Recent research has suggested that recovery from psychosis is a complex process that involves recapturing a coherent sense of self and personal agency. This poses important challenges to existing treatment models. While current evidence-based practices are designed to ameliorate symptoms and skill deficits, they are less able to address issues of subjectivity and self-experience. In this paper, we present Metacognitive Insight and Reflection Therapy (MERIT), a treatment approach that is explicitly concerned with self-experience in psychosis. This approach uses the term metacognition to describe those cognitive processes that underpin self-experience and posits that addressing metacognitive deficits will aid persons diagnosed with psychosis in making sense of the challenges they face and deciding how to effectively manage them. This review will first explore the conceptualization of psychosis as the interruption of a life and how persons experience themselves, and then discuss in more depth the construct of metacognition. We will next examine the background, practices and evidence supporting MERIT. This will be followed by a discussion of how MERIT overlaps with other emerging treatments as well as how it differs. MERIT's capacity to engage patients who reject the idea that they have mental illness as well as cope with entrenched illness identities is highlighted. Finally, limitations and directions for future research are discussed.
Van Iddekinge, Roth, Raymark, and Odle-Dusseau's (2012) meta-analysis of pre-employment integrity test results confirmed that such tests are meaningfully related to counterproductive work behavior. The article also offered some cautionary conclusions, which appear to stem from the limited scope of the authors' focus and the specific research procedures used. Issues discussed in this commentary include the following: (a) test publishers' provision of studies for meta-analytic consideration; (b) errors and questions in the coding of statistics from past studies; (c) debatable corrections for unreliable criterion measures; (d) exclusion of laboratory, contrasted-groups, unit-level, and time-series studies of counterproductive behavior; (e) under-emphasis on the prediction of counterproductive workplace behaviors compared with job performance, training outcomes, and turnover; (f) overlooking the industry practice of deploying integrity scales with other valid predictors of employee outcomes; (g) implication that integrity test publishers produce biased research results; (h) incomplete presentation of integrity tests' resistance to faking; and (i) omission of data indicating applicants' favorable response to integrity tests, the tests' lack of adverse impact, and the positive business impact of integrity testing. This commentary, therefore, offers an alternate perspective, addresses omissions and apparent inaccuracies, and urges a return to the use of diverse methodologies to evaluate the validity of integrity tests and other psychometric instruments.
The destabilization created by the rapid pace, ease of communication, and mixing of cultures and viewpoints that characterize the postmodern world is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the raging controversies about health care. Psychologists and the public are alarmed by the threat of diluted access to high-quality mental health care. Concerns about cost containment, efficacy, and accountability will continue to be constraints for the practitioner, and they have forced a basic review of nearly every aspect of clinical service delivery. Follette (1996) noted that the "tentacles" of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) diagnostic system have extended from managed care (in the form of requirements for classifying clients to gain reimbursement for services) to funding agency requirements to organize research around DSM constructs, all "despite the fact that DSM has not been particularly successful as an organizing principle for guiding science, and its assumptions about how to interpret behavior seem inadequate from many perspectives" (p. 1117). Nonetheless, there is still an urgent need for theoretical and diagnostic frameworks to facilitate clinical work, inform "change management" strategy, and integrate technically eclectic practice.
Explorations into the development of children's constructs have failed to explore systematically the effects of sorting methods upon the content of a child's constructs. This study addressed this weakness by investigating the effects of construct elicitation techniques on the content of children 's constructs. Utilizing kindergarten, second, fourth, and sixth grade subjects, it was found that dyadic sorting and free response methods of construct elicitation differentially affect the types of constructs produced. Dyadic sorting led to fewer behavioral constructs for the kindergarten and second grade groups while having a similar effect upon personality constructs for the fourth grade group. By the sixth grade, the method effect had disappeared. The results were discussed in terms of the implications for free response and dyadic sorting methods of construct elicitation with children.
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