Engaging families in therapy: A pilot study

Engagement is reviewed as a central component of marriage and family therapy and presented as a viable means of assessing the nature and outcome of therapy. A tentative model containing six differentiated engagement categories is described and documented with clinical data and case examples. Conclusions drawn indicate engagement has merit as a construct for evaluating marriage and family therapy and as a means of generating process hypotheses in research. Recommendations to validate, refine and revise the model are posited and further research relative to engagement is advocated.James P. Trotzer, Ph.D. is Professor of Counselor Education at the University of Visconsin-River Falls, River Falls, Wisconsin 54022, marriage and family therapist in private practice     

Abstraction of contingency in concept learning

It is generally agreed that concept learning involves the abstraction of some general representation or schema. Just what is abstracted, however, and how it is used in the classification of sets of stimuli in the natural world or in the laboratory, remain outstanding questions. In this paper a hypothesis involving contingency abstraction is described as a possible solution to these questions. An experiment which manipulated measured contingency in a concept-learning task, and which offered empirical support for the hypothesis, is reported. The advantages of a contingency-abstraction theory of concept learning are briefly discussed.     

Degree of consistent training: Improvements in search performance and automatic process development

Previous research has shown substantial improvements in detection performance when subjects consistently detect a subset of stimuli. In contrast, in conditions in which stimuli appear as both targets and distractors, there is little performance improvement with practice. The present experiments examine how varying degrees of consistency determine the improvement of detection accuracy with extended practice. The degree of consistency was varied by manipulating the frequency with which a letter was a distractor while holding the number of occurrences as a target constant. The experiments utilized a multiple-frame target-detection search paradigm in which subjects were to detect single-letter targets in a series of rapidly presented letters on four channels. Experiments showed that detection performance improvement with practice was a monotonic function of the degree of consistency, decreasing to zero as the target-to-distractor ratio increased from 10:0 to 10:20. As consistency decreased, detection performance asymptoted earlier and at a lower level. A dual-task experiment examined subjects’ ability to perform the previously trained search task as a secondary task. Results showed that the previous targetto-distractor consistency had a marked effect on resource sensitivity of the detection task. The general issues of consistency in the development of skilled performance and in the development of automatic processing are discussed.     

Counting eliminates the repetition effect in judgments of temporal duration.

College student subjects estimated the duration of time intervals (8–54 sec) by counting or not (N=35 per group). Counting eliminated the repetition effect (a decline in the magnitude of estimations across trials), and resulted in a truncation of the psychophysical function. The former result was interpreted as contrary to Treisman's (1963) model. The latter result was attributed to the effortfulness of counting, which was established in a subsequent experiment.     

A feminist's look at freud's feminine psychology

The psychology of women is admittedly incomplete and fragmentary, and sometimes it does not sound altogether flattering. You must not forget, however, that we have only described women in so far as their natures are determined by their sexual function. The influence of this factor is, of course, very far-reaching, but we must remember that an individual woman may be a human being apart from this. If you want to know more about feminity, you must interrogate your own experience, or turn to the poets, or else wait until Science can give you more profound and more coherent information.     

The contribution of relaxation and expectancy to fear reduction via graded, imaginal exposure to feared stimuli

Speech phobic subjects received five treatment sessions under either positive or neutral expectancy set. Therapy conditions included hierarchy exposure with contiguous relaxation (desensitization), exposure with noncontiguous relaxation, exposure only, and no-treatment. Expectancy had virtually no outcome effects. Desensitization was superior to the other conditions on subjective outcome measures. In contrast to the two exposure conditions without contiguous relaxation, desensitization resulted in increased imagery vividness, greater cardiovascular response to the first visualization of the initial hierarchy scene, and greater declines in cardiovascular response within repetitious visualizations of scenes and across initial visualizations of increasingly anxiety-provoking scenes. Expectancy significantly influenced both fear ratings and cardiovascular response to scenes during the first session, the latter effect disappearing after the first session. The results are discussed in terms of recent theorizing regarding the role of relaxation and expectancy in desensitization.