2005 National Society of Genetic Counselors Presidential Address: Raising Our Voice

This Presidential Address was given at the annual education conference of the National Society of Genetic Counselors in Los Angeles, California, USA on November 14, 2005     

Onkologisch Kranke als Patienten der psychotherapeutischen Praxis

Background

The high prevalence of cancer and the considerable psychological comorbidity is a challenge for psychotherapists. There are, however, relatively few patients in outpatient psychotherapy. Aim of the study was to survey outpatient psychotherapists concerning this issue and their attitudes towards the treatment of cancer patients.

Methods

All outpatient psychotherapists of an East-German city were surveyed using semi-structured interviews.

Methods

There are various reasons for the relatively rare visits of cancer patients in psychotherapeutic practices: For instance the subjective lack of specific competence, the fear of many psychotherapists to treat physically ill people, insufficient fitting of the relatively inflexible organization structure of psychotherapeutic settings with the vicissitudes of life among physically ill people, e.g. long waiting periods until the begin of treatment, furthermore the psychotherapeutic training focuses on psychosomatic and not so much on somatopsychic perspectives. A further problem is the widespread attitude about psychic causation of cancer, which is contradictory to scientific evidence.

Conclusions

Psychotherapists who want to treat cancer patients need specific and in-depth training in psychooncology.     

Aging and visual search: automatic and controlled attentional bias to threat faces

Using a visual search paradigm, we investigated how age affected attentional bias to emotional facial expressions. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants searched for a discrepant facial expression in a matrix of otherwise homogeneous faces. Both younger and older adults showed a more effective search when the discrepant face was angry rather than happy or neutral. However, when the angry faces served as non-target distractors, younger adults' search was less effective than happy or neutral distractor conditions. In contrast, older adults showed a more efficient search with angry distractors than happy or neutral distractors, indicating that older adults were better able to inhibit angry facial expressions. In Experiment 3, we found that even a top-down search goal could not override the angry face superiority effect in guiding attention. In addition, RT distribution analyses supported that both younger and older adults performed the top-down angry face search qualitatively differently from the top-down happy face search. The current research indicates that threat face processing involves automatic attentional shift and a controlled attentional process. The current results suggest that age only influenced the controlled attentional process.     

Effects of Scope of Justice,Informant Ethnicity,and Information Frame on Attitudes towards Ethnicity-based Selection

The study ascertained whether attitudes towards ethnicity-based employment selection would be affected by three variables: scope of justice, information frame, and informant ethnicity. Using a scenario approach, results showed that (1) European New Zealanders with greater scope of justice regarding Maori people were less opposed to an employment practice that involves granting preferential treatment to Maori candidates. (2) The frame of information about ethnicity-based selection (i.e. preferential selection vs. diversity-based selection) and informant ethnicity interacted with scope of justice in exerting a significant influence on respondents' views on ethnicity-based selection. Furthermore, individuals' reactions to moral philosophers' justifications for merit or ethnicity-based selection determined their overall attitudes towards each selection practice.     

The kinesthetic spatial aftereffect as a function of the angular displacement of the joints of the arm

The magnitude of the kinesthetic spatial aftereffect following different angular displacements from the vertical and horizontal planes during stimulation was examined in two experiments using 278 Ss. Both Gibson’s direct and indirect effect were found when angular displacements were away from the vertical, however, a bimodal pattern was observed in both experiments when stimulation was away from the horizontal. An explanation for the interaxial difference cannot be provided by conventional theories and must be sought in a consideration of the structure of the joints which are involved with the production of the aftereffect.