A five‐year evaluation of the effectiveness of person‐centred counselling in routine clinical practice in primary care

Counselling is the recommended treatment for individuals with mild to moderate mental health problems of recent onset. In this evaluation of a primary care counselling service offering person‐centred counselling, the Core Outcome Measure (CORE‐OM) was administered at referral and at the beginning and end of therapy. A pre‐post therapy effect size for 697 individuals over a 5 year period was 1.2. This compares with a waitlist (between referral and pre therapy) effect size of 0.24 for 382 individuals over a three year period. The results indicate that person‐centred counselling is effective for clients with common mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression. Effectiveness is not limited to individuals with mild to moderate symptoms of recent onset, but extends to people with moderate to severe symptoms of longer duration.     

Executive function in preschoolers: a review using an integrative framework

During the last 2 decades, major advances have been made in understanding the development of executive functions (EFs) in early childhood. This article reviews the EF literature during the preschool period using an integrative framework. The framework adopted considers EF to be a unitary construct with partially dissociable components (A. Miyake et al., 2000). The authors focus on 3 EF components: working memory, response inhibition, and shifting. For the present purposes, the central executive is conceived of as a central attention system that is involved in all EF component operations. Research to date suggests that elementary forms of the core EF components are present early during the preschool period. Changes in EF during the latter half of the preschool period appear to be due to the development of attention and integration of component EFs. Finally, the review outlines a number of areas that warrant further investigation if researchers are to move forward in understanding early EF development.     

A method for eliciting scale errors in preschool classrooms

Six preschool classrooms, containing children between the ages of 4.0 and 40.0 months, were seeded with miniature items to examine how easily scale errors could be elicited. Observations occurred over a period of 3 months, with a total of 280 min of observations per classroom. A concealed observer documented all interactions with the miniature items. A total of 93 scale errors occurred, with a higher frequency committed by the younger children. These results confirm findings from previous research and suggest that scale errors can be effectively elicited in a preschool classroom. Our approach may provide a useful method for systematically studying the factors that influence scale errors.     

Mental rotation of mirrored letters: evidence from event-related brain potentials

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants (n=13) were presented with mirrored and normal letters at different orientations and were asked to make mirror-normal letter discriminations. As it has been suggested that a mental rotation out of the plane might be necessary to decide on mirrored letters, we wanted to determine whether this rotation occurs after the plane rotation in mirror rotated letters. The results showed that mirrored letters in the upright position elicited a negative-going waveform over the right hemisphere in the 400-500 ms window. A similar negativity was also present in mirrored letters at 30 degrees, 60 degrees, and 90 degrees, but in these cases it was delayed. Moreover, the well-known orientation effect on the amplitude of the rotation-related negativity was also found, although it was more evident for normal than for mirrored letters. These results indicate that the processing of mirrored letters differs from that of normal letters, and suggest that a rotation out of the plane after the plane rotation may be involved in the processing of mirror rotated letters.     

Context influences holistic processing of nonface objects in the composite task

We explored whether holistic-like effects can be observed for nonface objects in novices as a result of the task context. We measured contextually induced congruency effects for novel objects (Greebles) in a sequential matching selective attention task (composite task). When format at study was blocked, congruency effects were observed for study-misaligned, but not study-aligned, conditions (Experiment 1). However, congruency effects were observed in all conditions when study formats were randomized (Experiment 2), revealing that the presence of certain trial types (study-misaligned) in an experiment can induce congruency effects. In a dual task, a congruency effect for Greebles was induced in trials in which a face was first encoded, but only when it was aligned (Experiment 3). Thus, congruency effects can be induced by context that operates at the scale of the entire experiment or within a single trial. Implications for using the composite task to measure holistic processing are discussed.     

Recent books on ≡ world religion(s)

Books reviewed in this article:
Dan Cohn-Sherbok, A Concise Encyclopedia of Judaism
Klaus K. Klostermaier, A Concise Encyclopedia of Hinduism
Geoffrey Parrinder, A Concise Encyclopedia of Christianity
Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Judaism
Jamal J. Elias, Islam
Bradley K. Hawkins, Buddhism
Cybelle Shattuck, Hinduism
Brian Wilson, Christianity
Mary Pat Fisher, Religion in the Twenty-first Century     

The cognitive therapy of evaluation: Therapeutic techniques-[2]

The main aim of this paper is to introduce the techniques used in cognitive therapy of evaluation. The Cognitive therapy of evaluation is being developed from the theoretical background of general semantics theory and it is a therapy based on language as an instrument of cognitive processes, and on the role it plays, through word-facts identification, in the development and treatment of emotional problems. The main techniques developed (abstraction orders and the extensional devices) and other therapeutic issues are introduced and explained.     

The long past and the short history of social psychology

In 1908 Ebbinghaus distinguished between the long past and the short history of psychology. The short history dated from 1879 when Wundt established a psychological laboratory at Leipzig. The long past concerns the time when psychology was a branch of philosophy. Implicit in such a break with the past is a positivist philosophy of science. I show how this philosophy of science distorts the historical record. I then analyse the history of social psychology. Unwittingly Lindzey and Aronson (1985) distinguish between the long past of social psychology as part of the Western intellectual tradition and its short history as an experimental science that is mainly American. Murchison's Handbook of Social Psychology (1935), whilst marking the boundary between the long past and the short history, belongs to the long past. The break with tradition came in 1954, when Lindzey published the first Handbook in the modern series. There is a self-conscious need, in the post World War II era, to train a whole new generation of social psychologists. The Lindzey series of Handbooks meets that need. The ‘progress’ of modern social psychology is now measured in terms of its distance from the Murchison milestone of 1935.