Predictors of Health Care Use Among Individuals Seeking Therapy for Marital and Family Problems: An Exploratory Study

A number of studies have examined variables associated with health care use. However, no study is known to have considered health care use among people seeking services for marital and family problems. In this study, health care use of persons (N = 110) seeking these services was investigated to determine the strongest psychosocial correlates of health care use. The goal was to identify potential “targets” of clinical intervention that may be driving excessive health care use. “Informational support” and “somatization” were the strongest correlates for the complete sample, with the model explaining 24% of the variance in health care use. For “high users” of health care, “hostility” was the strongest correlate, accounting for more than 36% of the variance in health care use.     

Transdiagnostic internet treatment for anxiety and depression: a randomised controlled trial

Disorder-specific cognitive behavioural therapy programs delivered over the internet (iCBT) with clinician guidance are effective at treating specific anxiety disorders and depression. The present study examined the efficacy of a transdiagnostic iCBT protocol to treat three anxiety disorders and/or depression within the same program (the Wellbeing Program). Seventy-seven individuals with a principal diagnosis of major depression, generalised anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and/or social phobia were randomly assigned to a Treatment or Waitlist Control group. Treatment consisted of CBT-based online educational lessons and homework assignments, weekly email or telephone contact from a clinical psychologist, access to a moderated online discussion forum, and automated emails. Eighty one percent of Treatment group participants completed all 8 lessons within the 10 week program. Post-treatment data were collected from 34/37 Treatment group and 35/37 Control group participants, and 3-month follow-up data were collected from 32/37 Treatment group participants. Relative to Controls, Treatment group participants reported significantly reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression as measured by the Depression Anxiety and Stress Scales-21 item, Patient Health Questionnaire-9 item, and Generalised Anxiety Disorder-7 item scales, with corresponding between-groups effect sizes (Cohen’s d) at post treatment of.56,.58, and.52, respectively. The clinician spent a mean time of 84.76 min (SD = 50.37) per person over the program. Participants rated the procedure as highly acceptable, and gains were sustained at follow-up. These results provide preliminary support for the efficacy of transdiagnostic iCBT in the treatment of anxiety and depressive disorders.     

Evolved navigation theory and horizontal visual illusions

Environmental perception is prerequisite to most vertebrate behavior and its modern investigation initiated the founding of experimental psychology. Navigation costs may affect environmental perception, such as overestimating distances while encumbered (Solomon, 1949). However, little is known about how this occurs in real-world navigation or how it may have evolved. We manipulated the most commonly navigated surfaces with a non-intuitive cost derived from evolved navigation theory. Observers in realistic settings unknowingly overestimated horizontal distances that contained a risk of falling and did so by the relative degree of falling risk. This manipulation produced previously unknown, large magnitude illusions in everyday vision in the environments most commonly navigated by humans. These results bear upon predictions from multiple fundamental theories of visual cognition.     

Integrative problem-centered metaframeworks therapy II: planning, conversing, and reading feedback

This is the second of 2 articles presenting Integrative Problem Centered Metaframeworks (IPCM) Therapy, a multisystemic, integrative, empirically informed, and common factor perspective for family, couple, and individual psychotherapy. The first article presented IPCM's foundation concepts and Blueprint for therapy, focusing on the first Blueprint component—Hypothesizing or assessment. This article, focusing on intervention, presents the other 3 Blueprint components—Planning, Conversing, and Feedback. Articulated through the Blueprint, intervention is a clinical experimental process in which therapists formulate hypotheses about the set of constraints (the Web) within a client system that prevents problem resolution, develop a therapeutic Plan based on those hypotheses, implement the Plan through a coconstructed dialogue with the clients, and then evaluate the results. If the intervention is not successful, the results become feedback to modify the Web, revise the Plan, and intervene again. Guided by the therapeutic alliance, this process repeats until the presenting problems resolve. IPCM Planning sequentially integrates the major empirically and yet‐to‐be empirically validated therapies and organizes their key strategies and techniques as common factors. Conversing and Feedback employ empirical STIC^® (Systemic Therapy Inventory of Change) data collaboratively with clients to formulate hypotheses and evaluate interventions. This article emphasizes the art and science of IPCM practice.     

A perceptually based comparison of image similarity metrics

The assessment of how well one image matches another forms a critical component both of models of human visual processing and of many image analysis systems. Two of the most commonly used norms for quantifying image similarity are L1 and L2, which are specific instances of the Minkowski metric. However, there is often not a principled reason for selecting one norm over the other. One way to address this problem is by examining whether one metric, better than the other, captures the perceptual notion of image similarity. This can be used to derive inferences regarding similarity criteria the human visual system uses, as well as to evaluate and design metrics for use in image-analysis applications. With this goal, we examined perceptual preferences for images retrieved on the basis of the L1 versus the L2 norm. These images were either small fragments without recognizable content, or larger patterns with recognizable content created by vector quantization. In both conditions the participants showed a small but consistent preference for images matched with the L1 metric. These results suggest that, in the domain of natural images of the kind we have used, the L1 metric may better capture human notions of image similarity.     

Parsimony and Complexity: Developing and Testing Theories of Affective Intelligence

The theory of affective intelligence posits that an individual's emotions help govern a reliance on political habits or, alternatively, deliberation and attention to new political information. Some of the evidence adduced draws on the fact that voters who are anxious about their own party's candidate do not rely blindly on their partisanship but instead consider policy and personality when they vote. In a provocative paper, Ladd and Lenz (2008 ) argue that emotions reflect an evaluative judgment, akin to likes and dislikes, that has little to say about attention and habit. Here we examine the ANES data from 1980 to 2004 and find that the affective intelligence theory's original findings remain statistically robust. On closer examination, we also learn that Ladd and Lenz reformulated the theoretical test by using a different operationalization of affect and a different dependent variable and found results at variance from ours. We find it an inappropriate test. In the end, we agree with Ladd and Lenz that cross‐sectional data cannot crisply test the short‐term impact of emotions on attention and habit and concur that ultimately experiments will move the debate forward. We further observe that Brader's (2005, 2006 ) powerful field experiments explicitly test the special effect of emotions on attention and judgment and support the affective intelligence model.     

On Habermas’s Critique of Husserl

Over four decades, Habermas has put to paper many critical remarks on Husserl’s work as occasion has demanded. These scattered critical engagements nonetheless do add up to a coherent (if contestable) position regarding the project of transcendental phenomenology. This essay provides a comprehensive reconstruction of the arguments Habermas makes and offers a critical assessment of them. With an eye in particular to the theme of intersubjectivity (a theme of fundamental interest to both thinkers), it is argued that Habermas’s arguments do indeed show up deficiencies in Husserlian phenomenology and yet that they do not succeed in proving that we must abandon the methods and tasks of phenomenological research. On the contrary, it is argued that phenomenological methods may well be needed in order to investigate certain philosophical questions that Habermas’s theory of communication has thus far only partially addressed.     

Physical self-concept and self-esteem mediate cross-sectional relations of physical activity and sport participation with depression symptoms among adolescent girls.

The authors tested whether physical self-concept and self-esteem would mediate cross-sectional relations of physical activity and sport participation with depression symptoms among 1,250 girls in 12th grade. There was a strong positive relation between global physical self-concept and self-esteem and a moderate inverse relation between self-esteem and depression symptoms. Physical activity and sport participation each had an indirect, positive relation with global physical self-concept that was independent of objective measures of cardiorespiratory fitness and body fatness. These correlational findings provide initial evidence suggesting that physical activity and sport participation might reduce depression risk among adolescent girls by unique, positive influences on physical self-concept that operate independently of fitness, body mass index, and perceptions of sports competence, body fat, and appearance.     

Prejudicial Expressions in Defense of Adolescent Masculine Identities in Interaction

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the efficacy of a fine-grained, discursive-narrative approach in the investigation of the use of prejudicial expressions in defense of emerging masculine identities in conversational interaction. The processes of masculinity construction by an adolescent, Kev, who used a prejudicial expression to bring a pejorative ‘small’ story to a climax, are examined in detail. Although immediate interlocutor responses were subdued and subtle, an explicit delayed response is followed-up by a repositioning of Kev as an ‘undesirable other,’ to which Kev constructs another small story as a counter-response. It is argued such an interactional approach to prejudice illuminates actors’ social-action goals in real time and could lead to the formulation of more sensitive interventions.