Family therapy for the borderline patient

Family therapy can be an appropriate modality of treatment for borderline patients: family sessions may be helpful in making order out of chaos in the system. It also takes into account the fear of separation and other developmental issues which are of concern to the borderline patient. Issues related to the structure and format of sessions in the beginning and middle phase of therapy are discussed. Progress and treatment implications including transference reactions are examined. We have concluded that the family members in a case presented have become considerably stronger and more independent. Their current developmental level indicates that we can begin to work on intrapsychic factors.     

Running: An adjunctive group therapy technique

Group therapists who work with severely disturbed patients know that group sessions are often characterized by verbal rambling, frequent and prolonged pauses and high levels of anxiety on the part of group members. This article focuses on the use of a group activity— namely, running—as an adjunct to group psychotherapy. A brief case report will illustrate the application of this innovative treatment technique; then issues that may arise when one leads a running group are dealt with in a question- and -answer format.The author wishes to express his appreciation to Mrs. Vera Kohn for editorial assistance in the preparation of this article.     

The effects of strategy—Monitoring training on children's selection of effective memory strategies

Second grade children were given training in general principles of strategy monitoring prior to being exposed to differentially effective acquisition strategies in a memory task. The results showed that even though both experimental and placebo control groups could assess when they remembered better, more experimental than control children attributed performance differences to their strategic behavior and then selected the more effective strategy on a forced-choice trial. These findings indicate that instruction in general memory-monitoring principles is sufficient to effect a change in strategy usage. The study therefore provides direct experimental support for the presumed relationship between metacognitive knowledge and subsequent strategy use.     

A further consideration in the application of an analysis-of-variance model for the intrasubject replication design

It is argued that the analysis-of-variance model is inappropriate for assessing treatment effects in single-subject designs. In particular, such designs are demonstrated to violate the crucial assumption concerning the statistical independence of observations. Alternative methods of data analysis are suggested.     

The role of overt activity in children's sentence production

Nursery schooler's abilityto associate pairs of toys was assessed under four experimental conditions: (1) control, (2) S manipulating the toys, (3) S generating a sentence, and (4) S generating a sentence while manipulating the toys. All three S-involvement conditions produced significantly better recognition performance than the control but contrary to initial predictions, the difference between the sentence-only and sentence-plus-manipulation conditions was not significant. In contrast to previous research, Ss in the sentence-only conditions had little difficulty producing sentences when asked. Of interest was the finding that the quality of sentence production was poorer in the sentence-plus-manipulation condition than in the sentence-only condition. Results are discussed in terms of the possible “conflict” produced when the child is required to engage in more than one overt activity simultaneously.     

Developmental differences in frequency judgments of words and pictures

Children in kindergarten, third, and fifth grades were presented a list of either pictures or words (with items presented for varying numbers of times on the study trial). In both picture and word conditions, half of the Ss estimated how many times each item had been presented (absolute judgments) and the other half judged which of two items had occurred more often on the study trial (relative judgments). The primary finding was that while frequency judgment performance improved with age for both pictures and words, there was relatively greater improvement for pictures (i.e., the picture-word difference increased with age). These results lend strong support to the frequency theory of discrimination learning and, in particular, may be useful in accounting for effects associated with age and with age by stimulus mode interactions.     

A developmental study of pronouncing responses in the discrimination learning of words and pictures

Subjects at three age levels were administered picture pair or word pair discrimination lists. They pronounced or pointed as a method of choice, and they pronounced or pointed at the correct item (or remained silent) during rehearsal. The results indicated that with picture pairs, pronunciation facilitated learning as a method of choice and a type of rehearsal in nursery school Ss. For fifth grade and college Ss, there was no significant difference between pronouncing and pointing as a method of choice. However, spoken rehearsal was superior to control performance for fifth grade Ss. College Ss performed equally well in the control and pronouncing conditions, but pointing during rehearsal produced significantly more errors than pronouncing. Word pairs produced no significant pronunciation effects. These results were discussed within an internalization of speech perspective.     

The occurrence of an increase in correlation by restriction of range

Given three variables,x, y, z, univariate selection onx, usually reduces the correlationr _{y z} . However, in some cases, whenr _{x y} orr _{x z} assumes extreme values,r _{y z} may increase. This reversal is explained by comparison to the effects of suppressor variables and predictors of predictability.     

Phenomenal background frequency and the concreteness/imagery effect in verbal discrimination learning

College students gave frequency ratings for concrete and abstract words which were equated on normative frequency. The results replicated the finding of Galbraith and Underwood (1973) that abstract words are perceived to be higher in frequency than concrete words. Different subjects then learned verbal discrimination lists consisting of both abstract and concrete pairs. While the usual concreteness effect was obtained when abstract and concrete items differed widely on phenomenal frequency, it disappeared when these items were equated on perceived frequency. The finding that appropriate frequency manipulations can eliminate the concreteness/imagery effect, coupled with similar findings for other stimulus characteristics, lends strong support to the frequency theory of discrimination learning.     

Picture-word differences and conceptual frequency judgments

Recent evidence suggests that while pictures are more easily recognized, discriminated, associated, and recalled than their corresponding verbal labels, this is not the case in concept acquisition/utilization tasks. If such evidence is interpreted in terms of a "frequency theory" perspective, one would expect the typically obtained frequency judgment differences between pictures and words to be reduced if "conceptual" frequency judgments are required. This expectation was confirmed in three experiments.