Profession Differences in Family Focused Practice in the Adult Mental Health System

There is a large gulf between what psychiatric services should (or could) provide and what they do in practice. This article sought to determine practice differences between the differing professions working in adult mental health services in terms of their family focused work. Three hundred and seven adult mental health professionals completed a cross‐sectional survey of family focused practices in adult mental health services. Findings highlight that social workers engaged in more family focused practice compared to psychiatric nurses, who performed consistently the lowest on direct family care, compared to both social workers and psychologists. Clear skill, knowledge, and confidence differences are indicated between the professions. The article concludes by offering direction for future profession education and training in family focused practices.     

Augmenting Visual Search Performance With Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS)

Military personnel endure rigorous and demanding man-hours designated to monitoring and locating targets in tasks such as cyber defense and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) operators. These tasks are monotonous and repetitive, which can result in vigilance decrement. The objective of the study was to implement a form of noninvasive brain stimulation known as transcranial DC stimulation (tDCS) over the left frontal eye field (LFEF) region of the scalp to improve cognitive performance. The participants received anodal and cathodal stimulation of 2 mA for 30 min as well as placebo stimulation on 3 separate days while performing the task. The findings suggest that anodal and cathodal stimulation significantly improves detection accuracy. Also, a correlation was detected between percent of eye closure (PERCLOS) and blinking frequency in relation to stimulation condition. Our data suggest that tDCS over the LFEF would be a beneficial countermeasure to mitigate the vigilance decrement and improve visual search performance.     

‘Rehabilitation' in schizophrenia: A psychoanalytic viewpoint

This is a study which investigates some difficulties people with schizophrenia have in the long term; looks at some of the psychoanalytical theories concerning the difficulties they have in keeping an internal caring maternal imago; the consequences for them; how the NHS can help by providing an external caring maternal imago.     

The neural consequences of semantic richness: when more comes to mind, less activation is observed

Some concepts have richer semantic representations than others. That is, when considering the meaning of concepts, subjects generate more information (more features, more associates) for some concepts than for others. This variability in semantic richness influences responses in speeded tasks that involve semantic processing, such as lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks. It has been suggested that concepts with richer semantic representations build stronger attractors in semantic space, allowing faster settling of activation patterns and thus faster responding. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined the neural activation associated with semantic richness by contrasting activation for words with high and low numbers of associates in a semantic categorization task. Results were consistent with faster semantic settling for words with richer representations: Words with a low number of semantic associates produced more activation than words with a high number of semantic associates in a number of regions, including left inferior frontal and inferior temporal gyri.     

Edward Bordin: Fusing Work and Play

This article contains highlights of an interview with Edward Bordin, who later died on August 24, 1992, after a long battle with prostate cancer. It focuses both on his professional history and contributions to the field as well as on his personal life. We were honored to learn from his wife Ruth that portions of the material that follows were read at his funeral service.     

Counselling psychology in the United States

Counseling psychology (CP) emerged in the US as the result of the convergence of a number of trends in early applied psychology, a number of social factors, as well as changes in the organizational structure of the American Psychological Association. We offer an overview of the history of counseling psychology in the US, focusing on key events that have helped establish and shape the profession. Struggles over the definition of CP as a specialty and its relations with clinical psychology and professional counseling are discussed, as are matters related to the licensing of CP practitioners, and the profession’s relationships with counseling-related professional organizations. The educational and professional preparation of CPs, the profession’s core values that affect both training in and the practice of counseling psychology, and the settings in which CPs work are briefly described. We close with a discussion of several of the challenges facing CP as it is organized and institutionalized in the US.     

Counselling psychology’s genotypic and phenotypic features across national boundaries

This article integrates the survey results presented in the introductory article of this journal issue as well as the articles describing counselling psychology in each of the countries covered in the issue to examine the international character of counselling psychology. Specifically, it addresses the similarities and differences in the histories, education and training, demographics, and practice characteristics of the specialty within and across these national boundaries. The article concludes with an analysis of the value dimensions describing the international character of counselling psychology and addresses where the different countries place themselves along the two dimensions that were identified: Dimension 1 capturing basic research as different from most of the other values, and Dimension 2 being defined by an applied client focus versus a more indirect clinical perspective (i.e. social justice and research adding to the knowledge base).