack of data relating to many key issues. This paper describes some of the key issues concerning four major factors of competency-based training: validity, reliability, logistics, and ethics. Three recommendations made to the Division 16 Education and Training Committee are presented.     

Alliance-Outcome Associations in a Community-Based Social Skills Intervention for Youth With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Although the alliance is a consistent predictor of treatment outcomes in psychosocial interventions, few studies have examined this association among youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In particular, youth-therapist alliance has never been examined in social skills interventions (SSIs), a common modality for this population. In this study, thirty-four youth with ASD (M_age = 12.41; 79% male) participated in a community-delivered, group-based SSI in a summer camp format led by eight Head Therapists (M_age = 32.12; 50% male). Early alliance and change in alliance over the course of the treatment were assessed via self- and observer-reported measures. Both self- and observer-rated alliance were associated with positive treatment outcomes as reported by parents (decreased problem behaviors) and other peers in the group (reciprocated friendship and social preference). These results provide the first evidence of the role of the alliance in an SSI for youth with ASD and add to the growing body of literature that demonstrates the importance of assessing and addressing the alliance in treatment for this population.