Counseling in the Philippines: Past,Present, and Future

The history of colonization and persistent attempts at self‐governance in the Philippines parallel the beginnings of counseling in the country, which were largely influenced by the United States. Because of the Guidance and Counseling Act of 2004 and the Psychology Act of 2009, counseling is on its way to professionalization and regulation. Counseling is growing in depth and credibility, as evidenced by applications in practice that are not only indigenous but powerfully relevant.     

The role and importance of interpretation in the talking cure

Starting with an exploration of how the concept of interpretation in analytical treatment has evolved, the author goes on to discuss the role and importance of interpretation in the changes that psychoanalysis brings about. Although interpretation is looked upon as the key element in psychoanalytic activity, the fact that it is subsumed within the transference raises questions as to its influence in the analytical domain. After discussing the foundations of interpretation with respect to the theory of psychoanalytic treatment and examining Strachey’s views on this, the author defines the conditions and constraints surrounding interpretation and preparatory interventions in order to outline the essential nature of the interpretative process as seen against the wider background of the analyst’s activity as manifested through speech. This leads to a discussion of the relative influence of insight and suggestion in bringing about therapeutic change. The author draws the conclusion that interpretation works as a metaphor in lifting repression.     

Fresh old news from Ferenczi about the function of dreams: The dream as a Kur,as a treatment and as a Gyógyászat

This article discusses a text on the function of dreams and their relation to trauma. Ferenczi intended to present this material as a talk at the 12th International Congress of Psychoanalysis, which was to take place in Interlaken, Switzerland the same year that he wrote it (1931). The entire conference, however, was postponed, and parts of this communication’s content appeared in other texts in which Ferenczi rethinks the concept of trauma and its clinical significance. In the present article the author makes use of the Freud/Ferenczi correspondence to contextualize Freud’s Hungarian follower’s originality regarding his theorizations about different aspects of the function of dreams. In the 1931 speech, as well as in this article, Ferenczi used a patient’s dream work as a clinical example of a process in which traumatic experiences and unmastered sensory impressions can be repeated to achieve a better working‐through for the dreamer. The process Ferenczi describes resembles an effort of self‐treatment, of self‐Kur.     

A computer-based program to teach braille reading to sighted individuals

Instructors of the visually impaired need efficient braille‐training methods. This study conducted a preliminary evaluation of a computer‐based program intended to teach the relation between braille characters and English letters using a matching‐to‐sample format with 4 sighted college students. Each participant mastered matching visual depictions of the braille alphabet to their printed‐word counterparts. Further, each participant increased the number of words they read in a braille passage following this training. These gains were maintained at variable levels on a maintenance probe conducted 2 to 4 weeks after training.     

RELATIONS AMONG ACUTE AND CHRONIC NICOTINE ADMINISTRATION,SHORT-TERM MEMORY,AND TACTICS OF DATA ANALYSIS

Emerging evidence suggests that nicotine may enhance short‐term memory. Some of this evidence comes from nonhuman primate research using a procedure called delayed matching‐to‐sample, wherein the monkey is trained to select a comparison stimulus that matches some physical property of a previously presented sample stimulus. Delays between sample stimulus offset and comparison stimuli onset are manipulated and accuracy is measured. The present research attempted to systematically replicate these enhancement effects with pigeons. In addition, the effects of nicotine were assessed under another, more dynamic, memory task called titrating‐delay matching‐to‐sample. In this procedure, the delay between sample offset and comparison onset adjusts as a function of the subject's performance. Correct matches increase the delay, mismatches decrease the delay, and titrated delay values serve as the primary dependent measure. Both studies examined nicotine's effects under acute and chronic administration. Neither provided clear or compelling evidence of memory enhancement following nicotine administration despite reliable and systematic dose‐related changes in response latency measures. A modest dose‐related effect on accuracy was found, but the magnitude of the effect appears to be directly related to tactics of data analysis involving best‐dose analyses of a very circumscribed subset of trial types.     

Effects of a meaningful, a discriminative, and a meaningless stimulus on equivalence class formation

Thirty college students attempted to form three 3-node 5-member equivalence classes under the simultaneous protocol. After concurrent training of AB, BC, CD, and DE relations, all probes used to assess the emergence of symmetrical, transitive, and equivalence relations were presented for two test blocks. When the A-E stimuli were all abstract shapes, none of 10 participants formed classes. When the A, B, D, and E stimuli were abstract shapes and the C stimuli were meaningful pictures, 8 of 10 participants formed classes. This high yield may reflect the expansion of existing classes that consist of the associates of the meaningful stimuli, rather than the formation of the ABCDE classes, per se. When the A-E stimuli were abstract shapes and the C stimuli became S(D)s prior to class formation, 5 out of 10 participants formed classes. Thus, the discriminative functions served by the meaningful stimuli can account for some of the enhancement of class formation produced by the inclusion of a meaningful stimulus as a class member. A sorting task, which provided a secondary measure of class formation, indicated the formation of all three classes when the emergent relations probes indicated the same outcome. In contrast, the sorting test indicated "partial" class formation when the emergent relations test indicated no class formation. Finally, the effects of nodal distance on the relatedness of stimuli in the equivalence classes were not influenced by the functions served by the C stimuli in the equivalence classes.     

Matching- and nonmatching-to-sample concept learning in rats using olfactory stimuli

Previous research has shown that rats can learn matching-to-sample relations with olfactory stimuli; however, the specific characteristics of this relational control are unclear. In Experiment 1, 6 rats were trained to either match or nonmatch to sample in a modified operant chamber using common household spices as olfactory stimuli. After matching or nonmatching training with 10 exemplars, the contingencies were reversed with five new stimuli such that subjects trained on matching were shifted to nonmatching and vice versa. Following these reversed contingencies, the effects of the original training persisted for many trials with new exemplars. In Experiment 2, 9 rats were trained with matching procedures in an arena that provided for 18 different spatial locations for comparison stimuli. Five subjects were trained with differential reinforcement outcomes and 4 with only one type of reinforcer. Differential outcomes and multiple exemplars facilitated learning, and there was strong evidence for generalization to new stimuli for most rats that acquired several conditional discriminations. Performances with novel samples were generally above chance, but rarely reached the high levels obtained during baseline with well-trained stimulus relations. However, taken together, the data from the two experiments extend previous work, show that rats can learn both match and nonmatch relations with different experimental protocols, and demonstrate generalization to novel sample stimuli.     

Some determinants of remote behavioral history effects in humans

Undergraduates were exposed to a series of reinforcement schedules: first, to a fixed-ratio (FR) schedule in the presence of one stimulus and to a differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate (DRL) schedule in the presence of another (multiple FR DRL training), then to a fixed-interval (FI) schedule in the presence of a third stimulus (FI baseline), next to the FI schedule under the stimuli previously correlated with the FR and DRL schedules (multiple FI FI testing), and, finally, to a single session of the multiple FR DRL schedule again (multiple FR DRL testing). Response rates during the multiple FI FI schedule were higher under the former FR stimulus than under the former DRL stimulus. This effect of remote histories was prolonged when either the number of FI-baseline sessions was small or zero, or the time interval between the multiple FR DRL training and the multiple FI FI testing was short. Response rates under these two stimuli converged with continued exposure to the multiple FI FI schedule in most cases, but quickly differentiated when the schedule returned to the multiple FR DRL.     

Gender Role Traits Among Individuals with Social Anxiety Disorder

The present study investigated differences between individuals with and without social anxiety disorder (SAD) in instrumentality and expressiveness, personality traits traditionally linked to the male and female gender roles, respectively. Based on evolutionary and self-discrepancy theories, it was hypothesized that individuals with SAD would score lower on instrumentality and report a discrepancy between their perceived and ideal level of instrumentality compared to control participants. Sixty-four patients with SAD and 31 non-anxious control participants completed a battery of questionnaires, including ratings of their perceived and ideal gender role attributes and current psychosocial distress. Results supported the hypotheses, and provided initial evidence that a discrepancy between perceived and ideal instrumentality may be linked to social anxiety severity, depression and lower quality of life. No differences were detected between groups in expressiveness. The present findings suggest that individuals with SAD perceive themselves to be deficient in instrumentality. They also suggest that increasing instrumentality among individuals with SAD may be beneficial for treatment.     

Life history strategy, identity consolidation, and psychological well-being

Previous research has shown that individual differences in life history strategies co-vary with a large array of variables to the extent that latent variables from a number of psychological measures load on a single (Super-K) factor. Similar to research on the Super-K factor, the purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that various measures of identity would load on a single factor and that this latent variable would in turn be associated with other variables reflecting life history strategy and psychological well-being, making a Super-K factor. A sample of 248 university students were administered a variety of questionnaires related to identity, life history strategy, and psychological well-being. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed the hypothesized Super-K factor and the relationship remained even when controlling for variance in social-desirable responding. The results are discussed in terms of the association between Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development and life history theory.