The treatment of tension headache—II. EMG ‘normality’ and relaxation

A selected group of patients complaining of severe and chronic tension headache (without muscular abnormality) were given a short 3-week course of relaxation treatment. Half of the subjects received progressive relaxation instructions, while the other half received relaxation plus calming imagery. Both groups showed substantial improvements in pain behaviour and in pain experience. The improvements were synchronous and still present at the 6–8 week follow-up assessment. Although no significant differences were found between the groups, the addition of imagery appeared to produce larger improvements on a number of measures. These results were compared with those reported obtained in a previous biofeedback study and the implications of both the studies were discussed with respect to tension headache and its treatment.     

Natural science and the healing of persons

The importance of a counselor's philosophical point of departure is emphasized. Viewing the self as a conscious, free, and responsible decision-making actor in a world of substantial and self-transcendent meanings and purposes is suggested as the core of a definition that uses an existentialist point of departure. In the light of this definition, four specific inadequacies of counseling that uses a natural-scientific point of departure are identified and discussed: 1) it is overreductionistic; 2) it reinforces the view of self as helpless victim; 3) it disregards the importance of transpersonal concerns; 4) it ignores the importance of conflicting world views between therapist and client.     

The polar unities as a guide to psychotherapy

The author recognizes the need for a psychotherapy that aims to be either spiritual or wholistic to ground itself in appropriate philosophical and theological constructs. As one small step in this direction, the ontological elements as discussed by Paul Tillich are applied to some specific therapeutic issues. Striking parallels are found between Tillich's first two ontological elements (individualization-participation, and dynamics-form) and the two dimensions (cohesion and adaptability) of the circumplex model of family therapy. It is suggested that Tillich's third ontological element (freedom-destiny) throws useful light on the educational and psychotherapeutic issue of permissiveness versus authoritarianism.     

Concurrent schedules: undermatching and control by previous experimental conditions.

Five pigeons were trained on concurrent variable-interval schedules. A series of conditions in which the ratio of reinforcement rates on two keys was progressively increased and then decreased was arranged twice. The birds were then exposed to an irregular sequence of conditions. Each condition in which reinforcement was available on both keys lasted six sessions. Performance in the first, third, and sixth sessions after a condition change was analyzed. Following a condition change, preference was biased toward the preference in the last condition, but this effect largely disappeared before the sixth session of training. The birds' preferences also appeared less sensitive to reinforcement rates in early sessions after a transition. Preference in a session was a function of both the reinforcements in that session and the reinforcements obtained in as many as four or five previous sessions. The effects of reinforcements in previous sessions could be summarized by the performance in the immediately preceding session, giving a relatively simple relation between present performance and a combination of present reinforcement and prior session performance. While such hysteresis could cause undermatching when only a small number of sessions are arranged in a condition, undermatching in a stable-state performance probably arises elsewhere.     

Reliability and Validity of the Dyadic Observed Communication Scale (DOCS)

We evaluated the reliability and validity of the Dyadic Observed Communication Scale (DOCS) coding scheme, which was developed to capture a range of communication components between parents and adolescents. Adolescents and their caregivers were recruited from mental health facilities for participation in a large, multi-site family-based HIV prevention intervention study. Seventy-one dyads were randomly selected from the larger study sample and coded using the DOCS at baseline. Preliminary validity and reliability of the DOCS was examined using various methods, such as comparing results to self-report measures and examining interrater reliability. Results suggest that the DOCS is a reliable and valid measure of observed communication among parent-adolescent dyads that captures both verbal and nonverbal communication behaviors that are typical intervention targets. The DOCS is a viable coding scheme for use by researchers and clinicians examining parent-adolescent communication. Coders can be trained to reliably capture individual and dyadic components of communication for parents and adolescents and this complex information can be obtained relatively quickly.     

Adults' memories of childhood: Affect,knowing, and remembering

Adult questionnaire respondents reported, for each of a number of events, if they had experienced that event during childhood and, if so, if they remembered the experience or merely knew it had happened. Respondents also rated the emotion of each event and judged whether they would remember more about each reportedly experienced event if they spent more time trying to do so. Study 1 respondents were 96 undergraduates, whereas Study 2 tested 93 community members ranging widely in age. Respondents often reported no recollections of reportedly experienced events. Reportedly experienced events rated as emotional were more often recollected than those rated as neutral, and those rated as positive were more often recollected than those rated as negative. Predicted ability to remember more was related to current memory. Claims of remembering reportedly experienced events increased with age, but predicted ability to remember more about them declined with age.     

Self-Reported Cognitive Inconsistency in Older Adults

ABSTRACT

Insight into one's own cognitive abilities, or metacognition, has been widely studied in developmental psychology. Relevance to the clinician is high, as memory complaints in older adults show an association with impending dementia, even after controlling for likely confounds. Another candidate marker of impending dementia under study is inconsistency in cognitive performance over short time intervals. Although there has been a recent proliferation of studies of cognitive inconsistency in older adults, to date, no one has examined adults' self-perceptions of cognitive inconsistency. Ninety-four community-dwelling older adults (aged 70–91) were randomly selected from a parent longitudinal study of short-term inconsistency and long-term cognitive change in aging. Participants completed a novel 40-item self-report measure of everyday cognitive inconsistency, including parallel scales indexing perceived inconsistency 5 years ago and at present, yielding measures of past, present, and 5-year change in inconsistency. The questionnaire showed acceptable psychometric characteristics. The sample reported an increase in perceived inconsistency over time. Higher reported present inconsistency and greater 5-year increase in inconsistency were associated with noncognitive (e.g., older age, poorer ADLs, poorer health, higher depression), metacognitive (e.g., poorer self-rated memory) and neuropsychological (e.g., poorer performance and greater 5-year decline in global cognitive status, vocabulary, and memory) measures. Correlations between self-reported inconsistency and neuropsychological performance were attenuated, but largely persisted when self-rated memory and age were controlled. Observed relationships between self-reported inconsistency and measures of neuropsychological (including memory) status and decline suggest that self-perceived inconsistency may be an area of relevance in evaluating older adults for memory disorders.     

Anchoring and Adjusting in Questionnaire Responses

Do survey designers bias respondents' answers on attitude/opinion questionnaires through the organization of their survey items? We hypothesize that respondents often employ an anchoring and adjusting strategy in which their response to an initial survey item provides a cognitive anchor from which they insufficiently adjust in answering the subsequent item. Three experiments indicate that respondents often anchor and insufficiently adjust in certain situations. Ultimately, this tendency can affect reliability estimates of scales and the resultant correlations with other measures. In organizing their surveys, researchers may wish to combat this bias by intermixing items designed for different but related constructs.     

Determination of a behavioral transfer function: White-noise analysis of session-to-session response-ratio dynamics on concurrent VI VI schedules

Six pigeons were exposed to concurrent variable-interval schedules in which the programmed reinforcer ratios changed from session to session according to a pseudorandom binary sequence. This procedure corresponded to the stochastic identification paradigm (“white-noise experiment”) of systems theory and enabled the relation between log response ratios in the current session and log reinforcer ratios in all previous sessions to be determined. Such dynamic relations are called linear transfer functions. Both nonparametric and parametric representations of these, in the form of “impulse-response functions,” were determined for each bird. The session-to-session response ratios resulting from the session-to-session pseudorandom binary variations in reinforcer ratios were well predicted by the impulse-response functions identified for each pigeon. The impulse-response functions were well fitted by a second-order dynamic model involving only two parameters: a time constant and a gain. The mean time constant was 0.67 sessions, implying that the effects of abrupt changes in log reinforcer ratios should be 96% complete within about five sessions. The mean gain was 0.53, which was surprisingly low inasmuch as it should equal the sensitivity to reinforcement ratio observed under steady-state conditions. The same six pigeons were subjected to a similar experiment 10 months following the first. Despite individual differences in impulse-response functions between birds within each experiment, the impulse-response functions determined from the two experiments were essentially the same.