The development of drawing in children with congenital focal brain injury: evidence for limited functional recovery

Children with pre- or perinatal injury to right hemisphere (RH) brain regions show impairment of spatial integrative functions similar to that observed among adults with comparable injury. Unlike adults, children show considerable improvement with development on a range of spatial construction tasks which require spatial integration. Such gains could reflect true recovery of spatial integrative abilities. Alternatively, the improvement could be more limited in scope, reflecting the development of compensatory strategies which are task specific and allow the children to circumvent, rather than overcome, their primary spatial disorders. The studies presented here examined this distinction within the context of drawing tasks in which the child was first asked to draw a house and then an impossible house. The impossible house task was designed to examine the extent to which children rely on graphic formulas in generating organized drawings. The results showed that while all of the children with RH injury make considerable progress in free drawing into the school age period, they are very reliant on the use of graphic formulas. When given a task which requires them to alter their drawings, they did not change the spatial configuration of the depicted object. Rather they found alternate ways to render the object 'impossible'.     

Developmental trends in visuospatial analysis and planning: I. Copying a complex figure.

An existing scoring system was used to assess the accuracy of the children's ability to copy the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure. The authors also developed additional measures to more precisely describe the process used by children in copying this figure. The findings suggest that children between the ages of 6 and 9 break the figure up into simple components but improve in their ability to integrate the figure with age. Younger children demonstrated a similar pattern of performance when copying the main features of the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure in isolation. The results of this study suggest that when faced with tasks requiring more advanced types of spatial analysis, children adopt strategies that proved successful when they were younger. Children have a variety of spatial analytic strategies available by age 6, but the strategy that they use is a function of pattern complexity and the capabilities of the child. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sudden Gains in Cognitive Therapy for Depression: A Replication and Extension.

Of 76 clients receiving 8-20 sessions of cognitive therapy (CT) in a joint university and a national health service clinic, 31 experienced sudden gains that appeared very similar to those first reported in clinical trials of CT by T. Z. Tang and R. J. DeRubeis (1999) and subsequently replicated in other studies. The sudden gains appeared less stable in the present study's more routine clinical practice settings than they were in the clinical trials. Life events did not appear to account for sudden gains. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Convergent validity of the CORE measures with measures of depression for clients in cognitive therapy for depression.

Clients (N = 77) undergoing cognitive therapy for depression were assessed before treatment with the Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation-Outcome Measure (CORE-OM), which encompasses domains of subjective well-being, problems, functioning, and risk of harming self or others, along with the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II), the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD), the Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS), and a measure of avoidant (Cluster C) personality problems (Inventory of Interpersonal Problems-Avoidant [IIP-Av]). The CORE-OM and the BDI-II were strongly correlated with each other and showed coherent and similar patterns of correlations with the HRSD, the BHS, and the IIP-Av. Sixty-one of the clients were repeatedly assessed during treatment with alternating versions of the CORE Short Form and with the BDI-II. Results strongly supported the convergent validity of the CORE measures with the BDI-II in across-clients comparisons of means scores and rates of improvement and in across-sessions comparisons within clients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Book reviews

Landscape and Power in Vienna

Robert Rotenberg

Baltimore and London, The John Hopkins University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-8018-4961-6, 416 pp, £33.00, ($39.95), hb

The Avebury Cycle

Michael Dames

London, Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2nd edition (revised), ISBN 0-500-27886-5, 240 pp, 201 illus., £10.95 ($16.95), pb

Landscapes of Settlement: prehistory to the present

Brian K. Roberts

London and New York, Routledge, 1996, ISBN 0-415-11968-5, x +181 pp, £47.50 hb, £16.99 pb

The Body Language of Trees: a handbook of failure analysis

Claus Mattheck & Helge Breloer (translator: Robert Strouts)

London, HMSO, 1996, ISBN 0 11 753067 0, 239 pp, £17.50     

Relations of the alliance with psychotherapy outcome: findings in the Second Sheffield Psychotherapy Project

Clients (n = 79) and therapists (n = 5) rated their alliance using parallel forms of the Agnew Relationship Measure (ARM) after every session of their time-limited psychodynamic-interpersonal or cognitive-behavioral treatments for depression. The ARM assesses 5 dimensions of the alliance: Bond, Partnership, Confidence, Openness, and Client Initiative. Treatment outcome was assessed as residual gain from pretreatment assessment to end of treatment, 3-month follow-up, and 1-year follow-up on 6 standard measures. Some aspects of the alliance as measured by the ARM were correlated with clients' gains in treatment. The strength of the association varied across assessment measures, occasions of outcome assessment, ARM scales, and the session number when the alliance was measured.     

Therapist session intentions in cognitive–behavioral and psychodynamic–interpersonal psychotherapy.

Theories of psychotherapy are implemented by therapists' intentional actions within sessions. This study examined the structure and construct validity of the Therapist Session Intentions (TSI) form. Ten therapists rated their therapeutic intentions following each of 2,305 therapy sessions of cognitive–behavioral or psychodynamic–interpersonal therapy in the Second Sheffield Psychotherapy Project. Seven conceptually coherent clusters of intentions, or therapeutic foci, were identified: treatment context, session structure, affect, obstacles, encouraging change, behavior, and cognition-insight. Contrasting patterns of therapeutic focus across treatments and changes in focus across sessions within treatments appeared conceptually coherent. Correlations across a subsample of sessions confirmed correspondences of the TSI foci with dimensions found previously in observers' ratings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verbal response mode correlates of experiencing.

This study, one in a series seeking indices of good psychotherapy process in the client's verbal behavior, compared specific verbal response mode (VRM) indices with the more global Experiencing (EXP) Scale, a measure reported to correlate with positive psychotherapy outcome. W. B. Stiles's (1978, 1979) VRM taxonomy was used to code the 90 transcribed interview segments published in the EXP manual. As predicted, the strongest VRM correlate of EXP level was the percentage of utterances that were Disclosure in form (1st person; "I") and intent (revealing subjective experience). Results suggest that good process may be measurable on an utterance-by-utterance basis. (5 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of bilateral olivocochlear lesions on vowel formant discrimination in cats

Operant conditioning procedures were used to measure the effects of bilateral olivocochlear lesions on the cat's discrimination thresholds for changes in the second formant frequency (deltaF2) of the vowel /epsilon/. Three cats were tested with the formant discrimination task under quiet conditions and in the presence of continuous broadband noise at signal-to-noise ratios (S/Ns) of 23, 13, and 3 dB. In quiet, vowel levels of 50 and 70 dB produced average deltaF2s of 42 and 47 Hz, respectively, and these thresholds did not change significantly in low levels of background noise (S/Ns = 23 and 13 dB). Average deltaF2s increased to 94 and 97 Hz for vowel levels of 50 and 70 dB in the loudest level of background noise (S/N = 3 dB). Average deltaF2 thresholds in quiet and in lower noise levels were only slightly affected when the olivocochlear bundle was lesioned by making bilateral cuts into the floor of the IVth ventricle. In contrast, post-lesion deltaF2 thresholds in the highest noise level were significantly larger than pre-lesion values; the most severely affected subject showed post-lesion discrimination thresholds well over 200 Hz for both 50 and 70 dB vowels. These results suggest that olivocochlear feedback may enhance speech processing in high levels of ambient noise.