In defence of loose ends: Psychotherapy process research in the real world

Understanding what transpires in therapeutic conversations is as complex as the humans who are engaged in them. Inspired by the natural sciences, mainstream research in psychotherapy has taken up a positivist epistemology and strives for quantification and verification to produce evidence of the effectiveness of an approach. This paper explores an alternative foundation for therapeutic practices which has implications for how we do research. First, we present some ideas from process philosophy and dialogical perspectives.. In particular we return to the ideas of Henri Bergson who understood change as consisting of interpenetrated continuous and shifting states. In a next step we briefly look into how such ideas have influenced what is referred to as dialogical practices. Such dialogical practices operate through facilitating polyphonic, diverse perspectives that may mediate change in and through an intersubjective process of becoming. Based on this we take another step and make some suggestions for how we may develop research that enables ways of exploring therapeutic conversations as a multi-voiced, interactional and unfinalized process. We offer by way of example a method by which we attempt to integrate a linguistic theory (Systemic functional linguistics) with the dialogical framework and the ideas of Bergson. This paper considers how process philosophy may offer an alternative to the seeking of certainty that occurs in both psychotherapy research and practice, and ideas for making space for the ‘loose ends’ of the inconsistent and the unknown.     

学校心理学专业化

本文扼要介绍由联合国教科文组织和国际教育局于1948年召开的第一次有关学校心理学的会议,此作为学校心理学始倡,以及会议分发给世界各国政府的问卷节要,讨论了学校心理学的不同任务,特别是普通教育系统中特殊教育的随班就读的各项任务。本文还概述了学校心理学在智力甑别、社会适应、教学咨询和职业指导方面的作用;尝试性地提出了以前忽略学校心理学的问题,指出它在我国将来发展的前景。     

Lexical decision and aphasia: Evidence for semantic processing

Wernicke's and Broca's-Conduction aphasics and a Global aphasic were presented with a lexical-decision task in which English words and pronounceable nonwords were preceded by semantically related, unrelated, or nonword primes. The patients were also given a simple semantic-judgment task using the word pairs from the lexical-decision task. Wernicke's aphasics performed similar to normals and Broca's-Conduction aphasics showing significantly shorter latencies in making real-word identifications when preceded by a semantically related word. In addition, both superordinate and coordinate associates showed semantic-priming effects. Performance on the semantic-judgment task showed significantly more impairment in the aphasic group than in the normal controls. These results suggest that aphasics with even severe language impairments retain stored semantic information that may be automatically activated, yet is inaccessible to conscious semantic decision during metalinguistic tasks.     

Speech production mechanisms in aphasia: A delayed auditory feedback study

Data collected from a delayed auditory feedback (DAF) study conducted by F. Boller, P. B. Vrtunski, Y. Kim, and J. L. Mack (1978, Cortex, 14, 212–226) were reanalyzed to determine if speech quality measures which were significantly affected during DAF could be operationalized and to ascertain which type of errors are responsible for the judgement. A second goal of this study was to determine if Conduction aphasics were relatively spared under conditions of DAF, as has been shown in previous studies. Twenty aphasic patients and ten controls were presented with several speech production tasks under two delay conditions and two simultaneous feedback conditions. Results indicated that only the category of vowel length produced a significant number of errors, suggesting that DAF affects articulatory implementation. Conduction aphasics showed the least effect of all the groups. These results support Wernicke's and Geschwind's model, in which Conduction aphasics have a disconnection between the sensory and motor images of words. In contrast, Broca's aphasics were the most affected group under DAF, suggesting that a major component of their disorder is phonetic in nature.     

The speech production abilities of stutterers: Recent, ongoing, and future research

Recent and ongoing research into the speech production abilities of stutterers has followed four disparate paths. First, there have been objective studies of physiologic, aerodynamic, and acoustic parameters of stutterers' habitual speech patterns and the patterns they display while speaking in the presence of such novel stimuli as DAF or masking. Second, investigators have undertaken the fiberoptic examination of stutterers' larynges during fluent and stuttered utterances. Third, there have been studies of the speed with which stutterers start and terminate voicing independent of the act of speaking. Finally, there have been investigations of possible perceptible differences between the fluency of stutterers and normal speakers. Each of these four types of research is examined. Tentative conclusions are drawn, and directions for future theorizing and experimentation are suggested.     

A theory of careers encounters sex: Reply to Holland (1976)

This paper is the third in a series beginning with a report (by the authors) of research on the application of Holland's theory of careers to women and men. Holland's response, “The Virtues of the SDS …” is considered, in particular, research he cites on the effect of the Self-Directed Search (SDS) on counselees and his advocacy of raw score reports of personality patterns. The widely divergent career options suggested to men and women by SDS raw scores are noted and misunderstandings concerning the implications of Holland's assessment procedures for his theory are discussed. Holland's defense of raw score reports of personality characteristics is found wanting, especially in light of the support provided for his theory by normed scores.