Current Topics in Clinical and Community Psychology

Current Topics in Clinical and Community Psychology, Volume 1 reviews advances in clinical and community psychology. Topics covered include theory and research in areas such as psychological assessment of intelligence, personality, and abnormal behavior; psychotherapy, broadly defined to include counseling and behavior modification; and psychophysiological and neurological determinants of personality and psychopathology. Comprised of five chapters, this volume first illustrates how reinforcement and modeling techniques can enable psychologists to function effectively as mental health consultants and agents of social change in an institution for delinquent children. The second chapter describes a unique program designed to prevent emotional dysfunction in school children by combining effective therapeutic intervention with relevant research and evaluation. The third chapter challenges the relevance of psychological research that does not take into account the relationship between the experimenter and his subjects, and instead demonstrates the impact of experimenter self-disclosure on the responses given to psychological tests and on subjects' behavior in psychology experiments. The fourth chapter proposes a behaviorally oriented model for the assessment of positive mental health and describes a successful application of this model in the assessment of the competence of college freshmen. The final chapter relates research on human psychophysiology to problems of psychological assessment and psychotherapy that are of central concern to clinical psychologists. This book should prove useful to practicing clinical and community psychologists, graduate and undergraduate students of psychology, and members of other mental health professions.

-List of ContributorsPrefaceSocial Influence Technique in Clinical and Community Psychology I. Introduction II. The Principle of Reinforcement III. The Principle of Modeling IV. Summary and Conclusions ReferencesResearch on Early Detection and Prevention of Emotional Dysfunction in Young School Children I. Introduction II. Background for Initial Programs in Early Detection and Prevention III. Early Detection Procedures IV. Preventive Procedures V. Recent Programs in Secondary Prevention VI. Concluding Remarks ReferencesThe Effects of Experiments' Self-Disclosure on Subjects' Behavior I. Introduction II. Some Effects of Experimenter-Subject Acquaintance III. Conclusion Appendix I: 40-Item Self-Disclosure Questionnaire Game of Invitations Appendix II: Interview Rating Scale Appendix III: Topics of the Interview Appendix IV: Impression Scale Appendix V: Discussion Topics Appendix VI: Discussion Topics Appendix VII: Self-Disclosure Questions Appendix VIII: The Experience of Being a "Subject" ReferencesA Behavioral-Analytic Model for Assessing Competence I. Introduction II. Approaches to Assessment III. Definitions of Competence IV. A Behavioral-Analytic Method of Assessing Competence V. The Stony Brook Study VI. Conclusions and Implications ReferencesPsychophysiology and Clinical Psychology I. Introduction II. Theoretical Models and Their Application to Clinical Psychological Problems III. Personality Correlates of Psychophysiological Processes IV. Psychophysiology and Psychotherapy V. Diagnosis VI. Conclusions ReferencesAuthor IndexSubject Index