The Teaching Alliance Inventory: Evaluating the student-instructor relationship in clinical and counselling psychology training

The Teaching Alliance Inventory (TAI) was developed to measure the quality of the student-instructor relationship in graduate clinical and counselling psychology classrooms. Based on Bordin's (1983) original concept of the alliance as fundamental to the change process in psychotherapy, we developed the TAI to measure aspects of the classroom relationship that may be fundamental to learning essential skills of counselling and clinical psychology. Factor analysis revealed six subscales, four representing interpersonal variables not evaluated in traditional teaching effectiveness measures. We demonstrated internal consistency and split-half reliability with a large sample of graduate students and described evidence for the scale's face validity and content validity. Construct validity was supported by significant correlations between the TAI and its subscales with an established measure of teaching effectives and its logically related subscales (SEEQ; Marsh, 1987 Marsh, HW. 1987. Students’ evaluations of university teaching: Research findings, methodological issues, and directions for future research. International Journal of Educational Research, 11(Whole Issue 3): 253–288.  [Google Scholar]). The TAI may supplement traditional assessments of instructor quality by providing feedback regarding interpersonal impact in the classroom.     

Body image issues in women with breast cancer

Diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer affects women physically as well as psychologically. There are many obvious and real factors that are related to psychological distress in women coping with breast cancer, such as facing a life-threatening illness, painful and impairing treatments, and significant role changes. Although these factors are clearly important, issues related to body image in women faced with breast cancer can also add to psychological distress. Women, in general, are concerned with their appearance, their weight, and their body, with recent studies suggesting 89% of women reported concerns with weight. Such premorbid concerns are often deeply ingrained and can contribute to psychological distress in women treated for breast cancer. The present article is a summary of the literature that has examined body image issues and related psychological adjustment in women with breast cancer. Implications for clinical practice and recommendations for future investigations are discussed.     

Lonelier, lazier, and teased: the stigmatizing effect of body size

The authors conducted 2 studies to examine the stigmatization of the female and male body using photographic stimuli of real people. In the first study, 75 female and 55 male undergraduates rated a series of 50 photographs of women ranging in body mass index (BMI) on 3 items: gets teased, lonely, and lazy. Both male and female observers rated bodies on either side of BMI 19-20 kg/m2 higher for the gets teased and lonely items. For the lazy item, there was a clear pattern of greater stigmatization with increasing BMI. In the second study, 40 male and 40 female observers rated a series of photographs of the male body that varied in BMI and waist-to-chest ratio on the same items. Results showed that men and women judged overweight and more tubular men to be lazier, lonelier, and teased. These findings suggest that body size is an important characteristic to consider when examining body stigmatization among men and women. These results also show support for the beautiful-is-good bias.     

Using performance feedback to enhance implementation fidelity of the problem-solving team process

Implementation integrity is a potentially critical issue for problem-solving teams (PST) and most response-to-intervention models. The current study hypothesized that providing performance feedback, which has consistently been shown to increase implementation integrity, to PSTs would enhance the procedural integrity of the process. The PSTs for three elementary schools were provided performance feedback with a 20-item checklist created from the literature. A multiple-baseline design across schools revealed an immediate change in level after providing performance feedback. The resulting percentages of non-overlapping data were 90.9%, 90.0%, and 100%. However, PSTs still did not monitor student progress, assess the effectiveness of the intervention, or measure the integrity with which the intervention was implemented even after receiving feedback. Thus, providing performance feedback could be a method to increase the fidelity with which critical components of data-based problem-solving are implemented, but these data suggest the need for additional research.     

Using morphs of familiar objects to examine how shape discriminability influences view sensitivity

We investigated how the difficulty of detecting a shape change influenced the achievement of object constancy across depth rotations for object identification and categorization tasks. In three sequential matching experiments, people saw pictures of morphs between two everyday, nameable objects (e.g., bath-sink morphs, along a continuum between "bath" and "sink" end-point shapes). In each experiment, both view changes and shape changes influenced performance. Furthermore, the deleterious effects of view changes were strongest when shape discrimination was hardest. In our earlier research, using morphs of novel objects, we found a similar interaction between view sensitivity and shape sensitivity (Lawson, 2004b; Lawson & Bülthoff, 2006; Lawson, Bülthoff, & Dumbell, 2003). The present results extend these findings to familiar-object morphs. They suggest that recognition remains view-sensitive at the basic level of identification for everyday, nameable objects, and that the difficulty of shape discrimination plays a critical role in determining the degree of this view sensitivity.     

Rats' knowledge of incorrect responses in a matching-to-sample task

The idea that rats possess some knowledge about having been incorrect when having previously made an incorrect response is proposed. A matching-to-sample task with a second choice was used to assess the hypothesis. Only if the correct lever was chosen on the second choice was the animal rewarded. Further, the second choice was offered whether the animal was initially correct or incorrect in its first choice, preventing it from "knowing" if it had been correct in its initial decision. If rats possessed some knowledge whether they had been correct or not, then the number of correct second choice responses after an incorrect first one should have been greater than chance. The current experiment provided some evidence that the rats did "know" when its choices were incorrect.     

Trouble crossing the bridge: altered interhemispheric communication of emotional images in anxiety

Worry is thought to involve a strategy of cognitive avoidance, in which internal verbalization acts to suppress threatening emotional imagery. This study tested the hypothesis that worry-prone individuals would exhibit patterns of between-hemisphere communication that reflect cognitive avoidance. Specifically, the hypothesis predicted slower transfer of threatening images from the left to the right hemisphere among worriers. Event-related potential (ERP) measures of interhemispheric transfer time supported this prediction. Left-to-right hemisphere transfer times for angry faces were relatively slower for individuals scoring high in self-reported worry compared with those scoring low, whereas transfer of happy and neutral faces did not differ between groups. These results suggest that altered interhemispheric communication may constitute one mechanism of cognitive avoidance in worry.     

Error detection and posterror behavior in depressed undergraduates

This study examined the influence of depression on error-monitoring and behavioral compensation after errors, two important aspects of cognitive control. Undergraduates differing in self-reported depression levels completed a modified Stroop task while error-related scalp potentials were recorded. Behaviorally, participants with higher depression scores were disproportionately slower and less accurate after errors in a task condition that included negative emotional words. Physiological results indicated that the amplitudes of the error-related negativity (ERN) and error positivity (Pe), two indices of error detection, were not correlated with depression score. ERN amplitudes predicted behavioral slowdown after errors, but only among more depressed participants in the negative-word condition. Together, the results imply that depression is associated not with an error detection deficit, but rather with alterations in subsequent performance changes, once errors have been identified.     

Characterization of aggressive behavior and phenytoin response

Recent work has suggested that the success of pharmacological treatment for chronic aggressive behavior may depend, in part, on the subtype of aggressive behavior displayed (e.g. reactive, impulsive aggression vs. predatory, premeditated aggression). The present study examined the usefulness of characterizing aggressive behavior during a 16‐week double‐blind crossover study of phenytoin (PHT) treatment in 41 aggressive adult males. The Impulsive/Premeditated Aggression Scales (IPAS) were used to characterize aggressive behavior as predominantly impulsive or predominantly premeditated in nature. Analyses indicated that participants who did not respond to PHT treatment endorsed significantly more premeditated characteristics on the IPAS than those who responded to PHT treatment. Non‐responders also exhibited fewer aggressive outbursts during placebo treatment, suggesting a greater level of behavior control. Participants who did not complete the study were younger, endorsed significantly more premeditated aggression characteristics and reported more lifetime antisocial behaviors than those who completed the study. Taken together, these data emphasize several factors that may influence the success of pharmacological treatment in aggressive individuals, namely the importance of characterizing the predominant type of problem aggressive behavior. Aggr. Behav. 00:1–6, 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.