The relationship between children's sociometric status and ability to recognize facial expressions of emotion

This study explored the relationship between children's sociometric status (SMS) and ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions. As expected, high SMS children obtained significantly higher emotion recognition scores than did low SMS children. However, there was an unanticipated inverse correlation between low SMS children's recognition scores from adult photgraphs and child photographs. Possible reasons for the observed relationships are discussed.     

Hypnotic deafness: a psychophysical study of responses to tone intensity as modified by hypnosis.

Hypnotic deafness was suggested for 1000 Hz tones presented in random orders at seven intensities between 17 and 70 db. Subjects were 70 college students stratified into four levels of hypnotic susceptibility, ranging from low to high. Four conditions were presented within a single session. Two conditions tested normal hearing, one in waking and one in hypnosis; two tested reported loudness of the tones as reduced by hypnotic suggestion. The method of magnitude estimation was employed. Hearing reduction was found to correlate .59 with hypnotic susceptibility in the total sample. Few high hypnotizables reduced their hearing to zero; their mean residual hearing during the deafness conditions was 55% of normal. Power functions for the relationship between tone intensity and magnitude estimates for conditions of normal hearing and deafness were found to be relatively parallel and orderly, differing primarily in intercept value. Order effect anomalies are discussed. The "hidden observer" method showed that for 4 of the 70 subjects the covert hearing was found to be at least 20% greater than that reported overtly within hypnotic deafness and approached normal hearing. As in our previous hypnotic analgesia research, not all subjects who reduced their hearing significantly gave subsequent covert reports which differed from reported overt hearing. Discussion is given for evidence of two levels of information processing during hypnotically suggested perceptual distortions.     

Brief therapy in adult psychiatry

Forty-one of forty-four referrals to a multidisciplinary team providing brief therapy in adult psychiatry were followed up after one year. Questionnaires were sent to attenders and their general practitioners. A good outcome was reported in 29 cases (70%) while four cases (10%) were worse. Good outcome was linked with more therapy sessions and having specific goals for treatment. Lower social class did not predict poor outcome, unlike other forms of psychotherapy. Benefit was not linked to age, sex, place of residence, duration of problem, source of referral, those attending, inpatient status or lapse from treatment. Longstanding problems did slightly less well. The 'worse' group were younger and all four were female. Training of the team took place during therapy at little extra cost without any detriment to outcome. These findings have implications for the team's approach and for the provision of psychotherapy services in general.     

Effects of temptations on the affective salience of weight control goals

Despite the value of weight control goals, the maintenance of healthy eating habits represents a challenge for most. Self-regulatory efforts are often challenged by the presence of high-risk cues (e.g., tempting foods) which provide short-term positive outcomes at the expense of these long-term health objectives. The current study examined contextual influences on self-regulation failure by exploring the effect of cues on an indirect measure of goal value. Two experiments were conducted with undergraduate students which examined the effect of temptation cues on the evaluation of information related to the goal of weight control. Results of Study 1 provided preliminary evidence for the utility of this task as an indirect measure of goal value and showed that food-related primes slowed evaluation response times for weight control-related targets. Study 2 replicated and extended these findings by demonstrating that temptation cues may not only decrease the affective salience of weight control related information but increase the salience of information related to the goal of affect enhancement. These results suggest that self-regulation failure may be influenced by contextual changes in the value of health-related goals. Implications for prevention and intervention efforts are discussed.     

Being Fit and Looking Healthy: Young Women’s and Men’s Constructions of Health and Fitness

We drew on Foucault's notion of ‘practices of the self’ to examine how young people take up, negotiate, and resist the imperatives of a public health discourse concerned with the relationships between health, fitness, and the body. We did this through a discussion of the ways young women and men talk about their own and others' bodies, in the context of a number of in-depth interviews conducted for the Life Activity Project, a study of the place and meaning of physical activity in young people's lives, funded by an Australian Research Council Grant. We found that the young women and men in the study engaged the health/fitness discourse very differently: for the young men, health conflated with fitness as an embodied capacity to do physical work; and for the young women, health was a much more difficult and complex project associated with managing and monitoring practices associated with eating and exercise to maintain an ‘appropriate’ body shape.     

Brief Therapy in Adult Psychiatry – Further Outcomes

A report of a one-year follow-up of thirty-six referrals treated with solution-focused brief therapy by a supervised team in a mental health setting is described. A good outcome was reported for twenty-three cases (64%). These results are comparable with our previous work and with one other statistically validated outcome study on solution-focused therapy.