Nursing and psychological treatments

Presents a comment on "Psychological Treatments" by D. H. Barlow. In his article, Barlow pointed to the need "to solidify the identification of psychology as a health care profession" by changing the terminology of practice in the health care context from psychotherapy to psychological treatments and suggested that the only persons qualified to carry out such interventions are doctoral-level psychologists. Unfortunately, there was no discussion of the health care professionals who already provide psychological treatments in health care settings and their contribution to the evidence base supporting such treatment. The authors find several aspects of the article to be problematic. Overall, the authors feel that suggesting that psychology should claim treatment of psychological disorders and psychological components of physical disorders in health care settings as exclusively its own domain ignores the research and clinical contributions of others.     

Training effects on dual-task performance: are there age-related differences in plasticity of attentional control?

A number of studies have suggested that attentional control skills required to perform 2 tasks concurrently become impaired with age (A. A. Hartley, 1992; J. M. McDowd & R. J. Shaw, 2000). A. A. Hartley (2001) recently observed that the age-related differences in dual-task performance were larger when the 2 tasks required similar motor responses. The present study examined the extent to which age-related deficits in dual-task performance or time sharing--in particular, dual-task performance of 2 discrimination tasks with similar motor requirements--can be moderated by training. The results indicate that, even when the 2 tasks required similar motor responses, both older and younger adults could learn to perform the tasks faster and more accurately. Moreover, the improvement in performance generalized to new task combinations involving new stimuli. Therefore, it appears that training can substantially improve dual-task processing skills in older adults.     

A reexamination of stimulus-frequency effects in recognition: two mirrors for low- and high-frequency pseudowords

The word-frequency mirror effect (more hits and fewer false alarms for low-frequency than for high-frequency words) has intrigued memory researchers, and multiple accounts have been offered to explain the result. In this study, participants were differentially familiarized to various pseudowords in a familiarization phase that spanned multiple weeks. Recognition tests given during the first week of familiarization replicated a result of W. T. Maddox and W. K. Estes (1997) that failed to show the classic word-frequency mirror effect for pseudowords; however, recognition tests given toward the end of training showed the classic mirror pattern. In addition, a stimulus-frequency mirror effect for "remember" vs. "know" judgments was obtained. These data are consistent with an account of the mirror effect that posits the involvement of dual processes for episodic recognition.     

Learning phonotactic constraints from brief auditory experience

Three experiments asked whether phonotactic regularities not present in English could be acquired by adult English speakers from brief listening experience. Subjects listened to consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syllables displaying restrictions on consonant position. Responses in a later speeded repetition task revealed rapid learning of (a) first-order regularities in which consonants were restricted to particular positions (e.g. [baep] not *[paeb]), and (b) second-order regularities in which consonant position depended on the adjacent vowel (e.g. [baep] or [pIb], not *[paeb] or *[bIp]). No evidence of learning was found for second-order regularities in which consonant position depended on speaker's voice. These results demonstrated that phonotactic constraints are rapidly learned from listening experience and that some types of contingencies (consonant-vowel) are more easily learned than others (consonant-voice).     

Honoring and Privileging Personal Experience and Knowledge: Ideas for a Narrative Therapy Approach to the Training and Supervision of New Therapists

This article discusses an approach for the training and supervision of new therapists built around social constructionist and poststructuralist ideas from a narrative therapy perspective. We briefly discuss some of the pitfalls of current training/supervision in marriage and family therapy (MFT) that are deficit based and/or that disproportionately grant privilege to expert knowledge. We articulate this emerging training approach which utilizes the rite of passage metaphor, centers relationalism, and incorporates the honoring and privileging of new therapists' lived experience, knowledges, skills, talents, ideas, morals, personal ethics, values, beliefs. Concrete practices of experience privileging, re-membering, and creating communities of concern are detailed, and illustrative examples from our supervision work are given.     

Enhancing Young Infants’ Representations of Physical Events Through Improved Retrieval (Not Encoding) of Information

Infants’ representations of physical events are surprisingly flexible. Brief exposure to one event can immediately enhance infants’ representations of another event. The present experiments tested two potential mechanisms underlying this priming: enhanced encoding or improved retrieval. Five-month-olds saw a target block become hidden inside a container, followed by priming events that involved a second block. The target was subsequently withdrawn from the container. Infants noticed a change to the target’s height after seeing priming events involving occlusion, but they failed to so do if priming events involved no occlusion (Experiment 1). Infants noticed the change even when the priming and target blocks were not identical (Experiment 2). Because the target became fully hidden before the priming events started, priming must have arisen from improved retrieval, not enhanced encoding, of information about the target. The results add to our understanding of how brief observation of one event can affect infants’ processing of subsequent events, thereby elucidating fine-grained aspects of the representational process.