Counselling and the schizophrenias

Schizophrenia is the collective name given to allied psychiatric disorders each of which has received a number of different professional interpretations. A primary counselling task is to help staff resolve conflicts over treatment, and give them support during their care of patients. Counselling patients and families, particularly through opportunities provided by self-help groups, is also discussed. The specialised work of genetic, psychoanalytical and behavioural counselling is considered, and stress is laid on the importance of counselling the adolescent schizophrenic for whom early help is vital to prevent deterioration. The article focuses on those areas where marriage guidance counsellors, social workers and probation officers are most likely to be consulted.     

Patterns of self-disclosure in homosexual and heterosexual college students

Two hypotheses concerning self-disclosure were investigated and confirmed in the present study, comparing homosexual and heterosexual college students. The first hypothesis was that self-disclosure, as measured by the Jourard Self-Disclosure Questionnaire, would be positively correlated with psychological femininity. The second hypothesis was that homosexual males and heterosexual females would exhibit similar patterns of high disclosure and femininity. No significant differences were found in total disclosure between homosexuals and heterosexuals, although homosexuals disclosed less to father, and more to friends than to parents. The conclusion was that psychological femininity and masculinity are more important than biological sex in determining self-disclosure.     

The Study of Perspective-Taking: Contributions from Mainstream Psychology and Behavior Analysis

The Psychological Record - The key purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive overview of the literature on perspective-taking from within mainstream psychology and behavior analysis....     

Learning directions of objects specified by vision,spatial audition,or auditory spatial language

The modality by which object azimuths (directions) are presented affects learning of multiple locations. In Experiment 1, participants learned sets of three and five object azimuths specified by a visual virtual environment, spatial audition (3D sound), or auditory spatial language. Five azimuths were learned faster when specified by spatial modalities (vision, audition) than by language. Experiment 2 equated the modalities for proprioceptive cues and eliminated spatial cues unique to vision (optic flow) and audition (differential binaural signals). There remained a learning disadvantage for spatial language. We attribute this result to the cost of indirect processing from words to spatial representations.     

Reasoning about Sensing Actions in Domains with Multi-Valued Fluents

In this paper, we discuss the weakness of current action languages for sensing actions with respect to modeling domains with multi-valued fluents. To address this problem, we propose a language with sensing actions and multi-valued fluents, called AM_K, provide a transition function based semantics for the language, and demonstrate its use through several examples from the literature. We then define the entailment relationship between action theories and queries in AM_K, denoted by ⊧AM_K, and discuss some properties about AM_K.     

A test of the ABC model underlying rational emotive behavior therapy

The ABC model underlying Ellis's Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy predicts that people who think more irrationally should respond to daily stressors or hassles differently than do people who think less irrationally. This study tested this aspect of the ABC model. 192 college students were administered the Survey of Personal Beliefs and the Hassles Scale to measure irrational thinking and daily hassles, respectively. Students who scored higher on overall irrational thinking reported a significantly higher frequency of hassles than did those who scored lower on overall irrational thinking, while students who scored higher on awfulizing and low frustration tolerance reported a significantly greater intensity of hassles than did those who scored lower on awfulizing and low frustration tolerance. This indicates support for the ABC model, especially Ellis's construct of irrational beliefs central to this model.     

Development of Clinical Psychology and Mental Health Resources in Vietnam

In this paper, we discuss development of the Vietnam National University graduate Clinical Psychology Program, which has the goal of training both Vietnamese researchers who will develop and evaluate culturally appropriate mental health treatments, as well as Vietnamese clinicians who will implement and help disseminate these evidence-based treatments. We first review the background situation in Vietnam regarding mental health, and its infrastructure and training needs, and discuss the process through which the decision was made to develop a graduate program in clinical psychology as the best approach to address these needs. We then review the development process for the program and its current status, and our focus on the schools as a site for service provision and mental health task shifting. Finally, we outline future goals and plans for the program, and discuss the various challenges that the program has faced and our attempts to resolve them.