The clinical representativeness of couple therapy outcome research

The clinical representativeness of outcome studies is defined as the generalizability of recruitment processes, assessment/diagnostic procedures, treatment protocols, and therapeutic results from research settings to naturalistic treatment settings. The main goal of the present study was to examine the clinical representativeness of couple therapy in outcome studies. The data set was formed by 50 published clinical trials, including 34 couple therapy outcome studies for marital distress (CTMD) and 16 couple therapy outcome studies for comorbid relational and mental disorders (CTMD + C). The present findings showed that, overall, the clinical representativeness of couple therapy outcome studies is only fair (i.e., the mean global score is slightly lower than the midpoint of the rating scale used to assess representativeness). CTMD + C studies fared better than CTMD studies on many dimensions of clinical relevance. Studies in which pretherapy training was less intensive (for CTMD studies only), treatment was less structured, and therapists were more experienced showed larger effect sizes than those in which such was not the case.     

Examining auditory kappa effects through manipulating intensity differences between sequential tones

The auditory kappa effect is a tendency to base the perceived duration of an inter-onset interval (IOI) separating two sequentially presented sounds on the degree of relative pitch distance separating them. Previous research has found that the degree of frequency discrepancy between tones extends the subjective duration of the IOI. In Experiment 1, auditory kappa effects for sound intensity were tested using a three-tone, AXB paradigm (where the intensity of tone X was shifted to be closer to either Tone A or B). Tones closer in intensity level were perceived as occurring closer in time, evidence of an auditory-intensity kappa effect. In Experiments 2 and 3, the auditory motion hypothesis was tested by preceding AXB patterns with null intensity and coherent intensity context sequences, respectively. The auditory motion hypothesis predicts that coherent sequences should enhance the perception of motion and increase the strength of kappa effects. In this study, the presence of context sequences reduced kappa effect strength regardless of the properties of the context tones.