Hans Zacharias Hoxter: Building Counseling Internationally

Counseling is an international phenomenon. This interview presents the lifework of Hans Hoxter and illustrates how the American counseling movement affects and is affected by multinational and multicultural conceptions.     

Relationship of severity of dementia to caregiving stressors

In studies of individual differences and longitudinal changes in stress and coping among dementia caregivers, assessing severity of patient impairment is critically important. It is proposed that with the progression of dementia, cognitive impairment may steadily increase, but other stressful behavioral symptoms peak at various stages of dementia. Cross-sectional data from 49 caregiving families and longitudinal follow-up data from 48 families suggest that instrumental self-care deficits begin early in dementia, and basic self-care deficits increase with dementia severity, but that many distressing behavioral symptoms decrease in late dementia. Assessments of dementia patient severity should be multidimensional, and increases and decreases in various dementia patient stressors over time should be considered as factors influencing caregiver coping.     

Frontal lobe dysfunction and memory impairment in patients with chronic progressive multiple sclerosis

Deficits in semantic encoding have been described in patients with frontal lobe disease who also show memory impairments. As a group, patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) exhibit memory impairment, fail to make effective use of semantic encoding to aid memory, and perform poorly on verbal fluency and concept formation tests which are sensitive to frontal lobe damage. In the present study the semantic encoding capacity of MS patients was measured using a modification of Wicken's release from proactive interference (PI) paradigm. Individual patients varied considerably in the severity of their impairments on verbal fluency, verbal recognition memory and on Wisconsin Card Sorting Task, but even patients who evidenced both memory impairment and signs of frontal lobe dysfunction showed normal release from PI after a categorical shift. Memory disturbances in MS are unlikely to result from an incapacity for semantic encoding, which seems preserved in MS, but may arise instead from deficits in processing information rapidly.     

Expert evidence by psychologists: Sometimes problematic and often premature

This article provides a critical review of two major types of expert evidence: (a) clinical assessments, and (b) generalizations drawn from psychological research. Strong arguments both for and against both types of testimony have been offered by legal experts and psychologists. These arguments are evaluated and the conclusion is drawn that there are two fundamental problems for psychologists in the role of expert. First, the types of assessments clinicians are asked to make (e.g., concerning the accused's mental state at the time of committing the offense) may exceed the capacity of the discipline; such assessments are problematic. Second, the research foundation that psychologists employ in court does not always apply to the court situation in the way experts imply; the application of laboratory research findings to real world contexts is sometimes premature. The article concludes with an admonition that psychologists should adopt a more conservative response to requests to provide expert evidence.     

Cognitive guidelines for simplifying medical information: Data framing and perception

In this paper, 1 describe psychological guidelines for simplifying medical information — methods to aid the perception and recognition of abnormalities in medical test reports. These techniques resemble natural human editing strategies outlined in prospect theory. The methods pre-edit data as humans do but to reduce human effort. I review empirical studies assessing these techniques and discuss needs for further research.     

Conversational skills for autistic adolescents: An autistic peer as prompter

In this study, an autistic youth served as peer prompter for three other autistic adolescents. The peer prompter encouraged the other boys to talk about sports, a topic frequently discussed by typical teenagers. A multiple-baseline design across participants was used to assess the effectiveness of the peer-prompting procedure. During baseline, the youth rarely talked about sports, although all three had previously completed a sports-appreciation class and had displayed large pre-to-post gains on a paper-and-pencil test. During intervention, when a peer prompted sports discussions, all three youth engaged in much more sports-related conversation. Generalization measures indicated that: (1) the youth engaged in sports discussions in groups, as well as in the dyads that characterized the training situation; (2) they talked about sports in a setting other than the training setting; (3) they discussed sports with their peers when an unfamiliar teacher was present; and (4) they continued to discuss sports when training tapes and behavioral contracts between the teacher and the peer prompter were withdrawn. Previously, it has been common to use nonhandicapped or less-handicapped peers as tutors; this study demonstrates that an autistic youth may also effectively serve as a prompter who assists his schoolmates in acquiring conversational skills that contribute to their normalization.     

Discrimination of facial expressions of emotion by depressed subjects

A frequent complaint of depressed people concerns their poor interpersonal relationships. Yet, although nonverbal cues are considered of primary importance in interpersonal communication, the major theories of depression focus little attention on nonverbal social perception. The present study investigated the ability of depressed, disturbed control, and normal American adults to make rapid discriminations of facial emotion. We predicted and found that depressed subjects were slower than normal subjects in facial emotion discrimination but were not slower in word category discrimination. These findings suggest that current theories of depression may need to address difficulties with nonverbal information processing. There were also no significant differences between depressed and disturbed control subjects, suggesting that the unique social-behavioral consequences of depression have yet to be identified.