The history of couple therapy: a millennial review

In this article, we review the major conceptual and clinical influences and trends in the history of couple therapy to date, and also chronicle the history of research on couple therapy. The evolving patterns in theory and practice are reviewed as having progressed through four distinctive phases: Phase I–Atheoretical Marriage Counseling Formation (1930–1963); Phase II–Psychoanalytic Experimentation (1931–1966); Phase III–Family Therapy Incorporation (1963–1985); and Phase IV–Refinement, Extension, Diversification, and Integration (1986–present). The history of research in the field is described as having passed through three phases: Phase I–A Technique in Search of Some Data (1930–1974), Phase II–Irrational(?) Exuberance (1975–1992), and Phase III–Caution and Extension (1993–present). The article concludes with the identification of Four Great Historical Ironies in the History of Couple Therapy.     

Molecular analyses of the principal components of response strength

Killeen and Hall (2001) showed that a common factor called strength underlies the key dependent variables of response probability, latency, and rate, and that overall response rate is a good predictor of strength. In a search for the mechanisms that underlie those correlations, this article shows that (a) the probability of responding on a trial is a two-state Markov process; (b) latency and rate of responding can be described in terms of the probability and period of stochastic machines called clocked Bernoulli modules, and (c) one such machine, the refractory Poisson process, provides a functional relation between the probability of observing a response during any epoch and the rate of responding. This relation is one of proportionality at low rates and curvilinearity at higher rates.     

Sex differences in performance on three novel continuous response tasks

The Dynavision apparatus was used to assess psychomotor differences between men and women first-time users. Subjects, 50 men and 76 women, were tested on three 60-sec. Dynavision response tasks of graded difficulty. An analysis of variance with repeated measures indicated that men performed significantly better than women on all tasks. Performances on all tasks were also significantly different from each other within both sexes (p < or = .05). Furthermore, a significant interaction between sex and task was based on a greater drop in performance on the most complex task for women than for men.     

Symptoms of anxiety disorders and teacher-reported school functioning of normal children

Correlations between scores on the Spence Children's Anxiety Scale, a questionnaire for measuring symptoms of anxiety disorders and a report of school functioning by teachers were computed for 317 primary school children and 13 teachers in The Netherlands. Analysis showed a small but significant negative correlation between scores for total anxiety and school functioning (r = -.20, p < .001). The finding is consistent with the notion that high symptoms indicating anxiety disorders in children are accompanied by less optimal functioning in school.     

On normal theory based inference for multilevel models with distributional violations

Data in social and behavioral sciences are often hierarchically organized though seldom normal, yet normal theory based inference procedures are routinely used for analyzing multilevel models. Based on this observation, simple adjustments to normal theory based results are proposed to minimize the consequences of violating normality assumptions. For characterizing the distribution of parameter estimates, sandwich-type covariance matrices are derived. Standard errors based on these covariance matrices remain consistent under distributional violations. Implications of various covariance estimators are also discussed. For evaluating the quality of a multilevel model, a rescaled statistic is given for both the hierarchical linear model and the hierarchical structural equation model. The rescaled statistic, improving the likelihood ratio statistic by estimating one extra parameter, approaches the same mean as its reference distribution. A simulation study with a 2-level factor model implies that the rescaled statistic is preferable.This research was supported by grants DA01070 and DA00017 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and a University of North Texas faculty research grant. We would like to thank the Associate Editor and two reviewers for suggestions that helped to improve the paper.     

A contour propagation approach to surface filling-in and volume formation

A new approach to surface and volume formation is introduced in response to the question, "Why do some silhouettes look 3 dimensional (3D) and others look 2D?" The central idea is that form information can propagate away from a "propagable segment" (PS) of occluding contour that could have projected onto the image from the visible portion of a cross-section of a surface. A key property of a PS is that it exhibits abrupt curvature changes where it meets the rest of the occluding contour. An algorithm is described for filling in curved surfaces from a PS: When copies of a PS are propagated into the interior, they act as cross-sectional surface contours that also exhibit abrupt curvature changes with the rest of the occluding contour. The result is a nonmetric coding of 3D-shape in terms of local ordinal surface curvature and orientation relationships that is scale, translation, and rotation invariant.