Clinical implications of research on brief dynamic psychotherapy I. Formulating the patient's problems and goals.

In this two-part series of articles, a model for understanding the process of brief dynamic psychotherapy is presented. The model suggests that patients enter therapy with an unconscious plan for how to get better. The therapist's interventions must be in accord with this plan for the patient to be helped by therapy. The plan concept is described, as are issues involved in inferring a patient's plan. Finally, the ramifications of the plan concept for the conduct of brief dynamic psychotherapy are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Advanced wood-frame construction details in Canada

This paper investigates how durability, energy efficiency and indoor air quality can be improved through proper detailing. The energy implications of air-tight construction are evaluated for terrace and semi-detached houses.     

Simulations among concurrent-write PRAMs

This paper is concerned with the relative power of the two most popular concurrent-write models of parallel computation, the PRIORITY PRAM [G], and the COMMON PRAM [K]. Improving the trivial and seemingly optimalO(logn) simulation, we show that one step of a PRIORITY machine can be simulated byO(logn/(log logn)) steps of a COMMON machine with the same number of processors (and more memory). We further prove that this is optimal, if processor communication is restricted in a natural way.Support for this research was provided by NSF Grants MCS-8402676 and MCS-8120790, DARPA Contract No. N00039-84-C-0089, an IBM Faculty Development Award, and an NSERC postgraduate scholarship.     

Vanderbilt Psychotherapy Process Scale: A replication with adult outpatients.

This study is a replication of two earlier studies undertaken by the Vanderbilt Psychotherapy Research Group to investigate the relation between the process and the outcome of brief psychotherapy. In this study, 38 brief (16-session) psychodynamic therapies were rated from audiotaped segments of the 8th hr of treatment on the Vanderbilt Psychotherapy Process Scale (VPPS). This study, unlike prior studies with the VPPS, applied the scale to a population of adult outpatients. The VPPS ratings were correlated with outcome assessments made by patients, therapists, and independent clinical evaluators. Significant correlations were found between therapist ratings of outcome and two process variables: patient involvement and therapist-offered relationship. These findings are consistent with published reports by the Vanderbilt group. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A user evaluation of information characteristics related to demand deposit systems: An empirical analysis

In a recent issue of Information and Management, Neumann and Segev developed a correlation analysis of user evaluation of information characteristics (IC) for system improvement. The purpose of this note is to offer a modest extension to their theory which is otherwise viewed as an excellent attempt at modeling realistic aspects of the user IC evaluation. This empirical study factor analyzes the four IC variables. These variables (Content, Accuracy, Frequency, and Recency) are also ranked according to their relative dominance. The differentiation level among these IC variables is found to be low. Thus, the four variables have been reduced to one factor. Moreover, a formula for an index of IC has been set. Thus, it is possible to condense these four variables into one factor.     

The effects of shame, guilt, and the negative reaction in brief dynamic psychotherapy.

Developed the Therapy Shame and Guilt Scale (TSGS) to test the hypothesis that patients' degree of shame and guilt would be significant predictors of therapy outcome. 35 patients (aged 20–80 yrs) with neurotic and/or character disorders received 16 weekly sessions of psychodynamically oriented psychotherapy. Two judges' ratings of Sessions 1, 5, 8, and 14 on the TSGS demonstrated that patient levels of shame and (especially) guilt were associated with therapeutic outcome. The TSGS was a better predictor of outcome than the Vanderbilt Negative Indicators Scale (VNIS), whose major point of overlap with the TSGS was the VNIS item of self-rejection. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dependency, self-criticism, and depressive attributional style.

Dependency and self-criticism have been proposed as independent factors in depression. Investigated whether depressive individuals characterized by dependency and self-criticism, respectively, differ with regard to internality of causal attributions for negative events. Sixty psychiatric outpatients completed the Depressive Experiences Questionnaire, the Beck Depression Inventory, the semantic differential, and the Attributional Style Questionnaire. Dependency and self-criticism correlated positively with internality and with each other (p     

Randomized vs. deterministic decision tree complexity for read-once Boolean functions

We consider the deterministic and the randomized decision tree complexities for Boolean functions, denotedDC(f) andRC(f), respectively. A major open problem is how smallRC(f) can be with respect toDC(f). It is well known thatRC(f)DC(f) ^0.5 for every Boolean functionf (called 0.5-exponent). On the other hand, some Boolean functionf is known to haveRC(f) = (DC(f))^0.753...) (or 0.753...-exponent). It is not known whether there is a Boolean function with exponent smaller than 0.753... Likewise, no lower bound for arbitrary Boolean functions with exponent greater than 0.5 is known.Our result is a 0.51 lower bound on the exponent for everyread-once function. Read-once means that each input variable appears exactly once in the Boolean formula representing the function. To obtain this result we generalize an existing lower bound technique and combine it with restriction arguments. This result provides a lower bound ofn ^0.51 on the number of positions that have to be evaluated by any randomized - pruning algorithm computing the value of any two-person zero-sum game tree withn final positions.     

The Architecture of the Dalí Main-Memory Storage Manager

Performance needs of many database applicationsdictate that the entire database be stored in main memory.The dali system is a main memory storage manager designed toprovide the persistence, availability and safety guarantees one typically expects from a disk-resident database, while at the same time providing very high performance by virtue of being tuned to support in-memory data.User processes map the entire database into their address space andaccess data directly, thus avoiding expensive remote procedure calls andbuffer manager interactionstypical of accesses in disk-resident commercial systems available today.dali recovers the database to a consistent state in the case of system as well as process failures. It alsoprovides unique concurrency control and memory protection features, aswell as ordered and unordered index structures. Both object-oriented and relational database management systems have beenimplemented on top of dali. dali provides access to multiple layers ofapplication programming interface, including its low-level recovery,concurrency control and indexing components as well as its high-levelrelational component. Finally, various features of dali can be tailored tothe needs of an application to achieve high performance–for example,concurrency control and logging can be turned off if not desired, enablingdali to efficiently support applications that requirenon-persistent memory-resident data to be shared by multiple processes.