It's never too late to change: A group psychotherapy experience for older women

Group psychotherapy in a mixed gender group is seen as useful for treatment of the unique existential and emotional problems of the older woman. This article describes the first year of a psychotherapy group for older adults, four women and three men in their early fifties to late sixties. Some issues discussed unique to this age group were loss, isolation, changing body image, and changed political views. There were differences in reactions between the men and women. The major value of group psychotherapy for older women is seen as providing a safe arena for exploring current issues, integrating a sense of self, enhancing self-worth, and overcoming isolation and despair.     

Tracking the continuity of language comprehension: computer mouse trajectories suggest parallel syntactic processing

Although several theories of online syntactic processing assume the parallel activation of multiple syntactic representations, evidence supporting simultaneous activation has been inconclusive. Here, the continuous and non-ballistic properties of computer mouse movements are exploited, by recording their streaming x, y coordinates to procure evidence regarding parallel versus serial processing. Participants heard structurally ambiguous sentences while viewing scenes with properties either supporting or not supporting the difficult modifier interpretation. The curvatures of the elicited trajectories revealed both an effect of visual context and graded competition between simultaneously active syntactic representations. The results are discussed in the context of 3 major groups of theories within the domain of sentence processing.     

When group doesn't work: An examination of the types and causes of individual,group, and leader failures

Learning to recognize the types and causes of failures in group psychotherapy leads to ways of preventing or minimizing failures. Three types of failures are discussed. Causes of failure of an individual member of a group include early dropout and conflict with intimacy. Failure of the leader includes internal issues, such as countertransference, incongruent goals or desire for unrealistic treatment results, boundary issues, and setting of group structure through group rules. The leader's external issues relate to training and knowledge, while the leader's situational issues consist of those areas over which the therapist has little or no control, such as agency assignments. Failure of the group-as-a-whole may be due to therapeutic impasse or lack of cohesion. Cognizance of these factors is seen as primary in minimizing or preventing failures.