Stage hypnosis and public lecture effects on attitudes and beliefs regarding hypnosis.

Stage hypnosis shows, designed to entertain and amaze, and public lectures, designed to explain and educate, provide dramatically different introductions to hypnosis. This study examined how audience members' attitudes and beliefs regarding hypnosis are affected by these two different experiences. Two hundred and five college students completed pretest measures before either watching a stage hypnosis show, or attending a lecture on hypnosis, or participating in a control group. Subjects completed posttest measures between one to three weeks later. Both the stage hypnosis show and the lecture increased attendees' motivation to use hypnosis in treatment and decreased their belief that hypnotizability reflects lower intelligence. Moreover, the lecture also increased beliefs that hypnotizability reflects creativity and inner strength. Finally, while the lecture reduced the belief that a hypnotized person is robotlike and automatically acts on all suggestions, the stage hypnosis show increased this attitude among its audience members.

An ark of prevention: Preventing school absenteeism after a flood.

Children have been identified as a demographic group that is particularly vulnerable to disaster-induced psychological problems such as separation anxiety and phobias, both of which can lead to higher levels of school absenteeism. This paper presents an overview of a program designed to prevent school absenteeism following a flood in the central Shenandoah Valley of western Virginia. The program activities developed to achieve this goal involved a cognitive behavioral approach designed to equip students with the skills to cope effectively with future rainfalls. In evaluating the success of the program, analysis of school attendance records showed no increase in school absenteeism in the seven months following the flood, compared to attendance records for the previous ten years.

Testing a model for the process of telephone crisis intervention.

A four-stage model of telephone helping was tested by rating 59 calls to a crisis intervention service. The rating instrument was the Crisis Call Interaction Form, a process measure with 19 behaviors in four categories: establishment of a helpful climate, assessment of the crisis, affect integration, and problem solution. Hypotheses stated that helper behaviors would vary differentially across portions (thirds) of calls. After controlling for length of call and within-call similarities, residual variances in each third of the calls were subjected to planned orthogonal comparisons. Hypotheses were generally supported: Climate decreased from first to middle third; assessment decreased in the last third; affect tended to be highest in the middle third; and problem solution increased steadily throughout the calls. However, helper behaviors from all categories were present in every portion of calls. The term "phase" was offered to replace the stage concept as a more fluid model of telephone crisis intervention.