Female adolescent soccer players' perceived motivational climate,goal orientations,and mindful engagement

The purpose of this study was to examine two objectives: a) a moderation effect of task orientation in the predictive relationship of ego orientation to mindful engagement, and b) the mediational role of female high school soccer players' mindful engagement in the relationship between their perceptions of a caring/task-involving climate and task orientation to their practice strategy use and ability to peak under pressure. Athletes (N = 190, Mage = 15.59) completed measures of aforementioned psychometric variables. The moderation analysis revealed that athletes' task orientation and their mindful engagement were in a positive and significant liner relationship. The final mediation model results suggest that both female high school soccer athletes' mindful engagement and practice strategy use mediate the relationship of their perceptions of a caring/task-involving climate and goal orientations to their ability to peak under pressure. Results suggest that coaches' efforts to create a caring/task-involving climate in sport may help athletes be more task oriented and mindfully engaged in their sport, and thus experience more positive outcomes.     

A randomised controlled trial of cognitive-behaviour therapy for clinical perfectionism: a preliminary study

Perfectionism can be a problem in its own right and it can impede the progress of treatment of Axis I disorders. This study reports on a preliminary randomised controlled trial of cognitive-behaviour therapy (CBT) for "clinical perfectionism". Twenty participants were randomly assigned to either immediate treatment (IT) (n=10) or a wait list (NL) (n=10). Treatment consisted of ten sessions of CBT over eight weeks. Two participants did not complete the follow-up assessments (10%). Fifteen of the original 20 participants (75%) were clinically significantly improved after treatment and the effect size was large (1.8). Treatment gains were maintained at 8-week and 16-week follow-up.     

Recollective Experience During Recognition of Emotional Words in Clinical Depression

Earlier work has shown that free recall tasks produce a robust mood-congruent memory effect in depression, whereas recognition tasks produce heterogeneous results. This study aimed to further investigate recognition memory for positive, negative and neutral words in depressed patients and matched comparison participants with the Remember/Know/Guess procedure for assessing recollection and familiarity. No mood-congruent memory bias effect was detected in discrimination abilities. However, depressed patients recollected (more Remember responses) more negative than positive or neutral words, whereas comparison participants recollected more positive than neutral words. No mood-congruent pattern was evidenced for Know responses. However, the depressed patients responded to fewer words overall with Know responses than the comparison participants. These results suggest that the mood-congruent memory pattern in depressed patients is related to conscious recollection rather than to familiarity. Attentional biases toward negative words and elaboration processes and/or encoding in reference to the self may contribute to these findings.     

The Findings of a Cochrane Meta-Analysis of Couple Therapy in Adult Depression: Implications for Research and Clinical Practice

The association between depressive symptoms and distressed intimate relationships supported the assumption that couple therapy, by focusing on the interpersonal context of depression, might be more effective as a treatment for depression than individual psychotherapy or drug therapy. This issue was addressed by a Cochrane meta-analysis assessing the evidence from clinical trials of couple therapy for depression in comparison with individual psychotherapy, drug therapy, and no/minimal intervention, including fourteen studies with 651 participants. No study was found free of bias and the quality of the evidence was low, with major problems of small sample sizes, missing outcome data, selective reporting, lack of information on random sequence generation and allocation concealment, recruitment of people not representative of clinical practice, and allegiance bias. The meta-analysis showed that both couple therapy and individual psychotherapy improved depressive symptoms at end of treatment and after 6 months or longer, with moderate effect sizes, without any difference between the two treatments. Couple therapy was more effective in reducing couple distress. This effect was larger in studies with distressed couples only and should be considered as relevant in its own right. Couple therapy is a viable option for the treatment of a depressed partner, especially in discordant couples. Future research should address several issues left open to provide a sound empirical foundation for clinical practice.     

Intervention research: Integrating practice guidelines with dissemination strategies-A rejoinder to Paul, Stuve, and Cross

Paul, Stuve, and Cross (this issue) misunderstood the importance of the token economy described by Morisse et al. (1996) because they evaluated it solely from a clinical research perspective. Intervention research is a broader paradigm that describes the development of effective interventions via a series of research activities including basic psychological research, clinical research, and dissemination research. Given the wisdom of intervention research, we address three points made by our colleagues: (a) mental health staff should not adapt empirically validated practice guidelines to meet the needs of their program; (b) total-quality-management strategies like Interactive Staff Training should not drive dissemination efforts because they have little empirical support; and (c) user-friendly programs are inappropriate and unethical because they ignore consumer interests.     

The end of theoretical orientations?

Theoretical orientation is the most pervasive organizing device in psychology. Ideas, books, people, therapies, and other salient matters are frequently classified into psychodynamic, behavioral, humanistic, cognitive, or other orientation categories. The continued prominence of theoretical-orientation classification belies a breakdown in its applicability to contemporary psychology. Psychotherapy remains a stronghold. However, with internal and external forces endorsing particular approaches, theoretically-based practices will be forced to yield to evidence-based ones. The final dismantling of traditional theoretical categories by evidence-based practice standards paradoxically provides a hopeful impetus to otherwise arrested theoretical development. Manifest avowed theoretical orientation is distinguished from a latent theoretical-orientation construct, and the ways a new kind of meta-theory of therapy will reduce the naivete and increase the applicability of clinical research is discussed.     

Clinical interventions and prevention for Asian American children and families: Current status and needed research

The current status of clinical interventions and prevention for Asian American children and/or adolescents and their families was assessed through a review of the literature on conceptual frameworks, cultural variables and related issues, and empirical studies. Five proposed approaches to treatment or prevention were examined. Some factors that might account for the slow progress of treatment research in this area were also discussed. These included conceptual and methodological issues; the paucity of data on psychopathology in this population; their low service-utilization rates; and societal images, values, and needs. Some needed directions for future research are suggested.     

Depressive realism and clinical depression

Depressive realism suggests that depressed individuals make more accurate judgments of control than their nondepressed counterparts. However, most studies demonstrating this phenomenon were conducted in nonclinical samples. In this study, psychiatric patients who met criteria for major depressive disorder underestimated control in a contingent situation and were consistently more negative in their judgments than were nondepressed controls. Depressed patients were less likely than their nondepressed counterparts to overestimate control in a noncontingent situation, but largely because they perceived receiving less reinforcement. Depressed patients were no more likely to use the appropriate logical heuristic to generate their judgments of control than their nondepressed counterparts and each appeared to rely on different primitive heuristics. Depressed patients were consistently more negative than their nondepressed counterparts and when they did appear to be more “accurate” in their judgments of control (as in the noncontingent situation) it was largely because they applied the wrong heuristic to less accurate information. These findings do not support the notion of depressive realism and suggest that depressed patients distort their judgments in a characteristically negative fashion.     

The phenomenon of vulnerability in clinical encounters

After a brief, personal reflection on Aron Gurwitsch’s life and his many influences on my career, I devote this lecture to some of the central themes of a phenomenology of medicine. Its core is the clinical encounter, which displays a certain structure I term the asymmetry of power (physician) and vulnerability (patient, family)—a complex contextual imbalance characterized by multiple points of view, hence points for reflective entrance. These are then interpreted phenomenologically in terms of epoché and reduction (practical distantiation), evidence, reflection, and other related themes. I conclude with a suggestion about “the fundamental method” of phenomenology, free fantasy variation. This paper was delivered as The Aron Gurwitsch Memorial Lecture, October 21, 2005, co-sponsored by The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, Salt Lake City, Utah. It is based on a number of articles, chapters and books I have written over the past several decades (see especially 2000, pp. 123–140; 1995b, pp. 147–168).