Motivational Interviewing: Reconciling Recovery-Focused Care and Mental Health Nursing Practice.

Motivational interviewing (MI) is a long-established evidenced-based intervention aimed at guiding people to implement change. Originally developed by William Miller from the United States and Stephen Rollnick from the United Kingdom, a strong emphasis for MI is the underlying 'spirit', rather than merely the specific techniques within the model. The 'spirit' of MI consists of four key components: acceptance, partnership, evocation and compassion. These have direct overlap with concepts within the personal recovery model recognised as a critical framework in delivery of contemporary mental health services for consumers. Despite this recognition, recovery concepts have struggled to gain consistent traction, particularly within inpatient mental health units. This paper proposes that MI presents one strategy for integrating recovery-focused principles within routine mental health nursing (MHN) practice. An overview of MI and its relationship with recovery principles is discussed in the context of contemporary MHN practice. Evaluation results of a locally developed MI workshop for MHNs within a regional area of New South Wales (NSW) in Australia are presented to highlight the emerging evidence for this potential. Following the workshop, MHN participants showed key improvements in knowledge and confidence scores, as well as in understanding of key MI processes and strategies. The consolidation of these skills through training and a supervision framework is outlined.

Task effects determine whether recognition memory is mediated discretely or continuously.

How recognition memory is mediated has been of interest to researchers for decades. But the apparent consensus implicating continuous mediation has been challenged. McAdoo, Key, and Gronlund (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition,2018. Advanced online publication) demonstrated that recognition memory can be mediated by either discrete or continuous evidence, depending on target-filler similarity. The present paper expands on this research by showing that different recognition tasks also can be mediated by different evidence. Specifically, recognition memory was mediated by continuous evidence in a ranking task, but by discrete evidence in a confidence-rating task. We posit that participants utilize a control process that induces a reliance on discrete or continuous evidence as a function of efficiency (Malmberg, 2008) to suit the demands of the task.

Stimulus effects and the mediation of recognition memory.

Two broad approaches characterize the type of evidence that mediates recognition memory: discrete state and continuous. Discrete-state models posit a thresholded memory process that provides accurate information about an item (it is detected) or, failing that, no mnemonic information about the item. Continuous models, in contrast, posit the existence of graded mnemonic information about an item. Evidence favoring 1 approach over the other has been mixed, suggesting the possibility that the mediation of recognition memory may be adaptable and influenced by other factors. We tested this possibility with 2 experiments that varied the semantic similarity of word targets and fillers. Experiment 1, which used semantically similar fillers, displayed evidence of continuous mediation (contrary to Kellen & Klauer, 2015), whereas Experiment 2, which used semantically dissimilar fillers, displayed evidence of discrete mediation. The results have implications for basic theories of recognition memory, as well as for theories of applied domains like eyewitness identification. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).