Counselling in the workplace: How time‐limited counselling can effect change in well‐being

Background: Many employers provide counselling support on work and personal issues for their employees, but in times of economic pressure such services can be at risk if their effectiveness is not demonstrated. Aim: To evaluate whether time‐limited counselling in a workplace can effect sustained change in well‐being. Method: The study was carried out by a staff counselling team in a university setting. The Warwick‐Edinburgh Mental Well‐being Scale (WEMWBS) was completed by clients at the beginning and end of counselling, and at three and six months following. A non‐treatment comparison group completed the survey at the same intervals. Results: The results of our investigation show clearly that the effect of time‐limited counselling (average seven sessions) on distressed clients is positive. The evidence of our treatment group suggests that they acquire an increased sense of well‐being as a result of the experience of counselling with a significant statistical difference between pre‐and post‐counselling treatment group scores on the WEMWBS and consistently higher scores found post counselling. The improvement was maintained at the same level for at least six months following the end of counselling. Conclusions: The provision of time‐limited counselling by employers is an effective support for personal difficulties affecting work.     

Sex differences in reasoning and emotion about altruism

This study examined sex differences in the resolution of prosocial dilemmas involving self-sacrifice. Women and men between 17 and 68 years of age were presented with hypothetical situations necessitating a choice between self and other, and asked to decide what they would choose to do. In addition, participants were asked why they made the choices they did and how they felt about them. Participants usually made the self-sacrificing choice, with no differences found between women and men in the distribution of self and other choices. Choices were justified on the basis of the respondents' own needs or those of the other person, conflict was minimized, or reasons were offered that involved stereotyped statements, interpersonal concerns, empathy, internalized affects and values, or a judgment about the capacity to help. Modes of reasoning differed somewhat between the sexes, with women using more empathic reasoning than men with other choces, and attributing their self choices more to minimal conflict and less to concern for the other's interests. There were also sex differences in participants' self-reported feelings about the choices they made. Specifically, there was evidence that women experienced more conflict than men about other choices and had more positive feelings than men did about their self choices. Several interpretations of these findings were discussed.     

Discrimination of “W” and “V” shapes by goldfish

Goldfish were trained to discriminate between “W” and “V” shapes; different groups were trained with the shapes in different orientations. Transfer tests were given after training and the following conclusions were drawn. Animals learned to discriminate between the training shapes by detecting the difference in the number of points present in each; they learned the difference in the relative number of points rather than the absolute number present in each shape; the subjects transferred well to pairs of shapes bearing points facing in different directions from those on the training shapes; knobs were treated as practically equivalent to points; animals relied more heavily on differences at the tops of the shapes than on differences in the bottom halves.     

Differential responding as a function of auditory stimulus intensity without differential reinforcement

Two groups of four rats each were trained to bar press on a variable-interval 2-min schedule. During training, either 3, 5, or 9 auditory stimuli of various intensities were randomly presented. A direct relationship between stimulus intensity and rate of responding was obtained, but it was more consistent in the group trained initially with three stimuli than for the group that started with nine stimuli. The results are related to the concept of stimulus intensity dynamism and the necessary conditions for the acquisition of stimulus control.     

Depth of comprehension,effective elaboration,and memory for sentences

It was hypothesized that depth of comprehension is a function of the complexity of the meaning components of a sentence that are activated during initial encoding. In four experiments, subjects were presented sentences containing either transitive causative verbs (e.g., “John opened the door”) or their intransitive noncausative counterparts (e.g., “The door opened”) and were required to produce a continuation to each sentence. Based on the above hypothesis, sentences for which the continuations induced causative interpretations should be remembered better than sentences for which noncausitive interpretations were induced. The results confirmed this hypothesis, and they are considered in relation to depth of comprehension, effective elaboration, and the role of inferences in memory for sentences.     

Book reviews

Religion and Globalisation. Peter Beyer, 1994 London: Sage Publications 250 pp., £12.95 pb, £37.50 hb ISBN 0–8039–8917–2

The Religious Culture of India: Power, Love and Wisdom. Friedhelm Hardy, 1994 Cambridge Studies in Religious Traditions 4, Cambridge University Press xiii + 613 pp. £55.00, US$74.95 ISBN 0–521–44181–1

Judaism and Other Faiths. Dan Cohn‐Sherbok, 1994 Basingstoke: Macmillan Press ix + 186 pp., £40.00 hb ISBN 0–312–10384–0.

Women in Religion Jean Holm with John Bowker, eds., 1994 London and New York: Pinter Publishers 181 pp., £29.50 hb, £9.99 pb ISBN 1–85567–108–5 hb, ISBN 1–85567–109–3 pb

Attitudes to Nature. Jean Holm (ed.) with John Bowker, 1994 London and New York: Pinter Publishers 172 pp., £23.50 hb, £9.99 pb ISBN 1–85567–092–5 hb, ISBN 1–85567–093–3 pb

Sacred Writings. Jean Holm (ed.) with John Bowker, 1994 London and New York: Pinter Publications 201 pp., £29.50 hb, £9.99 pb ISBN 1–85567–106–9 hb; 1–85567–107–7 pb

The Gospel of Buddha. Paul Carus, 1994 Oxford: Oneworld Publications 306 pp., £6.95 ISBN 1–85168–026–8

The New Religious Order: The Passionists and the Option for the Poor. James Sweeney CP, 1994 London: Bellew Publishing 240 pp., £35.00 ISBN 1–85725–105–9

Religions in the UK: A Multi‐Faith Directory. Paul Weller (ed), researched by Rachelle Castle and Paul Weller, 1993 Mickleover, Derby: University of Derby, in association with The Inter Faith Network for the United Kingdom 651 pp., £25.00 (incl. p&p) ISBN 0–901437–06–9     

Attitudes, Intentions and Employment

A study of midwives' employment decisions was undertaken to identify whether and how they alter their employment plans at certain times relative to training. The research aimed to provide data which would help midwife managers to control the then widely perceived shortage of midwives, attributable partly to the non-retention of newly-qualified midwives in the maternity services. An attitude scale, devised for this study, is shown to be a valid predictor of midwifery employment.     

Language Abilities in Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Reading Disabilities, and Normal Controls

Research has demonstrated a high prevalence of language impairments (LI) and reading disabilities (RD) in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Since RD is also associated with LI, it is unclear whether the language impairments are specific to ADHD or associated with comorbid RD. The language abilities of ADHD children with and without RD were investigated in a task requiring recall of a lengthy narrative, and in tests assessing knowledge of the semantic aspects of language. The study was conducted with 50 boys—14 ADHD, 14 ADHD + RD, 8 RD, and 14 normal controls, aged 7 to 11. Children with ADHD (ADHD-only, ADHD + RD) exhibited difficulties in organizing and monitoring their story retelling. Children with RD (RD-only, ADHD + RD) demonstrated deficits in receptive and expressive semantic language abilities on the language processing tests. The comorbid group (ADHD + RD) exhibited the deficits of both ADHD and RD children. The deficiencies of ADHD children are consistent with higher-order executive function deficits while the deficits of RD children are consistent with deficits in the basic semantics of language processing.     

IMPULSIVITY AND INHIBITORY CONTROL

Abstract— We report an experiment testing the hypothesis that impulsive behavior reflects a deficit in the ability to inhibit prepotent responses Specifically, we examined whether impulsive people respond more slowly to signals to inhibit (stop signals) than non-impulsive people In this experiment, 136 undergraduate students completed an impulsivity questionnaire and then participated in a stop-signal experiment, in which they performed a choice reaction time (go) task and were asked to inhibit their responses to the go task when they heard a stop signal The delay between the go signal and the stop signal was determined by a tracking procedure designed to allow subjects to inhibit on 50% of the stop-signal trials. Reaction time to the go signal did not vary with impulsivity, but estimated stop-signal reaction time was longer in more impulsive subjects, consistent with the hypothesis and consistent with results from populations with pathological problems with impulse control.