Counselling and psychotherapy as a form of learning: some implications for practice

This paper explores counselling and psychotherapy as a form of learning. Previous experiences may create distortions in meaning-making perspectives, distortions that create templates for evaluating future experience. These templates act as barriers to being open to experience; thus there is an inability to learn from experience. The process of therapy can provide a learning milieu for the exploration and working through of these barriers, with a potential outcome of a return to learning from experience. It is suggested here that intrinsic to the learning milieu created in therapy there are elements of significant, transformative and emotional learning. Therapy is thus a reparative discourse that facilitates a return to learning from experience. A deconstruction of this concept is provided here as a way of developing the exploration of counselling and psychotherapy as a form of learning.     

The Effects of Values on Worries Associated With Acute Disaster: A Naturally Occurring Quasi‐Experiment1

On April 12, 1995, a bomb exploded in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, destroying a federal office building, killing 168 people, and upending American notions of safety and security in the heartland. Using data collected before, immediately after, and 1 year after the bombing from 3 samples living within 25 miles of the explosion in a naturally occurring quasi‐experiment, research examined effects of values on people's worries in the context of a macrolevel traumatic event. High self‐transcendence and conservation values correlated with higher macro‐worries immediately after vs. before the explosion, but these worries were lower 1 year later. Findings indicate that values emphasizing broader social perspectives were associated with higher macrolevel worries, while values emphasizing one's own life and welfare were not.     

Encouraging Intellectual Growth: Senior College Student Profiles

Researchers and educational writers provide many views on what characteristics and skills the college graduate should possess (P. D. Gardner, 1998). Given the rapidly changing nature of knowledge in all disciplines and the subjectivity of grading systems, we argue the best indicator of a successful college education is a student's ability to think complexly about difficult problems. In this paper we examine students' levels of intellectual development to inform our understanding of how college experiences affect students' abilities to think in complex ways about difficult problems. Using both qualitative and quantitative research techniques, we examine and compare the experiences of 19 senior college students who were rated at opposite ends of the Perry scheme of intellectual development. The 19 students were purposefully selected to represent the high and low ends of the Perry scale from an overall sample of 27 senior students at a large eastern university. Ten students from the original sample of 27 demonstrated the most advanced cognitive development with Perry scale ratings of 5–7. Nine students had Perry ratings below 4; this was the lowest rating represented in the sample. We examine the similarities and differences between these two sets of students' academic profiles, and their comments about their curricular experiences, and how the Perry scale reflects on these results. We then discuss how these similarities and differences relate to students' development of the desirable characteristics of a college graduate, implications for faculty and administrators, and the relationship of these results to prior studies using the Perry scheme.     

The influence of levels of processing on recall from working memory and delayed recall tasks

Recent research in working memory has highlighted the similarities involved in retrieval from complex span tasks and episodic memory tasks, suggesting that these tasks are influenced by similar memory processes. In the present article, the authors manipulated the level of processing engaged when studying to-be-remembered words during a reading span task (Experiment 1) and an operation span task (Experiment 2) in order to assess the role of retrieval from secondary memory during complex span tasks. Immediate recall from both span tasks was greater for items studied under deep processing instructions compared with items studied under shallow processing instructions regardless of trial length. Recall was better for deep than for shallow levels of processing on delayed recall tests as well. These data are consistent with the primary-secondary memory framework, which suggests that to-be-remembered items are displaced from primary memory (i.e., the focus of attention) during the processing phases of complex span tasks and therefore must be retrieved from secondary memory.     

Predicting ideal body mass index: what does clothing size have to do with it?

This study examined demographic and anthropometric variables as predictors of ideal body mass index (BMI) from cross-sectional, archival, self-reported data from the Psychology of Size Survey of 4014 U.S. residents collected in 2007. As hypothesized, ideal BMI can be predicted by a within gender hierarchical multiple regression analysis with the predictor variables of age, number of clothing sizes from ideal size, and current BMI; these variables account for 54.1% of variance in women's ideal BMI and 65.5% of variance in men's ideal BMI. Findings also demonstrated a logarithmic relationship between current BMI and ideal BMI, with increasing variance in ideal BMI for individuals with high current BMIs. These findings evidence the strong role of current body characteristics in the formation of ideals. Understanding how individuals conceptualize body ideals can inform researchers and practitioners alike, as this evidence has important implications related to both medical and psychological health.     

Disentangling the relationship between hemispheric asymmetry and cognitive performance

It is widely believed that advantages of hemispheric asymmetries originated in better cognitive processing, hence it is often implied that the relationship between hemispheric asymmetry and cognitive performance is linearly positive: the higher the degree of lateralization in a specific cognitive domain, the better the performance in a corresponding task. Yet, the empirical evidence for this notion is mixed and the statistical methods to analyze this relationship have been criticized. The present study therefore investigated the relationship between hemispheric asymmetries and cognitive performance in two behavioral tasks (a left-lateralized word-matching task and a right-lateralized face-decision task) in 230 participants (140 women, 90 men) by using two different approaches. Both methods correspondingly revealed that a relationship between hemispheric asymmetries and cognitive performance does exist. Contrary to a positive (linear) relationship however, the data could be best described by an inverted U-shaped curve. Although the optimal degree of lateralization seemed to be task-specific, a slight or moderate degree of hemispheric asymmetry achieved best cognitive performance in all tasks. Moreover, performances deteriorated towards extreme ends of lateralization (i.e., participants with either extreme left or right hemispheric biases). Taken together, the present study provides evidence against the notion that higher lateralization is related to enhanced cognitive performance.     

Changing the Scripts: Midlife Women’s Sexuality in Contemporary U.S. Film

This article examines the portrayal of midlife women’s sexuality in 13 recent U.S. narrative films. Content analysis of these films suggests that film portrayals of midlife women’s sexuality are relatively muted, with the most positive portrayals found in the broadest comedies. In addition, midlife women’s bodies are more often displayed as objects of humor than as objects of desire, the “female gaze” at the male body is shown only humorously, and midlife women’s sexuality is primarily validated for slim, white, middle-class women in committed romantic relationships with “age-appropriate” partners. Nevertheless, these films suggest that midlife women should have sexual desires, should act on those desires, should experience sexual pleasure, and should not sacrifice their sexual needs for a man’s approval.