ABSTRACT
This study investigated the use of the immediacy theory to explain the existence of auditory hallucinations and delusions in individuals with schizophrenia and to develop treatment strategies. In a 2-phase approach, a therapist trained 6 individuals with schizophrenia to stop responding to the immediate stimuli ostensibly evoking their symptoms and instead to respond to more remote stimuli unrelated to the problem behavior. Two other participants received nonspecific supportive psychotherapy to control for rater bias and to provide some comparison to the experimental treatment. Following 6 weeks of therapy, participants in the experimental group improved on 66% of the symptom measures. By contrast, participants in the control group improved on only 11% of the measures. The individuals in the experimental group retained some of these benefits during the follow-up period. The findings are discussed in light of several contributory factors.
Subject(s)
Behavior Therapy , Psychotherapy , Schizophrenia/therapy , Schizophrenic Psychology , Adult , Attention , Delusions/diagnosis , Delusions/psychology , Delusions/therapy , Female , Hallucinations/diagnosis , Hallucinations/psychology , Hallucinations/therapy , Humans , Male , Middle Aged , Outcome and Process Assessment, Health Care , Psychiatric Status Rating Scales , Schizophrenia/diagnosis , Speech Perception , Treatment OutcomeABSTRACT
Some years ago Underwood (1964) grappled with the problem of explaining his finding that rate of forgetting was not a function of the rate of learning but rather seemed to reflect the level of learning achieved. He likened different rates of learning to filling an Erlenmeyer flask of water at different rates and the process of forgetting to the rate of evaporation, which in turn is a function of the exposed surface area. Since an Erlenmeyer flask is cone-shaped, the surface area becomes smaller as the flask is filled, thus the greater the amount of learning achieved, or water added, the less the rate of evaporation independent of how quickly or slowly the flask was filled. I give this example because it is such a clear description of history kept simple, in the psychological process of learning and forgetting. Indeed it is as simple as Charles Dickens' description of how students are to be taught, that is, by considering them to be "little vessels...ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim" (Dickens, 1961, p. 12). The object of this paper is to show how our neglect in specifying the history of reinforcement and other behavior analytic concepts has resulted in our ceding much of our field to cognitive psychologists even though our knowledge of conditioning enables us to study it more thoroughly than they can.
Subject(s)
Behavior Therapy/methods , Reinforcement, Psychology , Animals , Conditioning, Operant , Extinction, Psychological , Humans , Mental Recall , MotivationSubject(s)
Psychology/history , Societies/history , History, 19th Century , History, 20th Century , Humans , United StatesABSTRACT
Rats were sham exposed or exposed perinatally to a 60-Hz electromagnetic field, 22 days in utero and the first 8 days post partum. Each of the 30 once-daily exposures was 20 h in duration. The electric component of the field was vertical 30 kV/m rms, and the magnetic field component was 100 microTG rms. Later, as adults, male rats were trained to emit an operant response when reinforced with food on a multiple, random-interval schedule. Exposed rats (N = 21) gradually came to respond at significantly lower rates than did sham-exposed controls (N = 20). This finding was confirmed and extended in a second, independently performed experiment. After a sequence including operant conditioning followed by experimental extinction of responding and then by a suspension of conditioning and finally by more than a month of reconditioning, slower rates of responding were found to persist in the adult animals. The evidence of altered behavior several months after combined, fetal-neonatal exposure to an electromagnetic field presents an interesting contrast with other findings: Field-exposed rats did not differ from sham-exposed rats in terms of body mass, physical appearance, grossly observed activity level, or incidence of disease.
