The Relevance of the Rorschach and Patient–Examiner Relationship in Treatment Planning and Outcome Assessment

In this era of evidence-based mental health care, traditional forms of depth-oriented psychotherapy and psychological assessment have been marginalized in graduate training in clinical psychology. As a counterpoint, this article presents the evaluation and treatment of an adolescent client, along with an outcome assessment, and illustrates ways that aspects of traditional psychological testing, including the Rorschach (Exner, 1986) and the patient–examiner relationship, can enhance psychodiagnosis and treatment planning. Additionally, this case illustrates ways that test data can illuminate the concept of underlying disturbance and its utility in diagnostic formulation, treatment planning, and outcome assessment.     

Mental Health among Youth in South Australia: A Survey of Flourishing,Languishing, Struggling,and Floundering

The Complete State Model of Mental Health was used to describe the prevalence of flourishing, languishing, struggling, and floundering in life in a sample of young South Australians (n = 3,913; 13–17 years, 52% female). Categorisation was based on the relative proportion of mental health and mental illness symptoms reported on standardised measures and the association of these categories to health‐risk behaviour. Variability in categories and health‐risk behaviour due to gender or region was investigated. Results indicated that a disturbingly small proportion of adolescents (<50%) were flourishing in life, that poorer states of mental health were associated with increased health‐risk behaviour, and that the propensity to engage in health‐risk behaviour did vary by gender and region. The current study extends the platform from which positively focused mental health strategies can be tailored and launched to meet the mental health needs of adolescents.     

Sustained Attention and the Type a Behavior Pattern: The Effect of Daydreaming on Performance

The present study examined the ability of Type A and Type B subjects to sustain attention during a 40-min visual vigilance task. It was predicted that Type A subjects would perform better than Type B subjects and that the performance of both groups would be related to the frequency of daydreams during the vigil. Type A subjects outperformed Type B subjects with regard to perceptual sensitivity (A') and number of signal detections. Although both groups reported an increase in the number of their daydreams as the vigil progressed, Type A subjects reported fewer daydreams during each period of watch than did Type B subjects. In addition, an inverse relationship was found between the number of signal detections and the frequency of daydreams.     

Memory and metacognition for piano melodies: Illusory advantages of fixed- over random-order practice

Some learning schedules can foster an illusion of competence, whereby the learner feels that the skill will be retained better than it actually will be. Consider fixed-order practice, in which a person practices a task repeatedly before switching to the next task (e.g., task order A, A, B, B); in contrast, in random-order practice, a person randomly alternates among two or more tasks (e.g., task order C, D, D, C). In the present experiment, participants (n = 25) who had formal training in piano practiced melodies under fixed- or random-order conditions (within-subjects), and then returned for a retention test 2 days later. Initially, the participants performed faster on melodies practiced in a fixed-order. However, on a retention test 2 days later, participants were faster with melodies from the random-order condition. Despite the within-subjects design, which facilitated the comparison of practice conditions, participants’ metacognitive judgments indicated an illusion of competence, whereby they erroneously believed that fixed-order practice would result in faster retention performance. Our results suggest that even some trained musicians may use ease of acquisition as a heuristic for predicting future performance.     

Empirical certainty and the theory of important criteria

Philosophers frequently treat certainty as some sort of absolute, while ordinary men typically do not. According to the Theory of Important Criteria, on which the present paper is based, this difference is not to be explained in terms of ambiguity or vagueness in the word ‘certain’, but rather in terms of disagreement between ordinary men and philosophers as to the importance of one of the criteria of the ordinary sense of ‘certain’. I argue that there is reason to think that certainty is some sort of absolute, and thus that no empirical statement is certain. And in any case, the problem of empirical certainty is not a pseudo‐problem, as metaphilosophers like Wittgenstein and Wisdom have thought.     

Responsibility Allocation and Human Rights

How does morality allocate responsibility for what it requires? I am concerned here with one fundamental part of this question, namely, how morality determines responsibility when multiple agents are capable of contributing to or completing a moral task, and special relationships capable of generating duties with respect to the task are non-existent, insufficient as a moral response, or partly indeterminate. On one view, responsibility falls to the agents who can bear it with the least burden. I show why this is initially attractive and mistaken. Instead, I defend an equity-based approach that accommodates the intuitions that both support and trouble the least-cost principle. One upshot is that sometimes we ought prefer a distribution of responsibility that is more expensive and less local than needed to complete the task. I illustrate the practical significance of the argument in terms of the human rights of refugees.     

A Cognitive-Behavioral-Based Workshop Intervention for Maladaptive Perfectionism

Maladaptive perfectionism (MP) can have adverse consequences for mental and physical health and can interfere with treatment success for various conditions. Theoretical conceptualizations of MP largely surround overly rigid and self-critical thinking as well as excessively high standards. Treatment for MP thus often focuses on these cognitive aspects and has been successful, albeit lengthy. The present study evaluated a brief cognitive-behavioral workshop for those with high, moderate, and low MP, which was defined as a composite of perfectionism subscales that included concern over mistakes, doubting of actions, parental criticism, parental expectations, and discrepancy. Workshop components focused on psychoeducation about MP, setting high standards, fearing mistakes and doubting oneself, and preventing distress and maintaining gains. Ratings of MP as well as anxiety, depression, and distress were significantly lower from pre-treatment across post-treatment and 3-week and 3-month follow-up assessments for those with high and moderate MP. Participants with low MP showed no significant change over time, as expected. The workshop thus provided a useful, brief, and cost-effective intervention for MP and related distress. Clinical implications are discussed, including routine assessment of MP in clinical practice, intervention for MP early in the clinical process, specific focus on self-criticism and setting high standards, and implementation in university counseling centers. Recommendations for future research are also discussed, including dismantling of workshop components, identifying treatment mechanisms, expanding to clinical populations, evaluating more diverse samples, and understanding the possible preventative aspects of a workshop approach.     

Less Religion,Better Society? On Religion,Secularity, and Prosperity in Scandinavia

Abstract : Phil Zuckerman argues in his book Society without God that Scandinavian secularity is strongly correlated to Scandinavian prosperity. In this article, we argue that such usage is premature. First, there are methodological issues that are not properly dealt with. Second, providing a causal narrative in addition to mere correlation is needed. Third, we argue that the causes of Scandinavian prosperity are found in close connection to Scandinavian Lutheranism.     

Propensity for risk taking and trait impulsivity in the Iowa Gambling Task

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is sensitive to decision making impairments in several clinical groups with frontal impairment. However the complexity of the IGT, particularly in terms of its learning requirements, makes it difficult to know whether disadvantageous (risky) selections in this task reflect deliberate risk taking or a failure to recognise risk. To determine whether propensity for risk taking contributes to IGT performance, we correlated IGT selections with a measure of propensity for risk taking from the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), taking into account potential moderating effects of IGT learning requirements, and trait impulsivity, which is associated with learning difficulties. We found that IGT and BART performance were related, but only in the later stages of the IGT, and only in participants with low trait impulsivity. This finding suggests that IGT performance may reflect different underlying processes in individuals with low and high trait impulsivity. In individuals with low trait impulsivity, it appears that risky selections in the IGT reflect in part, propensity for risk seeking, but only after the development of explicit knowledge of IGT risks after a period of learning.