Standardized patients: A fixed-role therapy experience in normal individuals

Abstract

This article describes how standardized patients (SPs), people trained to portray a patient role in a consistent fashion, view their role-playing experiences. Focus groups with 37 SPs (63% participation rate) were used to explore what impact, if any, playing a number of fixed roles had on them and their lives. Personal insights and changes reported by SPs are examined in terms of personal construct theory. The implications of these findings for both teaching clinicians and for therapeutic work with clients are discussed. The findings illustrate continuing relevance of G. Kelly's (1955) observations about the usefulness of role-playing and enactment techniques.     

The Influence of Television and Film Viewing on Midlife Women's Body Image,Disordered Eating,and Food Choice

A recent trend in screen media is the casting of older women who have bodies that are the shapes and sizes of younger women. These aging beauties can be found in shows such as Cougar Town and Desperate Housewives. It was predicted that heavy viewers of these media would report stronger eating disorder symptomatology, greater body ideal discrepancies, and stricter food choices than light viewers. Participants were 166 midlife women (M: 44.57 years) who completed an online questionnaire that asked about body ideals, disordered eating, food choices, and exposure to aging beauty programming. Results demonstrate that media exposure was associated with stronger reports of disordered eating, greater discrepancies between actual body size and both women's ideal body size as well as perceptions of how others wanted them to look, and stricter food choices when around other people. Ideal self-discrepancies mediate the association between aging beauty media and disordered eating symptomatology. Our study builds on extant work related to media consumption, body concerns, and eating behaviors among a non–college-aged sample.     

The joint role of trained,untrained, and observed actions at the origins of goal recognition

Recent findings across a variety of domains reveal the benefits of self-produced experience on object exploration, object knowledge, attention, and action perception. The influence of active experience may be particularly important in infancy, when motor development is undergoing great changes. Despite the importance of self-produced experience, we know that infants and young children are eventually able to gain knowledge through purely observational experience. In the current work, three-month-old infants were given experience with object-directed actions in one of three forms and their recognition of the goal of grasping actions was then assessed in a habituation paradigm. All infants were given the chance to manually interact with the toys without assistance (a difficult task for most three-month-olds). Two of the three groups were then given additional experience with object-directed actions, either through active training (in which Velcro mittens helped infants act more efficiently) or observational training. Findings support the conclusion that self-produced experience is uniquely informative for action perception and suggest that individual differences in spontaneous motor activity may interact with observational experience to inform action perception early in life.     

Labels Facilitate Infants' Comparison of Action Goals

Understanding the actions of others depends on the insight that these actions are structured by intentional relations. In a number of conceptual domains, comparison with familiar instances has been shown to support children's and adults' ability to discern the relational structure of novel instances. Recent evidence suggests that this process supports infants' analysis of others' goal-directed actions (Gerson &; Woodward, 2012 Gerson , S. , &; Woodward , A. L. ( 2012 ). A claw is like my hand: Comparison supports goal analysis in infants . Cognition , 122 , 181 – 192 . doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.10.014 [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The current studies evaluated whether labeling, which has been shown to support relational learning in other domains, also supports infants' sensitivity to the goal structure of others' actions. Ten-month-old infants observed events in which a familiar action, grasping, was aligned (simultaneously presented) with a novel tool-use action, and both actions were accompanied by a matched label. Following this training, infants responded systematically to the goal structure of the tool-use actions in a goal imitation paradigm. In control conditions, when the aligned actions were accompanied by nonword vocalizations, or when labeling occurred without aligned actions, infants did not respond systematically to the tool-use action. These findings indicate that labels supported infants' comparison of the aligned actions, and this comparison facilitated their understanding of the novel action as goal-directed.     

Twelve-Month-Old Infants Generalize Novel Signed Labels,but Not Preferences Across Individuals

By the end of the 1st year, infants expect spoken labels to be extended across individuals and thus seem to understand words as shared conventional forms. However, it is unknown whether infants' willingness to extend labels across individuals is constrained to familiar forms, such as spoken words, or whether infants can identify a broader range of symbols as potential conventions. The present study tested whether 12-month-old infants will extend a novel sign label to a new person. Results indicate that 12-month-olds expect signed object–label relations to extend across agents but restrict object preferences to individuals. The results suggest that infants' expectations about conventional behaviors and linguistic forms are likely broad at 12 months. The implications of these findings for infants' early conceptions of conventional behaviors as well as our understanding of the initial state of the learner are considered.     

Interventionism and Causal Exclusion

A number of writers, myself included, have recently argued that an “interventionist” treatment of causation of the sort defended in Woodward, 2003 can be used to cast light on so‐called “causal exclusion” arguments. This interventionist treatment of causal exclusion has in turn been criticized by other philosophers. This paper responds to these criticisms. It describes an interventionist framework for thinking about causal relationships when supervenience relations are present. I contend that this framework helps us to see that standard arguments for causal exclusion involve mistaken assumptions about what it is appropriate to control for or hold fixed in assessing causal claims. The framework also provides a natural way of capturing the idea that properties that supervene on but that are not identical with realizing properties can be causally efficacious.     

Building Schools’ Readiness to Implement a Comprehensive Approach to School Safety

Research consistently finds that a comprehensive approach to school safety, which integrates the best scientific evidence and solid implementation strategies, offers the greatest potential for preventing youth violence and promoting mental and behavioral health. However, schools and communities encounter enormous challenges in articulating, synthesizing, and implementing all the complex aspects of a comprehensive approach to school safety. This paper aims to bridge the gap between scientific evidence and the application of that evidence in schools and communities by defining the key components of a comprehensive approach to school safety and describing how schools can assess their readiness to implement a comprehensive approach. We use readiness and implementation data from the Safe Communities Safe Schools project to illustrate these challenges and solutions. Our findings suggest that (1) readiness assessment can be combined with feasibility meetings to inform school selection for implementation of a comprehensive approach to school safety and (2) intentionally addressing readiness barriers as part of a comprehensive approach may lead to improvements in readiness (motivation and capacity) to effectively implement a comprehensive approach to school safety.     

Factor Structure of the Beck Depression Inventory—II in a Medical Outpatient Sample

This study examined the factor structure of the Beck Depression Inventory—II (BDI-II) in a sample of 127 individuals referred by their primary care physicians. Using exploratory factor analysis with oblique rotation, a 2-factor model appeared to be the most parsimonious representation of the data. The rotated factors accounted for approximately 53% of the variance. Consistent with previous research, the first factor was interpreted as a somatic–affective dimension and the second factor reflected a cognitive dimension. The correlation between these 2 factors was .79. It appears possible to divide the BDI-II into subscales to facilitate interpretation in medical patients.