EFFECT OF SUPPORTED EMPLOYMENT ON THE VOCATIONAL OUTCOMES OF PERSONS WITH TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY

This paper reports the job placement of 5 males with severe traumatic brain injury. An individual placement model of supported employment was used. All individuals were placed in competitive employment and received staggered intervention over time by trained employment specialists. A multiple baseline design across persons was used to evaluate results. All individuals had been unable to work consistently or at all in competitive work environments. The range of wages was $4.25 to $5.00 per hour with an average of 339 hours of employment specialist intervention time required per case. The major problems experienced by employment specialists were insubordinate and disruptive behaviors as well as other inappropriate social behaviors displayed at the job site.     

The imaginaiy questionnaire

The experiment was designed to throw some light on the statistical problems in the analysis of questionnaire data. Previous work (unpublished) suggested that a simple choice response was partially determined by previous responses; and also that the nature of the determination was changed with changing length of series. A “null” experiment was devised in the form of a questionnaire without any questions, and the distribution of responses was studied with respect to the problems formulated.

The observations are discussed in three sections.

In the statistical discussion an alternative meaning to overall association or dissociation is advanced. This: relates association or dissociation to human behaviour in the serial response situation, rather than to qualities of the questionnaire. It is further suggested that association between specific, questions should be tested against the association in the whole questionnaire, and an appropriate treatment is indicated.

The observations depart from statistical randomness in certain ways. Answers made up almost entirely of one form of response are given less often than would be expected. Long sequences of the same type of response are relatively infrequent, and sequences of alternation of response are also rare. As the material is “null” it implies that the human concept of randomness differs from the statistical concept.

An attempt is made to define the human concept of randomness. It appears that a series of responses which has a pattern, or for which the subject can postulate a simple “cause” will not be accepted as random by the human subject. This raises problems of a perceptual and cognitive nature. It also has a bearing on the design of questionnaires. or experiments involving serial responses.     

Letters to the Editor

Pastoral Psychology -     

Towards case-specific applications of mindfulness-based cognitive-behavioural therapies: A mindfulness-based rational emotive behaviour therapy

Teasdale, Segal and Williams (2003 Teasdale, JD, Segal, ZV and Williams, JMG. 2003. Mindfulness training and problem formulation. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 10: 157–160. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]) present the combination of mindfulness and cognitive-behavioural therapy as “one of the most exciting and potentially productive avenues for future exploration.” (p. 160). In the same paper they also recommend moving beyond the current general-purpose, non-case-specific applications of mindfulness (p. 157). By integrating mindfulness interventions more closely with cognitive behavioural theories, clinicians should be in a better position to administer tailor-made mindfulness-based interventions in response to specific case formulations. This paper examines important similarities and differences between mindfulness and Rational-Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), in view of integrating the two practices closely within a one-on-one counselling environment. The latter half of the paper then presents recommendations of how such integration might be achieved in practice. This is illustrated with examples of three new interventions that combine mindfulness with three specific types of cognitive dysfunction as per REBT.     

Amygdala responses to emotionally valenced stimuli in older and younger adults

Abstract— As they age, adults experience less negative emotion, come to pay less attention to negative than to positive emotional stimuli, and become less likely to remember negative than positive emotional materials. This profile of findings suggests that, with age, the amygdala may show decreased reactivity to negative information while maintaining or increasing its reactivity to positive information. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess whether amygdala activation in response to positive and negative emotional pictures changes with age. Both older and younger adults showed greater activation in the amygdala for emotional than for neutral pictures; however, for older adults, seeing positive pictures led to greater amygdala activation than seeing negative pictures, whereas this was not the case for younger adults.     

Toward an Integrated Approach to Improving Multicultural Counselor Education

To improve multicultural counselor education, the cognitive domain portion of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) is melded with five dimensions to subjectively measure and monitor the cultural knowledge and progress of counselors-in-training     

The Effects of Names on Perception of Intelligence, Popularity, and Competence

Three experiments were conducted to explore the effects of first names on judgments of intelligence, popularity, and competence. In Experiment 1, first names that were used more often in the past than they are now (called Older Generation names) were rated by a sample of college-aged judges as less popular and less intelligent than were first names that are used more often now than in the past (called Younger Generation names). In addition, male first names tended to have higher ratings of these same qualities than did female first names. In Experiments 2 and 3, either resumes or personal ads were used to provide additional information to the raters. Results similar to those found in Experiment 1 were obtained. In general the present experiment used groups of names rather than individual names so as to control for possible irrelevant and idiosyncratic differences that might be found among individual names. Relevance to research in which men and women are compared was discussed.