Discourse analysis: Rich pickings for counsellors and therapists

Aim: It is only relatively recently that discourse analysis has begun to rise to prominence in the fields of counselling and psychotherapy. This paper briefly explains ways of understanding discourse analysis, discussing what the approach can offer counselling research and practice. Approach: An initial categorisation of recent discourse analysis studies is offered, to demonstrate diverse ways in which this type of research can address issues relevant to counselling practice. The five categories proposed range from the examination of language use in therapy to analyses that focus on the social structures, meanings and power relations related to therapy. Implications: The paper demonstrates that through the critical analysis of counselling sessions, research interviews, written texts and other materials, discourse analysis can provide insight into ways in which counselling operates as a social practice, and so help counsellors to contextualise their work within broader social structures and processes.     

Studies on retrograde and anterograde amnesia of olfactory memory after denervation of the hippocampus by entorhinal cortex lesions

The effect of hippocampal denervation on olfactory memory in rats was tested after interrupting the lateral olfactory tract projections at the level of the entorhinal cortex. When lesioned animals were trained to learn new odors, they showed no evidence of retention 3 h after acquisition. These results confirm earlier data on rapid forgetting in rats after hippocampal deafferentation and are in parallel to the anterograde amnesia typically found in humans with hippocampal damage. On the other hand, preoperatively learned information was minimally impaired after hippocampal deafferentation even if it was acquired within less than 1 h before the lesion. This finding differs from reports on humans as well as monkeys with hippocampal damage where memories formed during a critical time span of months or even years before the lesion are found to be impaired. This may suggest that the consolidation process in humans and rodents has different time scales or that the roles of the human and the rat hippocampal structure in memory formation are somewhat different.     

Anxiety and depression in women with advanced cancer: Implications for counselling

Fifty-three patients with advanced cancer were studied prospectively for 6 months to assess whether the site and method of chemotherapy administration influence levels of anxiety and depression. Patients received chemotherapy either at home or in hospital. Cases of clinical anxiety (36%) and depression (27%) were highest in the hospital treated group during the middle period of therapy. Patients treated at home had a lower psychiatric morbidity for anxiety (21%) and depression (21%) at the same period. There was no statistically significant difference in the mean scores on anxiety and depression between the groups. Overall, anxiety was more prevalent than depression. This study indicates that a minority of patients with advanced cancer treated by chemotherapy experience measureable psychiatric morbidity. Counselling services should be provided for these women throughout treatment, not just at the outset.     

A Muslim response to Harnack

Mohamed Ali, an Indian Muslim political activist of the 1920s, hoped to articulate an empowering perspective for his generation of Indian Muslims. He found Harnack's critique of the history of Christian dogma a suggestive basis for a new image of the relation of Islam to the religious life of the centuries before the Prophet Muhammad. He wanted to create a scheme for a ‘Federation of Faiths’ which would enable Indian Muslims to co‐operate in the new India with persons of other traditions. The article explains the context of Mohamed Ali's thought. Although his perspective lost momentum in India after the collapse of the non‐cooperation and Khilaft movements, it may be that a reconsideration of his ideas would be useful in the context of inter‐religious dialogue.     

Prosodic form and parsing commitments

This paper examines the question of whether there are effects of prosody on the syntactic parsing of temporarily ambiguous sentences containing complement verbs. It reports the results of five experiments employing cross-modal response tasks where the visually presented target word was either an appropriate or an inappropriate continuation in terms of the prosodic form of the preceeding auditory sentence fragment. Two experiments employing cross-modal naming only showed indications of sensitivity to syntactic and appropriateness manipulations when coupled with a simultaneous appropriateness judgment task. In contrast, the experiments employing cross-modal lexical decision showed greater sensitivity to syntactic and appropriateness effects. However, while the results from these studies replicated our earlier auditory parsing results and provided support for the suggestion that there are differences in visual and auditory parsing processes and for a constituent-based, minimal commitment type auditory parser, none of the studies demonstrated an effect of prosodic form on the parsing process.     

Psychological Aspects of Genetic Counseling. X. Advanced Counseling Techniques

Four procedures commonly used by experienced counselors are described: simple interview formulations, helping clients think through their problems, reframing, and role playing. Each procedure is illustrated by examples. Among other things, the goal of these procedures is to promote the autonomy and self-directedness of clients and thus are particularly valuable in circumstances requiring a nondirective stance. The need is underscored for a more active counseling stance appropriate to the psychological and problem-solving needs of genetic counselees.     

Investigating jury bias in a child molestation case

Defendants in most criminal cases have a constitutional right to be tried by a jury, however they may waive that right and elect to be tried by a judge. In several states and the federal criminal system, waiver of a jury trial requires the consent of the prosecution. Based on a United States Supreme Court decision in Singer v. United States, a criminal defendant does not have a constitutional right to bench a trial, although the Court acknowledged that certain cases might exist in which “passion, prejudice … public feeling” or other factors might render an impartial trial by jury impossible or unlikely. The present article describes one attempt to prove the Singer exception because of strongly biased pretrial publicity in a Virginia child molestation case.     

Extending the boundaries of psychoticism: Health care and the self-sentiment

A new questionnaire was constructed for the measurement of a hypothetical personality trait of ‘health care’, i.e. care and respect for the physical integrity of the body. It was found that the trait was a component of Cattell's self-sentiment factor. This yielded a new and more comprehensive self-sentiment questionnaire. The new questionnaire was validated by the demonstration of low scores in heroin addicts and alcoholics. Further investigation showed that the self-sentiment is highly correlated with P, of which it is best regarded as an additional expression. This result confirms the interpretation of P as the negative pole of a broad super-ego or socialization factor.     

Association learning and visual discrimination

The effect of learned stimulus associations on visual discrimination was measured in four experiments. The stimuli were visual shapes which had been scaled for similarity. Two shapes were selected as discriminanda, and each S was pretested and posttested for discrimination of these briefly presented simultaneous pairs of “same” and “different” shapes. During the training, each discriminandum was paired with another simultaneously presented associated shape on a paired-associate response-learning task. The two associated shapes were very similar, intermediate in similarity, or very dissimilar. There was more improvement in posttest discrimination following training with dissimilar associates. We conclude that learned stimulus associations affect visual discrimination.