Internet and the support of psychology education

The Computers in Teaching Initiative (CTI) Centre for Psychology has been promoting the use of computers in psychology education for the last 5 years. The advent of the Internet and ubiquitous access to the World-Wide Web has the potential to revolutionize the way the teaching and learning of psychology can be supported. This paper describes how we are using the Web to support psychology education through information dissemination, through the provision of teaching resources, and through facilities for communication.     

First steps in family therapy: a personal construct analysis

This article describes the career of a small multi-disciplinary group undergoing a training in family therapy. It is a personal tale attempting to give the 'inside story' on the trainee's struggle to become an effective family therapist. The group's experience, both corporately and individually, is described using the theoretical framework and research methodology of Personal Construct Psychology.     

Modality-specific interference with overt mediation by pigeons in a delayed discrimination task

Pigeons were trained on a delayed discrimination task in which they were rewarded for pecking a white terminal stimulus (TS) presented 5 sec after a green initial stimulus (IS) and for not pecking the white TS when it followed a red IS. Each bird bridged the memory interval (MI) with overt mediational behaviors. Nevertheless, sustained retroactive interference (RI) effects were produced by houselight illumination (Experiments 1 and 3), and mild shock pulses (Experiment 5) but not white noise (Experiment 2) presented during the MI. Although the magnitude of the light-induced RI effect was proportional to the duration of houselight illumination (Experiment 4), the beginning-end effect described by W. A. Roberts and D. S. Grant (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 1978, 4, 219–236) was not observed. These results not only attest to the between-task robustness of both light-induced RI and modality-specific effects with pigeons, but also support the hypothesis that RI effects result from the disruption of mediational activities possibly analogous to rehearsal. The results further demonstrate that an event interpolated within the MI need not be unexpected or novel to produce RI. Furthermore, the interpolated event can produce modality-specific RI effects even though it effects a different sense than do the IS and TS.     

Family therapy: the rest of the picture

The specialist literature on family therapy naturally tends to focus only on the special features of what is a much larger body of skills and knowledge. To redress the balance this paper outlines the rest of the picture in various ways. About 90 separable component parts of family therapy are described. Some implications of this analysis are identified.     

BEHAVIORAL INTERVENTION STRATEGIES FOR EMPLOYMENT COUNSELING

There is currently considerable impetus for applying behavioral intervention strategies to a variety of counseling settings. This discussion seeks to extend the application of these procedures to the employment security counseling situation. Unemployment is seen as unadaptive behavior, and its antecedent conditions are examined. Behavioral counseling tactics of goal-setting, contingency management, counter-conditioning procedures, and social systems intervention are considered in relation to the employment counselor's repertoire of potential helping responses. A hypothetical case is discussed to illustrate the application of these procedures. This case includes potential applications in systematic desensitization, assertion training, modeling and behavioral rehearsal, manipulation of reinforcement contingencies, and intervention in the employment system.