Psychoeducational Croups With Older Adults: An Integrative Personal Construct Rationale And Some Guidelines

A psychoeducational approach is proposed as an alternative to exclusively therapeutic work with older adults in recreational settings. An integrative rationale based on personal construct theory and some general guidelines for the group leader are presented. Two possible psychoeducational group formats (guided autobiography and coping skills) are discussed.     

The co-constructed therapy alliance and the technical and tactical quality of the therapist interventions in psychotherapy

This study sought to describe a brief review of studies conducted on the therapeutic alliance, taking into consideration therapeutic process and outcomes. We seek to reflect about the need to encourage the communities who engage in and conduct research on clinical practice not only to implement surveys of empirically validated measures of therapeutic outcomes, but also make them a regular practice among all clinical mental health psychotherapists. We therefore suggest the following paradigm – the Practice Based on Evidence of Results (PBER) – as a way to improve the quality of technical and tactical interventions of psychotherapists     

A Sullivanian Approach to the Problem of Reading Disability: Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Data

Since reading disabilities resemble operationally hysterical disorders, the applicability of some of Sullivan's (1947, 1956) conceptions about hysteria in the understanding of this symptom was explored. To this end a measure was designed to assess the degree to which children are sensitive and selectively attentive to hypocritical, insincere, and plain “silly” aspects of the world around them and/or their readiness to understand the sincere precepts of their culture. The instrument was essentially a modification and extension of the Verbal Absurdities items and the Proverb items of the Stanford-Binet Test (Terman & Merrill, 1960). If Sullivan's notions were applicable, then youngsters with reading disabilities should do better than their adequately reading control subjects on the Absurdity items; the reverse relationship was expected on the Proverbs items. Twenty children with marked reading retardation and a matched control group of equal size and reading at grade level expectancy served as research populations. All measures calculated rendered results supporting the hypotheses advanced at better than the .05 level of confidence. The implications of these findings for the theoretical understanding of the reading disability symptom from a Sullivanian vantage point are discussed.     

Treatment effectiveness of PMTO for children's behavior problems in Iceland: Assessing parenting practices in a randomized controlled trial

Findings are presented from an Icelandic randomized control trial (RCT) evaluating parent management training – Oregon model (PMTO?), a parent training intervention designed to improve parenting practices and reduce child behavior problems. In a prior report from this effectiveness study that focused on child outcomes, children in the PMTO condition showed greater reductions in reported child adjustment problems relative to the comparison group. The present report focuses on observed parenting practices as the targeted outcome, with risk by treatment moderators also tested. It was hypothesized that mothers assigned to the PMTO condition would show greater gains in pre‐post parenting practices relative to controls. The sample was recruited from five municipalities throughout Iceland and included 102 participating families of children with behavior problems. Cases were referred by community professionals and randomly assigned to either PMTO (n = 51) or community services usually offered (n = 51). Child age ranged from 5 to 12 years; 73% were boys. Contrary to expectations, findings showed no main effects for changes in maternal parenting. However, evaluation of risk by treatment moderators showed greater gains in parenting practices for mothers who increased in depressed mood within the PMTO group relative to their counterparts in the comparison group. This finding suggests that PMTO prevented the expected damaging effects of depression on maternal parenting. Failure to find hypothesized main effects may indicate that there were some unobserved factors regarding the measurement and a need to further adapt the global observational procedures to Icelandic culture.