Practical work in physiotherapy students’ professional development

Learning practical work through cooperation between school and working life is part of physiotherapy higher education. Students learn practical work through the integration of theoretical, practical, tacit and situational knowledge in a socialization process. Workplace practices and habits direct students’ learning. This study answers the question: What kind of conceptions of learning practical work do physiotherapy students have? Longitudinal data written by 21 volunteer students (mean age 25 years) was collected over three and a half years. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. Learning practical work proceeds in five phases: (1) the basis of practical work, human movement and action and therapeutic tools is learned at school; (2) the meaning of the profession and practical work takes shape in an interaction with clients and observing how professionals work in real workplaces; (3) the wholeness of the practical work takes shape by gradually participating in the work processes; (4) critical reflection of the work processes – thinking, construction, evaluation and reasoning – develops; and (5) the conception of practical work widens. This study brings new information about learning practical work for developing healthcare education and its curricula. The role of workplaces is huge in learning tacit knowledge of the profession.     

Structural couplings between individual development and the epigenesis of family relations in schizophrenia: An eight-year follow-up

The aim of this research was to study individual development along with the epigenesis of family relations in an eight-year follow-up of schizophrenia. The five epigenetic phases described by Wynne are attachment/caregiving, communicating, joint problemsolving, mutuality, and intimacy. Results showed that the critical level of epigenesis was the communicating level; its resolution was statistically significantly connected to good prognosis concerning individual parameters. The mother-child dyad was usually epigenetically the most developed dyad in the family. We think this study gives a new paradigm for understanding connecting interconnections between individual and family dynamics in schizophrenia and valuable information for planning the integrated and need-specific treatment of schizophrenia and evaluating the course and prognosis of schizophrenia.This study was carried out at the Clinic of Psychiatry of the University of Turku, Finland, and financially supported by the Academy of Finland. The head of the project was Professor Yrjö O. Alanen. We have also been in cooperation with and received valuable constructive criticism from Professor Lyman C. Wynne, whose theoretical model we applied in this study. Ms. Birgitta Nolvi's secretarial work was greatly appreciated.     

Freud's view of hysteria in light of modern trauma research

Freud's earliest notion of the aetiology of hysterical symptoms was based on his hypothesis on the importance of trauma dissociation, upon which he began to construct his first theory of neurosis. Soon, his conception of trauma narrowed to apply only to sexual trauma, and later only to childhood experiences of sexual abuse by the father. He substituted these earliest variations on a theory of neurosis with the libido theory due to his discovery of infantile sexuality, the poor treatment results he had with hysteric patients, the frequency of hysteria symptoms, the difficulties he had in distinguishing between his patients' internal and external realities and the ambiguous nature of the reasons behind the patients' problems, presumably due to repression. Recent trauma research, however, has rediscovered trauma dissociation, which is separate from repression. This has led to a new theoretical understanding of trauma-originated dynamics and the development of corresponding treatment interventions. In this paper, the author analyzes the development of Freud's conceptions of hysteria in the social-clinical cultural context of his period, as well as the reasons which led Freud to abandon the notion that trauma dissociation was an underlying cause of hysteria symptoms.     

Cognitive and attributional strategies among unemployed young adults: A case of the failure-trap strategy

This study concerns the extent to which people who display evident problem behaviour show signs of applying inefficient cognitive and attributional strategies in an achievement context. Twenty unemployed young adults, 14 people with health problems, and 23 students of a vocational school were compared in terms of the strategies they applied. The Strategy and Attribution Questionnaire (SAQ) and the Cartoon-Attribution-Strategy Test (CAST) developed for this study were used. The results showed that the unemployed young adults reported higher levels of failure expectations and task-irrelevant behaviour, and lower levels of self-esteem and self-serving attributional bias, than the control group. This pattern of results does not fully fit in with the conceptualizations of self-handicapping and learned helplessness. Therefore, a failure-trap strategy is discussed as an alternative type of maladaptive strategy. Typical of this strategy is that people with low self-esteem concentrate on task-irrelevant behaviour, but do not refer to this behaviour as an external excuse for failure.     

Production of Inflected Novel Words in Older Adults With and Without Dementia

While cognitive changes in aging and neurodegenerative disease have been widely studied, language changes in these populations are less well understood. Inflecting novel words in a language with complex inflectional paradigms provides a good opportunity to observe how language processes change in normal and abnormal aging. Studies of language acquisition suggest that children inflect novel words based on their phonological similarity to real words they already know. It is unclear whether speakers continue to use the same strategy when encountering novel words throughout the lifespan or whether adult speakers apply symbolic rules. We administered a simple speech elicitation task involving Finnish-conforming pseudo-words and real Finnish words to healthy older adults, individuals with mild cognitive impairment, and individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) to investigate inflectional choices in these groups and how linguistic variables and disease severity predict inflection patterns. Phonological resemblance of novel words to both a regular and an irregular inflectional type, as well as bigram frequency of the novel words, significantly influenced participants' inflectional choices for novel words among the healthy elderly group and people with AD. The results support theories of inflection by phonological analogy (single-route models) and contradict theories advocating for formal symbolic rules (dual-route models).