Margaret R. Miles’ Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter: An Eriksonian Perspective

My perspective on Margaret R. Miles’s Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter is informed by Erik H. Erikson’s life cycle model (Erikson 1950, 1959, 1963, 1964, 1968a, b, 1982; Erikson and Erikson 1997) and, more specifically, by my relocation of his life stages and their accompanying human strengths (Erikson 1964) according to decades (Capps 2008). I interpret Miles’s account of her life from birth to age forty as revealing the selves that comprise the composite Self (Erikson 1968a) that come into their own during the first four decades of the life cycle, i.e., the hopeful, willing, purposeful, and competent selves     

The Role of Theory and Research in the Practice of Cognitive-Behavioral Couple Therapy: If You Build It,They Will Come

Cognitive-behavioral couple therapy (CBCT), while empirically validated and highly efficacious, does not always have positive results for couples. One factor that may limit the efficacy of this intervention is the way in which therapists are trained to provide this type of therapy. More specifically, there is a need for therapists to gain a solid foundation in CBCT theory in order to maximize treatment results. This paper presents an argument for why an understanding of theory is necessary for therapists in treating couples. Then, this paper presents our training model and how we integrate theory into our training of both graduate student therapists and more experienced clinicians. We take the stance that “if you build it, they will come.”     

Announcement

Abstract

Empathy has consistently been identified as an important quality of psychotherapists. Understanding unique ways that empathy emerges in group therapy may assist group therapists in fostering empathy. Rogerian and selected psychodynamic and interpersonal perspectives on empathy are discussed. Group psychotherapy poses a challenge for empathic responding, but also a rich opportunity for utilizing a more varied embodied approach to empathy.     

Rethinking Communication Apprehension: A Myers-Briggs Perspective

This study is an examination of relationships between Myers-Briggs personality type preferences, based on Jungian theory, and communication apprehension. Results showed that participants who preferred introversion or sensing reported significantly higher levels of communication apprehension in general and across the group, dyadic, meeting, and public contexts than did participants who preferred extraversion or intuition. In addition, participants who preferred feeling reported higher levels of communication anxiety in the public context than those who preferred thinking. Findings support the assumption that communication apprehension is biologically based, suggest that the Myers-Briggs type preference framework offers an alternative way of understanding communication apprehension, and point out the need for new approaches to understanding the phenomenon of communication apprehension.     

Selective Attention in Animal Discrimination Learning

The traditional approach to the study of selective attention in animal discrimination learning has been to ask if animals are capable of the central selective processing of stimuli, such that certain aspects of the discriminative stimuli are partially or wholly ignored while their relationships to each other, or other relevant stimuli, are processed. A notable characteristic of this research has been that procedures involve the acquisition of discriminations, and the issue of concern is whether learning is selectively determined by the stimulus dimension defined by the discriminative stimuli. Although there is support for this kind of selective attention, in many cases, simpler nonattentional accounts are sufficient to explain the results. An alternative approach involves procedures more similar to those used in human information-processing research. When selective attention is studied in humans, it generally involves the steady state performance of tasks for which there is limited time allowed for stimulus input and a relatively large amount of relevant information to be processed; thus, attention must be selective or divided. When this approach is applied to animals and alternative accounts have been ruled out, stronger evidence for selective or divided attention in animals has been found. Similar processes are thought to be involved when animals search more natural environments for targets. Finally, an attempt is made to distinguish these top-down attentional processes from more automatic preattentional processes that have been studied in humans and other animals.     

Young Children's Phonological Sensitivity After Exposure to a Rhyming or Nonrhyming Story

This study examined the ability of preschool children to make phonological discriminations after hearing rhyming or nonrhyming versions of the same story. Participants first listened to either a rhyming or nonrhyming version of a story, Rainy Day Kate (Blegvad, 1987), then attempted a phonological deletion and a rhyme/alliteration detection task. In accordance with prior theoretical notions that listening to rhyme sensitizes young children to phonological properties of words, children who heard the rhyming version of the story showed significantly higher performance on the rhyme/alliteration task than did participants who heard the nonrhyming narrative. Children in the rhyme condition also offered more rhyming and clang (nonword but phonologically similar) associates in completing the phonological deletion task.     

The Kent-Rosanoff Word Association: II. A Comparison of Sex Differences in Response Frequencies

Wenger, M. A., Jones, F. N., and Jones, M. H. Physiological Psychology. New York: Holt, 1956. Pp. 472. Reviewed by Harry C. Mahan     

Children's Inferences of Causal Events During Story Understanding

Second-grade children's inference of causal events was studied. Each of the 24 children heard 2 stories containing 6 event episodes. Each story was followed by either a sentence recognition or a cued-recall test. Event episodes explicitly stated an event followed by its outcome. Enablement episodes explicitly stated an action that was causally antecedent to the event, followed by the outcome of the event. Filler (control) episodes explicitly stated an action causally unrelated to the event, followed by the outcome of the event. The results indicate that the children more frequently inferred events from enablements than they inferred enablements from events, and that the children did not make the inferences at the time of reading, but instead made them when queried at the time of the test. This conclusion is suggested because there was false recognition of events but no false recall.     

The Problem of Rehearsal or Mental Practice

The present study examines several methodological and conceptual problems which in the past have made it difficult to accept the hypothesis that mental practice facilitates behavioral skill. An experiment on skill in speech production is then reported which overcomes the methodological problems. Subjects practiced producing a sentence at maximal rate either mentally (mental practice) or overtly (physical practice) and then produced a transfer sentence which was either related or unrelated to the practiced sentence. The maximal rate of speech was faster for related than unrelated transfer sentences, and the degree of transfer for the mental and physical practice conditions was equivalent.

A theory was developed to explain these results and overcome the conceptual problems outlined in the introduction. Implications of the theory for several related phenomena are discussed: rehearsal, errors in action, automatization, control processes in motor skills, speed-up as a function of practice, the relative advantages of physical vs. mental practice, and the evoked potentials accompanying mental rehearsal of an action.