Evaluating Therapists' Practices in a Postmodern World: A Discussion and a Scheme

The social constructionist ideas currently reshaping the practice of family therapy are also relevant for supervision. However, if, as postmodernists assert, there is no privileged, expert position, how can supervisors evaluate their trainees? This question — a most pertinent one for university-based supervision, where evaluation is necessary and constant — is addressed both theoretically and pragmatically in this article. Ethical issues are explored, and an evaluation form, developed by the authors for use in a family therapy doctoral program, is presented and discussed.     

The time course of mood-induced decrements in colour-naming of threat-related words

The current study investigated the relationship between processing biases towards affectively negative words and a film-based mood manipulation procedure. Subjects either watched a film about nuclear war or sat alone for ten minutes and then colournamed sets of negative, positive and neutral words. Testing occurred after one of three possible time intervals. Impaired colour-naming of negative words was found both immediately and five minutes after watching the film. There was no consistent pattern of colour-naming impairments for the positive words. It was found that, when baseline Stroop performance was taken into account, and the semantic priming effect caused by stimulus homogeneity was controlled for, the resulting impairment in the colournaming of negative words was accounted for by state anxiety levels alone, and not the previously found interaction of state and trait anxiety.     

Minimizing subject loss in a longitudinal study of deviant behavior

A number of techniques are described to prevent attrition of four different categories of subjects in a longitudinal study of deviant behavior.Difficult to schedule subjects required persistence, empathy and flexibility to ensure their continued participation.Reluctant subjects were persuaded to participate by taking special care to build rapport with that family.Subjects who initially refused were turned around by assuming that a subject's refusal one year was circumstantial, and approaching that subject the following year with personalized correspondence that emphasized the importance of their contribution to the research. Persistence was an important factor in successfully locating and recruitingtransient subjects.     

Induction: Representation,strategy and argument

In order to be a general theory of human cognition, the theory of mental models needs to accommodate a variety of forms of reasoning in addition to deduction. The mental model theory of induction is a crucial step in establishing generality. After suggesting that the theory of mental models can also account for abduction and analogy, the paper points out that inductive performance is likely to be constrained both by the nature of the representation used and by strategic factors. Since human cognition involves the communication of arguments, a final section explores the relationship between the theory of mental models and the notion of an argument. It proposes that models can contain tokens of inductive arguments which can be referred to in the course of other arguments.     

Change in affective state assessed by impaired color-naming of threat-related words

This study investigated the effects of mood induction on Stroop color-naming times for threat-related words. The subjects’ task was to color-name sets of threat-related words and affectively neutral matched control words both before and after mood-induction. Subjects were shown a short film about the medical effects of nuclear war (negative affect manipulation), a humorous cartoon, or no film. A significant and highly reliable color-naming decrement of the threat-related words was observed only after the negative affect manipulation. This indicates that the attentional bias towards the processing of threat-related material observed in clinically anxious or high Trait-Anxious subjects can be induced in initially nonanxious subjects. An incidental recall task included in the procedure provided no evidence of mood state dependent recall.     

The thoroughly modern Aristotle: was he really a functionalist?

In recent years a debate has developed over whether Aristotle's theory of the psuche is properly characterized as having been "functionalist" in the sense that contemporary computational cognitive scientists claim to be adherents of that position. It is argued here that there are indeed some similarities between Aristotle's theory and that of contemporary functionalists but that the differences between them make it misleading, at best, for functionalists to look to Aristotle for ancient support. In particular, it is argued that Aristotle would not have--indeed, specifically did not--support the claim, central to functionalism, that the mind can in principle be transported from one body to another simply by instantiating in the new body some set of organizational properties that were instantiated in the old.     

Parental Attributions of the Causes of Their Children's Behavior

We investigated causal attributions parents made regarding their children's best and worst behavior while the children were taking methylphenidate (MPH) for Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Twenty-six parents were surveyed each week for six weeks using the Parent Attribution Scale-Revised. This scale measures parents' attributions of the causes for their children's behavior when taking MPH to treat symptoms of ADHD. When attributing causes for best behavior, the parents rated their children's effort most often followed by their own effort and the positive medication effects. When attributing causes for worst behavior, the parents rated their children's lack of effort most often followed by inadequate medication effects and their own lack of effort. Our study suggests that parents rate effort most often when making attributions for their children's best and worst behavior. When making attributions for best behavior only, parents saw no difference between their own efforts and the effects of medication. When making attributions for worst behavior only, parents were more likely to blame their children's lack of effort and the ineffectiveness of medication more often than their own lack of effort.     

VISUAL IDENTITY MATCHING AND AUDITORY-VISUAL MATCHING: A PROCEDURAL NOTE

After preliminary computerized training on visual-visual identity matching, a 5-year-old boy with autism (Sam) was given visual-visual and auditory-visual matching-to-sample tests with new stimuli. He did well in matching dictated name samples to 20 pictures, 26 printed upper case letters, and 9 single-digit numbers. In matching the visual stimuli (pictures, letters, or numbers) to themselves, however, he did not perform well. We then increased the number of picture comparisons per trial from two to three. In tests after this three-comparison training, Sam correctly matched on 95% of the original 20-stimulus, four-comparison, identity-matching test trials. He went on to demonstrate accurate identity matching of the numbers, letters, and new pictures. In identity-matching tests on the table top, he performed poorly until the stimulus array was made to resemble the stimulus arrangement on the computer. These findings showed that seemingly small procedural changes can influence performance and demonstrated that successful auditory-visual matching does not guarantee proficiency in visual-visual identity matching.     

IDENTIFYING WORK PREFERENCES AMONG INDIVIDUALS WITH SEVERE MULTIPLE DISABILITIES PRIOR TO BEGINNING SUPPORTED WORK

We evaluated a prework assessment for predicting work-task preferences among workers with severe multiple disabilities prior to beginning supported work. The assessment involved comparing worker selections from pairs of work tasks drawn from their future job duties. Results of workers' choices once they began their jobs in a publishing company indicated that the assessment predicted tasks that the workers preferred to work on during their job routines. Results are discussed regarding other possible means of determining preferred types of supported work.