Search

Psychotherapy competence is a core skill for psychiatry residents, and psychotherapy supervision is a time-honored approach to teaching this skill. To explore the current supervision practices of psychiatry training programs, a 24-item questionnaire was sent to all program directors of Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME)-approved adult psychiatry programs. The questionnaire included items regarding adherence to recently proposed therapy supervision practices aimed at reducing potential liability risk. The results suggested that current therapy supervision practices do not include sufficient management of the potential liability involved in therapy supervision. Better protections for patients, residents, supervisors and the institutions would be possible with improved credentialing practices and better documentation of informed consent and supervision policies and procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hurricane Coping Self-Efficacy (HCSE) measure is a validated tool for assessing self-efficacy appraisals after hurricanes. Data were collected 6 months after Hurricane Katrina from 1542 employed residents of New Orleans, and 181 participants randomly selected to complete a repeat survey to confirm the psychometric properties of the HCSE measure. Overall, coping self-efficacy was greater among men, the most educated and those with the highest income. Confirmatory factor analyses indicated a relatively good fit of the HCSE items into a single construct, with Bentler's comparative fit and McDonald's centrality index scores of 0.92 and 0.87, respectively. The repeatability of scores was high (Pearson's correlation 0.70). Additionally, HCSE scores were highly correlated with validated scales of perceived stress and posttraumatic stress symptoms, and significantly lower scores were observed among participants who sought counseling after the storm. The HCSE measure exhibited excellent internal consistency, external validity and repeatability after Hurricane Katrina.

Experienced weight lifters (N = 36) executed a weight-lifting task under each of four mental preparation conditions as well as two control conditions. The study employed a counterbalanced 4 ×4 Latin square design, and the four mental preparation, or “psyching,” conditions included self-efficacy, attentional focus, imagery, and preparatory arousal. Results indicated that subjects performed significantly better when allowed to engage in mental preparation than when engaging in cognitive distraction. In addition, the preparatory arousal condition was associated with significant improvement in performance over the control conditions. Preparatory arousal was also significantly more effective than the other three psyching strategies. These findings were interpreted as evidence that preparatory arousal cognitive preparation strategies (possibly in conjunction with other strategies) may be the most effective in facilitating maximum performance in experienced athletes executing a weight-lifting task.