A metaphor analysis in treatments of depression: Metaphor as a marker of change

This paper examines the use of ‘burden' metaphors relating to the experience of depression in one good and one poor outcome process-experiential short-term psychotherapy dyad. Burden-metaphors are meaningful as they appear to characterize the way these clients experience the course of their depressions (e.g. Korman & Angus, 1995). Understanding how these experiences are dealt with in productive therapies, as compared to less-productive treatments, can aid in therapist training and in developing therapeutic programmes for depressed clients. The Experiencing Scale (Klein et al., 1970) and the Narrative Process Coding System (Angus et al., 1996) are used to examine the processes at play when burden-metaphors are used in the good and the poor therapy. Results indicate that, in the good outcome dyad, metaphors of ‘being burdened' were transformed into metaphors of ‘unloading the burden' over the course of the therapy, while there was no transformation evident in the poor-outcome dyad. The good outcome therapy tended to have a higher level of experiencing when discussing burden-metaphors, in comparison with the poor-outcome therapy. Furthermore, the successful dyad tended to more often use internal narrative sequences (as identified by the NPCS) in the exploraiton of metaphoric expression.     

Narrative Process Coding System in Marital and Family Therapy: An Intensive Case Analysis of the Formation of a Therapeutic System

The aim of this study is to investigate whether the method (Narrative Processes Coding System) for studying the narrative sequences of individual psychotherapy developed by Angus and Hardtke (1994) can be applied in a family therapeutic process. According to the results narrative process coding system adds new dimensions and gives new depth in the narrative understanding of family therapeutic process. In micro-analytic interactional level it shows the complicated interactions between narration, plot, and narrative process type.     

Implicit and Explicit Attitudes to Alcohol in Alcohol Dependent and Non-Alcohol Dependent Samples

Measures of implicit and explicit attitudes to alcohol have been used to predict drinking behavior. Early studies with the bipolar Implicit Association Test (IAT) indicated that heavy drinkers hold negative implicit attitudes to alcohol. More recent studies using the unipolar IAT have found that positive implicit attitudes to alcohol are associated with drinking behavior in samples of university students. The present study is the first to use a unipolar single target IAT to assess positive alcohol-related attitudes in two samples with alcohol dependency compared to a non-alcohol dependent control group. A group of recently detoxed alcohol dependent adults entering a treatment program (n?=?22), a group of alcohol dependent adults who had been in treatment for 3 months (n?=?22), and a group of age matched adults who had no history of alcohol dependence (n?=?22) were compared on a positive unipolar single target IAT and an explicit attitude measure. Results indicated that alcohol dependent participants showed stronger positive implicit attitudes, and stronger negative explicit associations compared to non-alcohol dependent participants, but there were no differences between the two groups with alcohol dependency. The findings are discussed in terms of the role of the IAT as an assessment tool for those undertaking treatment for alcohol problems and the implications for targeting unconscious attitudes to alcohol in a clinical setting.     

Stimulus-based lexical distinctiveness as a general word-recognition mechanism

Word recognition is generally assumed to be achieved via competition in the mental lexicon between phonetically similar word forms. However, this process has so far been examined only in the context of auditory phonetic similarity. In the present study, we investigated whether the influence of word-form similarity on word recognition holds in the visual modality and with the patterns of visual phonetic similarity. Deaf and hearing participants identified isolated spoken words presented visually on a video monitor. On the basis of computational modeling of the lexicon from visual confusion matrices of visual speech syllables, words were chosen to vary in visual phonetic distinctiveness, ranging from visually unambiguous (lexical equivalence class [LEC] size of 1) to highly confusable (LEC size greater than 10). Identification accuracy was found to be highly related to the word LEC size and frequency of occurrence in English. Deaf and hearing participants did not differ in their sensitivity to word LEC size and frequency. The results indicate that visual spoken word recognition shows strong similarities with its auditory counterpart in that the same dependencies on lexical similarity and word frequency are found to influence visual speech recognition accuracy. In particular, the results suggest that stimulus-based lexical distinctiveness is a valid construct to describe the underlying machinery of both visual and auditory spoken word recognition.     

Development of prospective memory: tasks based on the prefrontal-lobe model.

This study investigated the development of prospective memory using tasks based on the prefrontal-lobe model. Three groups each of 30 children, adolescents, and young adults were compared on prospective-memory performance using ongoing tasks with two levels of cognitive demand (low and high), and two levels of importance (unstressed and stressed) of remembering prospective cues. The Self-Ordered Pointing Task (SOPT), Stroop Color Word Interference Test, and Tower of London were also used to assess relationships between prospective memory and prefrontal-lobe functions. The children remembered fewer prospective cues than either the adolescents or adults, but the adolescents and adults remembered equally well. This trend increased significantly as the cognitive demand of the ongoing tasks increased. However, stressing or not stressing the importance of remembering made no difference to prospective-memory performance. Performance on the SOPT and Stroop Colour Word Interference predicted performance on the high- but not on the low-demand condition. These findings implicate the maturation of the brain's prefrontal region in the development of prospective memory.     

Definition and Power: Toward Authority without Privilege

Feminists have urged women to take semantic authority. I explain what such authority is, how it depends upon community recognition, and how it differs from privilege and from authority as usually conceived under patriarchy. Understanding its nature and limits is an important part of attaining it. Understanding the role of community explains why separatism is the logical conclusion of this project and why separatism is valuable even to those who do not separate.     

The developing role of prosody in novel word interpretation

This study examined whether children use prosodic correlates to word meaning when interpreting novel words. For example, do children infer that a word spoken in a deep, slow, loud voice refers to something larger than a word spoken in a high, fast, quiet voice? Participants were 4- and 5-year-olds who viewed picture pairs that varied along a single dimension (e.g., big vs. small flower) and heard a recorded voice asking them, for example, “Can you get the blicket one?” spoken with either meaningful or neutral prosody. The 4-year-olds failed to map prosodic cues to their corresponding meaning, whereas the 5-year-olds succeeded (Experiment 1). However, 4-year-olds successfully mapped prosodic cues to word meaning following a training phase that reinforced children’s attention to prosodic information (Experiment 2). These studies constitute the first empirical demonstration that young children are able to use prosody-to-meaning correlates as a cue to novel word interpretation.     

An item response theory analysis of the Problem Gambling Severity Index

Increases in the availability of gambling heighten the need for a short screening measure of problem gambling. The Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) is a brief measure that allows for the assessment of characteristics of gambling behavior and severity and its consequences. The authors evaluate the psychometric properties of the PGSI using item response theory methods in a representative sample of the urban adult population in South Africa (N = 3,000). The PGSI items were evaluated for differential item functioning (DIF) due to language translation. DIF was not detected. The PGSI was found to be unidimensional, and use of the nominal categories model provided additional information at higher values of the underlying construct relative to a simpler binary model. This study contributes to the growing literature supporting the PGSI as the screen of choice for assessing gambling problems in the general population.     

Perceived Benefits Following Sport Injury: A Qualitative Examination of their Antecedents and Underlying Mechanisms

The purpose of the present study was to describe the development and validation of the Self-Talk Questionnaire (S-TQ), designed to measure two functions of self-talk strategies, namely the motivational function and the cognitive function, used by athletes to enhance their sport performances. The study was conducted in three phases. The first phase targeted item selection and content relevance. The second phase set out to test the factor structure of the instrument. The aim of the third phase was focused on further examination of the psychometric properties of the instrument. The results of an exploratory factor analysis provided adequate support for the instrument. The S-TQ consists of 11 items, representing two factors (motivational and cognitive). A confirmatory factor analysis showed an acceptable fit to the data. The factors were internally consistent, the correlations with external criteria were significant, and test-retest reliability values were very good. Examining the relationships between the S-TQ and similar constructs supported convergent validity. Discriminant validity was supported by correlations between the S-TQ and a different construct. The S-TQ appears to be a promising psychometric instrument that can be used in research and psychological intervention programs.