Moral growth in medical students

Although students bring to medical school a fairly well established value system, the potential for moral growth through the medical school environment and experience is substantial. The educational environment poses a succession of developmental and adaptive tasks to be accomplished. Several of these tasks are discussed here, tasks that are value-laden and involve, directly or indirectly, the interplay of ethical theory and practice. During the past quarter century, the two influences that have had the greatest impact on the moral growth and moral reasoning capacity of medical students have been the incorporation into the medical school curriculum of courses in medical humanities and the admission to medical school of an increasing number of female students. The female students have brought to medical school a level or dimension of moral reasoning (morality as care or responsibility for others) to augment the male students' focus on rights and justice considerations.     

A model of short-term counselling in primary care

Counselling in prima y care settings has received much interest throughout Britain. Many surgeries employ counsellors or psychologists as part of the primay health care team. This paper describes a model of primary care counselling using an example of a case encountered in general practice. It emphasizes the advantages of offering on-site counselling services, such as better possibilities of liaison with the referring doctor and coordination of patient care. Progress was made in seven sessions of short-term cognitive-behavioural treatment and a more stigmatizing referral (for example, to psychiatric services) was avoided. The case can be seen as an appropriate referral in the context of primay care counselling and illustrates the benefit of this approach to the treatment of psychological and social problems in general practice. Names and details have been changed to preserve confidentiality.     

Reviews of current books

Pastoral Psychology -     

Learned helplessness versus reactance: The effects of sex-role stereotypy

Both learned helplessness and reactance theories hypothesize that the effects of noncontingent reinforcement on later performance are related to the amount of experience with noncontingent reinforcement and to the subjects' expectations of control. In addition, learned helplessness theorists have suggested that performance may depend upon the causes to which subjects ascribe failure. The present study investigated these hypotheses by defining expectation of control as the degree of sex-role stereotypy and by assessing causal attributions. Forty men and 40 women were given either zero, three, four, five, or six discrimination problems for which they received noncontingent reinforcement; they were subsequently tested on anagrams and math problems. Causal attributions were rated after each set of tasks. The data suggested the following. (1) In general, under conditions of noncontingency, high masculinity subjects performed better on anagrams and low masculinity subjects performed worse on anagrams than subjects in the control conditions; stereotypic femininity was not related to performance. (2) Ratings of attributions for failing the discrimination problems were generally unrelated to performance, although there was weak support for the facilitating effects of effort attributions. (3) Subsequent to anagram and math performance, women rated external attributions higher following success and internal attributions higher following failure than did men. The implications for learned helplessness and reactance theories are discussed.The authors would like to thank Stephen Haynes and Jack McKillip for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.     

The Experiences of Being a Talented Youth Athlete: Lessons for Parents

Involvement in organized sport can be highly demanding for young athletes who encounter many difficult situations and stressors. This can be exacerbated among youth athletes who have been recruited into talent-identification youth sport programs. Given that there are a range of negative consequences that can result when talent-identified (TI) youth athletes are unable to cope with the stressors they encounter, additional support is therefore necessary. Parents are uniquely situated to assist in this regard, but they are not always equipped to provide optimal levels of support. Therefore, the aim of this study was to understand the experiences of being a TI youth athlete and present the findings as “lessons” for parents seeking to enhance their involvement in TI youth sport settings. This article reports on qualitative data collected from the 1st year of a 3-year longitudinal study involving TI youth athletes from South Australia. Fifty male athletes (M age = 14.6 years) participated in focus groups to hear their experiences of being a TI youth athlete and understand what difficulties they want their parents to know. From the thematic analysis, 3 major themes were identified from the focus groups with TI youth athletes: (a) difficulties with being talented, (b) negotiating the future, and (c) playing for improvement. From the findings, a number of lessons for parents and youth sport organizations are offered to assist the transmission of knowledge to an applied setting.