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The article presents a study related to the relationship of socio-econornic characteristics, prior drinking patterns, prior treatment efforts and presents treatment variables to sobriety improvement. The factors which had a significant direct relationship to sobriety improvement in this project were duration of sobriety prior to intake and length of stay in treatr ment. Prior A. A. attendance and the use of Antabuse during treatment were also positive factors, whereas previous psychotherapy and educational level had a negative correlation with increased sobriety. For the most part, these findings, examined for differences among the three therapists for their patients and for their applicants, were consistent with the overall results analyzed by sobriety improvement.

The article attempts to add the understanding of therapy with respect to the dimension of psychological climate. Specifically the study is concerned with the therapist's behavior under two conditions of threat, and undertook to examine physiological and verbal response to threat. The study concerned the effect of two threat levels upon the physiological and verbal behavior of therapists. Sixteen therapists showed greater physiological activation as measured under the evaluative condition. It was concluded that an evaluative climate produced some decrement in verbal effectiveness but that quantitatively the amount of decrement was minimal.

The article reports that the utilization of psychologists as administrators of psychiatric wards or as members of ward treatment teams has led to the need to scrutinize and to reformulate the role of the psychologist. Whether the psychologist partly assumes the role of a ward psychiatrist, or whether he becomes a member of a ward team, changes in functions, attitudes and perceptions, and role-definition are inevitable. The traditional functions of psychodiagnostic testing, research, and psychotherapy developed by the psychologist are inexorably modified by the demands of the ward and team setting. The ward psychologist has no precedents to follow.

The article discusses the performance of psychiatrists and psychologists in a therapeutic interview. This investigation was undertaken for the purpose of obtaining empirical evidence on therapists' performance in an initial interview and to explore the effects of relevant therapist variables upon clinical judgments, including diagnostic and prognostic evaluations, formulations of treatment plans and goals, communications addressed to the patient. Psychotherapists were asked to participate as vicarious interviewers while being exposed to a sound film of an unrehearsed initial interview. Subsequently, they were asked to record their clinical impressions. Data were collected from 235 therapists representing a wide range of experience and training.

The article reports that special problems do arise in psychotherapy, one of which, for example, relates to the independent-variable complex. Either it is true that more variables interact in individual therapeutic treatment than is customary in experimental psychology, or that we are at present unable to specify the independent variables which account for response to treatment. Thus a study of psychotherapy cannot rule out a host of disturbing variables in order to concentrate on the significance of one or two. There is no prospect of rising to the level of the rat psychologist's control, where he gets rid of a great deal of genetic variability, for example, by drawing his animals from one purified strain. One of our concerns will be to state how, if at all, such special problems modify the use of formal design in research on therapy.

This article focuses on the training clinical psychologists in psychotherapy. It seems that a training program in therapy for psychologists must accept the premise that psychotherapy can be treated as a discipline in its own right, that it need not be viewed as necessarily an adjurict of medical training. Furthermore, the training program must recognize that while its existence as a stopgap or expediency measure can be justified by the present critical shortage of psychiatrists, any long-range, inherent justification can result only if the psychologist-therapist is prepared to make a unique contribution to the field of therapy, if he can complement the work of the psychiatrist rather than be his professional competitor.

The article considers methods, indications and contraindications for making available psychological information in directive counseling and psychotherapy. The therapeutic efficacy of directive methods is limited by the same factors of clinical experience and judgment, which determine the therapeutic outcome of nondirective methods. One of the functions of the psychologist in counseling normal people is to impart reliable scientific in formation concerning the psychology of adjustment. It was found that irrespective of the causes for their maladjustment, most normal persons are able to utilize psychological information in making better adjustment to life.

The article highlights on a case study of the semi-automated treatment of a phobia. The techniques used in the treatment described here were developed and refined in the course of experiments with snake-avoidant volunteer subjects. To that extent, the success of the treatment attests to the clinical relevance of analogue desensitization research, and draws into question the seemingly premature views of psychologist Cooper. Clearly, however, there remains a need for additional reports of both successful and unsuccessful applications of laboratory tactics to clinical problems.

The article discusses the effect of verbal conditioning of emotional words on recognition of threatening stimuli. In line with previous work in which the verbal conditioning of emotional words had been found to have a beneficial effect on hospitalized psychiatric subjects' behavior in group therapy, it was hypothesized that verbal conditioning of emotional words would be associated with reduced defense scores. Of primary importance to psychologists studying psychotherapy is that their manipulations of the psychological environment be associated with predictable, measurable, and meaningful changes in subjects' behavior. This study adds lowered perceptual defense to improved group therapy behavior as a criterion associated with reinforcement of emotional words. Thirty-two psychiatric patients receiving reinforcement for emotional words prior to taking a perceptual defense test (PDT) composed of matched pairs of threatening and neutral words, had lower PDT scores than 32 controls who took the PDT without prior verbal conditioning.

The article studies the utilization of a psychologist in ward administration. The professional skills of a psychologist were called upon in a non-traditional assignment to play a leading role in ward administration under the general supervision of a psychiatrist. The total effort of the psychologist and the other members of the ward team was compared with that of other ward teams (without a psychologist in an administrative capacity) in terms of the usual goal of assisting patients toward greater hospital freedom, return to the community, and remission. The variables expected to show the consequences of increased therapeutic effort showed trends in favor of the special project ward.