New approaches in counselling: Healthy diversity or anti-therapeutic?

Concern is expressed about the proliferation of new or 'innovative' approaches in counselling or psychotherapy. Most of these approaches appear to be regressive in that they ignore what we have learned about the importance of certain conditions for the therapeutic relationship. They place the counsellor or therapist in the position of a charismatic expert controlling and directing the lives of his clients. The potential dangers of these methods are noted. Yet there seems to be no good way to protect clients either from well-intentioned but misguided professionals or from the untrained non-professional. If professionals are not successful in policing the field, injured consumers and an aroused public may succeed in imposing unnecessarily rigid restrictions on all practice of counselling and psychotherapy.     

The community mental health center management game: Teaching administrative skills by means of computer simulation

Clinical training in psychology rarely includes the opportunity for students to exercise managerial responsibility for a functioning human service organization. Nevertheless, many clinicians are called upon to assume such decision-making duties, despite their lack of administrative training. This study examines the feasibility of using a computer model of a typical Community Mental Health Center (CMHC) as a training device, permitting clinical students to “manage” a complex social agency over a course of many months of simulated time. The system provides a valuable and interesting supplement to the usual training materials in psychology programs.     

A biphasic 60-Hz synchronizer circuit for the recording of visually evoked responses in high-noise environments

A simple synchronizer clock circuit is described that aids in the rejection of 60-Hz noise from evoked potential measurements.     

A digital noise and sine-wave generator

A circuit is described that will digitally generate three kinds of signal useful in auditory research: broad-band pseudorandom noise, low-pass-filtered Gaussian noise, and low-distortion sine waves. This digital circuit has two advantages over its analog counterparts, ease of calibration and adaptation to computer control.     

The role of an education welfare officer in two contrasting schools

Observation of the role relations between an education welfare officer and the senior staff of two schools (particularly the heads) underlines the extent to which the EWO's opportunity to undertake effective social work is facilitated or denied by schools. She does not enjoy freedom of professional self determination; nor does the education welfare service itself. Thus the implementation of the Seebohm/Plowden conception of the EWO as a social worker is heavily dependent upon the willingness of heads to use them in this way and to offer them the necessary support.     

A quantitative approach to the study of visual symmetry

An experiment was conducted to explore the quantitative relationship between "goodness" and the amount of symmetry in visual designs. Subjects arranged items in one, two, and three dimensions in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Each design was analyzed to determine its amount of symmetry, and the percent of subjects who created designs having each possible degree of asymmetry was calculated. Perfect symmetry was the most common condition for all three dimensions. Moreover, the goodness of patterns was inversely related to the quantitative degree of asymmetry.