Balancing Confidentiality and Collaboration Within Multidisciplinary Health Care Teams

As multidisciplinary perspectives are increasingly integrated into the treatment of health problems, opportunities for clinical psychologists in medical settings are expanding. Although cross-discipline collaboration is at the core of multidisciplinary treatment models, psychologists must be particularly cautious about information sharing due to their profession??s ethical standards regarding patient confidentiality. Psychologists?? ethical obligations require them to achieve a delicate balance between contributing to the treatment team and protecting patient confidentiality. In the current review, relevant ethical standards and federal guidelines are applied to everyday practices of clinical psychologists in medical settings. Additionally, recommendations for individual psychologists, health care organizations, and graduate training programs are presented.     

Talking Points: A Modulating Circle Increases Listening Effort Without Improving Speech Recognition in Young Adults

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Speech recognition is improved when the acoustic input is accompanied by visual cues provided by a talking face (Erber in Journal of Speech and Hearing Research,...     

The psychological reality of word senses

This paper tests psychologists' frequent assumption that dictionaries are psychologically realistic models of polysemy in the mental lexicon. Psychologists have not often explored the nature of polysemy, and lexicographers' methods have not involved scientific sampling of usages or informants. It is argued, however, that the lexicographic technique of citation sorting is an effective way of discovering sense differences. Here this technique was used in three tasks involving usage samples for 24 high- and low-frequency nouns varying widely in degree of polysemy in the dictionary. Analyses of agreement within and between subjects showed that subjects consistently judged and substantially agreed upon the major senses of most nouns, but that few nouns in either frequency group were perceived to have more than three significant senses. Additionally, the possibility that larger usage samples will bias people to make more sense groupings was found not to be true, suggesting that the larger number of senses lexicographers create for high-frequency words are not artifacts of larger usage samples.This research was partially supported by grants from the Spencer and Sloan Foundations to George A. Miller.     

Getting engaged: A case study and a model of the engagement period as a process of conflict-resolution

This paper addresses the problem of why so many marriages end in divorce. It develops a preventative approach to marital breakdown by proposing pre-marital counselling as a resource to be made widely available to couples. The key psychological issues which a counsellor could use as the backbone of any such counselling or therapeutic work are outlined. It is suggested that these issues are part of the psychological ‘working-through’ period during an engagement, when the couple are preparing for marriage. The psychological difficulties that an individual may be struggling with are illustrated via an account of psychodynamic psychotherapy with a young woman during the year of her engagement.     

The Psychosocial Impact of Undergoing Prophylactic Total Gastrectomy (PTG) to Manage the Risk of Hereditary Diffuse Gastric Cancer (HDGC)

Individuals identified as at high risk of developing Hereditary Diffuse Gastric Cancer (HDGC) are advised to undergo prophylactic surgery - have their stomach removed - in their early twenties. Research with (older) cancer patients who undergo gastrectomy for curative reasons suggests that gastric resection has a number of physical and psychosocial sequelae. Because it is difficult to extrapolate the findings of studies of older cancer patients to younger healthy patients who are considering prophylactic total gastrectomy (PTG), the aim of this qualitative interview study was to determine the psychosocial implications of undergoing prophylactic surgery to manage genetic risk. Fourteen men and 13 women from the UK’s Familial Gastric Cancer study who had undergone PTG were invited to participate in qualitative interviews. Most reported that undergoing surgery and convalescence was easier than anticipated. There was evidence that age affected experiences of PTG, with younger patients tending to report faster recovery times and more transient aftereffects. All saw the benefits of risk reduction as outweighing the costs of surgery. Surgery was described as having a range of physical impacts (disrupted appetite, weight loss, fatigue, GI symptoms) that had related psychological, social and economic implications. Those considering PTG need to be aware that its impact on quality of life is difficult to predict and negative sequelae may be ongoing for some individuals.     

Standing up for whom? Targets’ different goals in the confrontation of discrimination

We challenge the common interpretation of targets’ immediate confrontation in reaction to discrimination as self-serving behavior and propose different underlying motivations for this phenomenon. In five online scenario studies (N_overall = 1,447), we demonstrate across different samples and contexts that targets indicate a distinct pursuit of the following self-reported confrontation goals: individual-benefit (e.g., perpetrator apologizes); group-benefit (e.g., prejudice reduction); and distancing (e.g., demonstrating that one is different from typical group members). Furthermore, meaningful associations of the pursuits of individual-benefitting goals and group-benefitting goals with group identification, disidentification, and further collective action intentions indicate that they represent different confrontation motivations: Individual-benefitting confrontation serves to cope with the individual mistreatment of discrimination, whereas group-benefitting confrontation represents a form of collective action. Distancing goals were associated with disidentification and—unexpectedly—group identification. Our results show that the phenomenon of confrontation in reaction to discrimination can be the result of different underlying psychological processes.