Current Topics in Clinical and Community Psychology

Current Topics in Clinical and Community Psychology, Volume 1 reviews advances in clinical and community psychology. Topics covered include theory and research in areas such as psychological assessment of intelligence, personality, and abnormal behavior; psychotherapy, broadly defined to include counseling and behavior modification; and psychophysiological and neurological determinants of personality and psychopathology.

Comprised of five chapters, this volume first illustrates how reinforcement and modeling techniques can enable psychologists to function effectively as mental health consultants and agents of social change in an institution for delinquent children. The second chapter describes a unique program designed to prevent emotional dysfunction in school children by combining effective therapeutic intervention with relevant research and evaluation. The third chapter challenges the relevance of psychological research that does not take into account the relationship between the experimenter and his subjects, and instead demonstrates the impact of experimenter self-disclosure on the responses given to psychological tests and on subjects' behavior in psychology experiments. The fourth chapter proposes a behaviorally oriented model for the assessment of positive mental health and describes a successful application of this model in the assessment of the competence of college freshmen. The final chapter relates research on human psychophysiology to problems of psychological assessment and psychotherapy that are of central concern to clinical psychologists.

This book should prove useful to practicing clinical and community psychologists, graduate and undergraduate students of psychology, and members of other mental health professions.

Inhalt

List of Contributors

Preface

Social Influence Technique in Clinical and Community Psychology

I. Introduction

II. The Principle of Reinforcement

III. The Principle of Modeling

IV. Summary and Conclusions

References

Research on Early Detection and Prevention of Emotional Dysfunction in Young School Children

I. Introduction

II. Background for Initial Programs in Early Detection and Prevention

III. Early Detection Procedures

IV. Preventive Procedures

V. Recent Programs in Secondary Prevention

VI. Concluding Remarks

References

The Effects of Experiments' Self-Disclosure on Subjects' Behavior

I. Introduction

II. Some Effects of Experimenter-Subject Acquaintance

III. Conclusion

Appendix I: 40-Item Self-Disclosure Questionnaire Game of Invitations

Appendix II: Interview Rating Scale

Appendix III: Topics of the Interview

Appendix IV: Impression Scale

Appendix V: Discussion Topics

Appendix VI: Discussion Topics

Appendix VII: Self-Disclosure Questions

Appendix VIII: The Experience of Being a "Subject"

References

A Behavioral-Analytic Model for Assessing Competence

I. Introduction

II. Approaches to Assessment

III. Definitions of Competence

IV. A Behavioral-Analytic Method of Assessing Competence

V. The Stony Brook Study

VI. Conclusions and Implications

References

Psychophysiology and Clinical Psychology

I. Introduction

II. Theoretical Models and Their Application to Clinical Psychological Problems

III. Personality Correlates of Psychophysiological Processes

IV. Psychophysiology and Psychotherapy

V. Diagnosis

VI. Conclusions

References

Author Index

Subject Index