Competences and occupational standards for systemic family and couples therapy

This article reports on the recent government initiative of 2007–2010 to delineate, for the major forms of psychological therapy, expected professional standards of practice and conduct in workplaces (the national occupational standards) and to specify expected levels of competent practice (the competences). The article focuses on the processes and outcomes of this initiative for systemic therapy and its clinical and political relevance. The rationale, research and consultation processes by which these formulations were achieved are described and the outcomes of the work are reported. We also discuss their wider implications, including the various ways in which these achievements might be used and their potential value for the field of systemic family and couples therapy.     

Offender interviewing in custodial settings: Understanding validity,value and veracity issues

The purpose of this scoping literature review was to identify trends regarding validity, value and veracity issues when conducting (qualitative) interviews with offenders in custodial settings. We selected for review works from electronic databases in SAGE, Springer, and Taylor and Francis by using e-journals, Google Scholar and the behavioural science database, PsycINFO. The inclusion criteria for our studies were based on whether sources addressed offender interviewing as a wellspring of information, but excluded those that focused solely on the acquisition of clinical information (at the expense of focusing on validity, value and veracity issues). We utilised the content analysis approach to identify themes/ patterns in the research findings. Key findings suggest that offenders with impression management motivations deceive and manipulate in their research interview presentations. When gathering data from inmates in custodial care settings, best practice includes cross-checking offender interview data against other sources of evidence and taking into account the context in which they are serving their sentences.     

A model to coordinate understanding of active autonomous learning

Family therapy has enthusiastically taken up certain concepts for adult education but has not benefited from the full range of ideas that are now both available and compatible with current epistemologies. Good practice in formulating learning objectives is discussed and the objectives of this article are specified. Areas of psychology that are relevant to adult learning are reviewed, and concepts of adult education that are important in the training of family therapists are considered. A model of a spiral process of learning that has been developed within the Leeds Family Therapy and Research Centre is proposed. The model coordinates the principles of adult learning described in the article and may be used as a framework for considering whether training will achieve its learning objectives as well as allowing people engaged in learning to gain further insight into how they learn. Readers are encouraged to use the principles of active reflective learning during their processing of the article.     

Sympathetic arousal to a vestibular stressor in high and low hostile men

The aim of the present experiment was to extend the literature on hostility and a cerebral systems based model of sympathetic arousal to a vestibular-based stress. Several authors have concluded that autonomic stress reactivity in high hostile individuals must be interpersonally based, whereas healthy vestibular system functioning does not depend on interpersonal features. Utilizing a vestibular activation paradigm, skin conductance levels of 15 high hostile and 15 low hostile men were recorded after brief passive rotation about the vertical neuroaxis. It was expected that hostile individuals would exhibit higher skin conductance levels after rotation compared with low hostile individuals. The results confirmed expectations of heightened sympathetic tone among high hostiles subsequent to vestibular stress. Overall, the findings are interpreted to support a cerebral model of frontal region capacity limitation for regulation of vestibular stress that is independent of psychosocial mechanisms.     

Discrimination by newborns of the intensity, frequency and temporal characteristics of auditory stimuli

The ability of 3- to 5-day-old neonates to discriminate between auditory stimuli, in terms of each of the dimensions of intensity, pitch and time, was studied using heart-rate responses in a habituation paradigm. For each of the dimensions a survey of the literature failed to provide results which could be used as the basis for later work involving auditory patterns. Further analysis of an earlier experiment (Stratton, 1970 a) involving stimuli at 80, 85 and 90 db showed that louder stimuli evoked larger initial responses and more rapid habituation. From the same experiment it was found that a change of pitch produced dishabituation as early as the 10th trial. There are reasonable grounds for attributing the increased response to the frequency characteristics rather than a change in the perceived intensity of the stimuli. Previous experiments suggested that fixed inter-stimulus intervals tended to produce anticipatory heart-rate changes and modify the magnitude and latency of the response. Two experiments designed specifically to examine temporal phenomena revealed time-linked behaviour. In both experiments acceleratory responses occurred at the first stimulus omission of a fixed-interval series. Not all of the subjects showed this effect, and in both experiments, only the subjects who failed to respond to the first stimulus presentation responded to stimulus omission. The findings are discussed in relation to general issues of neonatal psychophysiology, and it is concluded that neonates can discriminate in each of the auditory dimensions, but that preliminary work involving patterns should concentrate on varying pitch and intensity.