The British journal of medical psychology
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This article describes a role playing experiment that examined the sufficiency hypothesis of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT). This proposition states that it is sufficient for rational and irrational beliefs to refer to preferences and musts, respectively, if those beliefs are to affect the functionality of inferences (FI). Consistent with the REBT literature (e.g. ⋯ Thus, results indicated that it is not sufficient for rational and irrational beliefs to refer to preferences and musts, respectively, if those beliefs are to affect the FI. It appears, then, that preferences and musts are not sufficient mechanisms by which rational and irrational beliefs, respectively, affect the FI. Psychotherapeutic implications of these findings are considered.
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There is growing evidence to show that mental health professionals by the nature of their work are particularly vulnerable to stress with all its detrimental effects on service delivery and quality of care. This comes at a time when mental health services in many countries are under considerable strain. The present paper examines the multifaceted stressors encountered by the mental health team and recommends possible ways of reducing burnout through innovative intervention strategies. The detection of emotional distress and psychological dysfunctioning in mental health providers is outlined and their management carefully considered.
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This study explored the relationship of anxiety and depression with two major symptoms of fibromyalgia, pain and fatigue, among fibromyalgia patients (N = 322). Due to collinearity between anxiety and depression scores, extreme groups were defined according to high versus low anxiety and depression scores. Two-thirds of the initial sample were excluded by this approach, which permitted a two by two factorial split-plot ANOVA for the assessment of main effects and the interaction of anxiety and depression upon pain and fatigue. ⋯ In contrast, widespread pain was not indicated among anxious patients with low scores on depression. The findings support the hypothesis that (1) anxiety and depression are independently associated with severity of pain symptoms in fibromyalgia, and that (2) patients with high anxiety and low depression may communicate to the medical doctor in ways that involve a risk of diagnosing fibromyalgia when the criterion of widespread pain is not supported. These conclusions were confirmed by results from ANCOVAs that permitted more extensive control of collinearity among variables.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
The effects of varying information content and speaking aloud on auditory hallucinations.
The aim of this study was to investigate why requiring hallucinating schizophrenic subjects to read aloud produces large reductions in reports of auditory hallucinations. In Expt 1 hallucinating subjects (N = 9) were required to sort cards quietly into one, two, four, 13 and 26 piles. ⋯ Sorting cards into two piles whilst saying the colour of the card produced the largest reductions in the reports of hallucinations. It was concluded that it was the requirement to make overt motor and verbal response that produced the large reductions in reports of auditory hallucinations in the reading-aloud task.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Comparative Study Clinical Trial
Measuring medical students' empathy skills.
Empathy is an important skill for the medical practitioner or medical students to develop when interviewing patients. It helps the interviewer establish effective communication, which is important for accurate diagnosis and patient management. Two facets of medical education limit students' development of accurate empathy: the traditional format of interviewing training and the social ethos of medical training and medical practice, which stress clinical detachment. ⋯ This paper reviews the range of approaches to the measurement of empathy and reports on a research study designed to evaluate a two-stage measurement technique, involving a pencil-and-paper test of empathy and independent observer ratings of medical students' actual interview behaviours. Results lead to the conclusion that pencil-and-paper tests of empathy cannot incorporate the range of complex cognitive, emotional and behavioural components of the empathy construct. On the other hand, trained observers have been able to use items on a specially developed History-taking Rating Scale to discriminate between the empathic behaviours of a group of students trained in consulting skills with those of a group of control students who each carried out videotaped history-taking interviews with hospitalized patients.