Within the last 15 years a large number of empirical investigations have explored the psychotherapeutic applications of meditative techniques. This research expands upon previous efforts in this area by comparing Kundalini Yoga with Progressive Muscle Relaxation, an attention-placebo control, and a no-treatment control on measures of anxiety (STAI Trait Form), personality development (Locus of Control Scale), and drug consumption. A total of 47 undergraduate student volunteers were randomly assigned to the four treatment conditions. Following a 2-week baseline phase to determine pretreatment drug consumption, subjects began a 6-week treatment phase during which time they attended two classes each week. Throughout the treatment phase subjects maintained detailed drug consumption diaries. Following this treatment phase, all subjects were readministered the aforementioned tests and questionnaires. Without exception, the research failed to find any significant treatment effects attributable to the practice of Kundalini Yoga. Moreover, none of the experimental treatment groups studied here displayed treatment gains over and above a no-treatment control group. There are at least two ways to account for this lack of significant differences. On the one hand, one could assert that the treatment groups were somehow impotent and incapable of effecting change any better than the nonspecific treatment factors working for the no-treatment group; or on the other hand, one could assert that the treatment groups were indeed therapeutic, but not significantly due to too brief of an intervention phase, and/or due to the highly variable treatment response of a nonpredisposed subject pool.

Inledning: Humor, glädje och skratt har varit lika framträdande i det mänskliga livet som i litteraturen, teatern och konsten sedan civilisationens begynnelse, precis som sorgen och det tragiska. Detsamma kan dock inte sägas om psykoterapin. Uppmärksamheten på humorns funktion i terapeutisk behandling har varit ytterst begränsad. Frågeställningar: Vilken betydelse har humor när den uttrycks i den psykoterapeutiska kontexten och processen? Metod: Studie är kvalitativ. Fem psykoterapeuter intervjuades med hjälp av semistrukturerade intervjuer som sedan analyserades och tolkats utifrån en fenomenologisk hermeneutisk ansats. Resultat: Humor i terapi kan öppna upp tillvaron, ge en känsla av gemenskap, erbjuda förhållningssätt till döden samt skänka insikt. Humorn kan i sig utgöra en prognostisk indikator. Men den kan också utgöra hindrande försvar. Att bjuda in patienten till det humoristiska ställer krav på försiktighet, kan röra en fråga om överlevnad, kan uttryckas som klarifiering och slutligen utgöra ett förhållningssätt som kan internaliseras. Diskussion: Humor kan utgöra en mycket verksam och utvecklande del i terapin där patienten genom humor kan utvecklas i riktning mot ökad öppenhet, frihet och rörlighet vilket möjliggör distans och ökad reflektionsförmåga och därmed handlingsutrymme och möjlighet till insikt och i slutändan förändring. Patienten ingår också härigenom i ett sammanhang med sin egen och andras död och livsvillkor. En terapeut med sinne för humor och med god självkännedom kan med hjälp av bl.a. klarifieringar och gemensamma ordlösa tolkningar skapa något som utgör i sanning ett lekområde värt namnet. / Introduction: Humor, joy and laughter have been as prominent in human life as in literature, theater and the arts since the beginning of civilization, just as the sorrow and the tragic. The same can not be said for psychotherapy. Attention to the function of humor in the therapeutic treatment has been extremely limited. Research questions: What meaning has humor when expressed in the psychotherapeutic context and process? Method: The study is qualitative. Five psychotherapists were interviewed using semi-structured interviews which are then analyzed and interpreted on the basis of a phenomenological hermeneutic approach. Results: Humor in therapy can open up your world, giving a sense of community, provide approaches to death and give insight. The humor can itself be a prognostic indicator. But it can also be prohibitive defense. Inviting the patient to the humorous requires caution, can be a matter of survival, can be expressed as clarification, and finally provide an approach that can be internalized. Discussion: Humor can be a very active and challenging part of the therapy where the patient through humor can be developed in the direction of greater openness, freedom and mobility which allows for distance and increased reflectivity and thus room for maneuver and ability for insight and ultimately change. The patient is also included herein through in a context of their own and others dead and living conditions. A therapist with a sense of humor and with good self-knowledge can, with the help of clarification and joint nonverbal interpretations, create something that represents truly a play space worthy of the name.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Psychology, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 70-77).

From Introduction: This thesis involves a detailed explication of my experience as a client in psychotherapy. Being in therapy has brought about extremely important ·changes in my life and continues to do so. Being involved · in the field of· psychology as a student and therapist-to-be, the experience of therapy has also been a valuable source of a greater understanding of the process itself. The various facets of the importance of my experience of psychotherapy will become clear in my explication. It is a fact that experience, which is an essential aspect of our humanness, has been sadly neglected in psychological research. It is surely psychology's task to explore all aspects of humanity, and this neglect of experience has only fairly recently been questioned. Its reasons have been psychology's bias towards the natural sciences whose methods are not suitable for the study of experience. The tremendous achievements of the natural sciences caused psychology to adopt this slant, as Sigmund Koch (19.69) puts it, "The stipulation that psychology be adequate · to science outweighed the commitment that it be adequate to man". (p 65).

M.A. (Psychology) / This study set out to try and find some answers to questions pertaining to psychotherapy groups in the admissions ward of a psychiatric hospital. The questions were about the effect of group therapy on: * the system of the psychiatric hospital; * the therapists within the system of the psychiatric hospital; * the members of the groups (the patients). * which prosesses took place within the group therapy that can be regarded as therapeutic, and * which prosesses can be described as anti-therapeutic and destructive? The study is descriptive in nature and looks in turn to group therapy in the context of the psychiatric hospital and the efforts of two clinical psychology interns to run therapy groups in the admissions ward of a psychiatric hospital. The conclusion is made that the effectiveness of group therapy in a psychiatric hospital is limited as long as the epistemological differences between psychiatry and psychology are not attended to and as long as the status of psychologists in general, and interns in particular, stays as it is at present. With this in mind, recommendations are made regarding the context, organisation, goals and structure of group therapy as well as the role of the therapist, training of interns in group therapy and further research.

This study examines the workings of the ground rules which make up the framework of psychotherapy, in an institutional context, by analysing transcripts of twelve audio taped sessions of therapy conducted in a psychiatric hospital. The breaks in the ground rules of the sessions are noted and the patients' responses to these breaks are analysed using Langs's (1982, 1988) method for decoding patients' material, suitably modified for use as a hermeneutic research method. Although all of the ground rules are broken in the institutional context, only one of the ten ground rules appears to be essentially affected by this particular institutional context. Other ground rules are broken out of choice of technique or through error. The institutional context has a structural impact only on the ground rule requiring a one to one relationship with privacy and confidentiality and this ground rule is transgressed in a number of ways in all twelve sessions examined in this study. However the patients' responses to this breach only occur in ways predicted by communicative theory when the break in the ground rule involves actual entry into the therapy space by another person. Other contraventions to this ground rule that do not involve such an entry do not elicit the predicted patient responses. The many other ground rule breaks occurring in the institutional context evoke the predicted responses in the patients' material. In the study, no therapist interventions are found to comply with the communicative therapy requirements for sound interventions; concomitantly it was found that no therapist interventions receive the required derivative validation. The results indicate that it is possible to conduct therapy of a substantially secure frame variety in this institutional context with minimum effort on the part of therapists and given proper training and supervision of therapists in the techniques of communicative psychotherapy. Furthermore the results lend weight to the importance of the communicative methodology for listening to patients' material in psychotherapy in an institutional context. However, further rigorous study of competently performed therapy, executed within the context of a secure frame within an institutional context, is needed in order to demonstrate the benefits of the communicative psychotherapy interventions and interpretations in this context.

M.Cur. (Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

A prominent need in youth psychotherapy literature includes the examination of factors related to improved psychotherapeutic outcomes within the context of "real world" clinical settings, where the practice of psychotherapy differs significantly from that in controlled clinical trials. In examining those factors related to improved outcomes in youth psychotherapy, variables related to social support are important to consider. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate youth perceptions of social support as a potential predictor of successful treatment outcomes in a traditional community outpatient treatment setting for youth. In addition, this study examined whether perceptions of social support predicted both youth and parent-reported symptoms. Also examined were differential outcomes predicted by social support for youth with primarily internalizing vs. externalizing symptoms. Youth and parent-reported symptoms were measured using the Y-OQ and the Y-OQ-SR (Y-OQ; Burlingame, Wells, Lambert, & Cox, 2004; Y-OQ-SR; Wells, Burlingame, & Rose, 2003). Perceived social support was measured using the TSM social support subscale for youth reporters. Internalizing and externalizing symptoms were measured using the CBCL. Using a combination of Analysis of Variance and Hierarchical Linear Modeling with a sample of 199 youth, aged 10-17, and their parents, this study examined the relationship between perceived social support and youth progress in therapy. Results revealed that youth perceptions of social support were significantly associated with youth intake symptoms for both parent and youth-reported symptoms. In addition, youth-reported perceptions of social support improved significantly over the course of treatment. Also, increased overall change in perceived social support was associated with decreased overall symptoms for youth reporters. Finally, no significant differences were found for youth presenting with primarily internalizing vs. primarily externalizing symptoms. Examining the associations between perceptions of social support and youth psychotherapy outcomes is an important step toward identifying potential mechanisms of change in youth mental health treatment. The results of this study provide valuable information on the importance of attending to perceptions of social support in the assessment and treatment of youth mental health issues.

The role of motivation in relation to youth symptoms and psychotherapy outcomes is not well understood. Some cross-sectional research suggests that motivation predicts youth treatment outcome in low-motivation populations. The purpose of this study was to examine patterns of change in youth motivation over the course of treatment and to elucidate the relation between motivation, youth symptoms, and psychotherapy outcomes in a routine community mental health setting. Participants and their caregivers were from three community mental health outpatient clinics and completed youth or parent forms of the Youth Outcome Questionnaire (Y-OQ) and Treatment Support Measure (TSM) at frequent intervals throughout treatment. Data were collected over a period of about 2 years. On average, youth motivation significantly increased over the course of therapy according to self- (p < .001) and parent-report (p < .001). This change followed a square root function better than linear and quadratic models. Initial motivation was not predictive of overall change in symptoms or rate of change at the p <.05 level after accounting for initial levels of youth symptoms. Individual rates of change for youth motivation varied significantly over the course of treatment (p < .001), which might suggest unique trajectories of motivation for different subsets of youth based on presenting concerns or other variables.

No description available.