Journals – Page 4 – Dr Martin Fracker

Cognitive Behavior Therapy Works Better than Other Psychotherapies

David Tolin has spent years comparing the effectiveness of cognitive behavior therapies to other forms of psychotherapy. In this article, he publishes the results of a meta-analytic review across 26 other studies. (You can learn more about meta-analysis from the Association for Psychological Science website.) His basic finding was that cognitive behavior therapy was more effective than other forms of therapy in treating patients with anxiety and depression disorders.

When Hans Eysenck Said Psychotherapy Doesn’t Work

Over 70 years ago, a British psychologist named Hans Eysenck shocked the world of psychotherapy by claiming that psychotherapy was no more effective than doing nothing at all. He had surveyed the reports of improvement for over 7,000 patients receiving psychotherapy, and had found that those patients did no better than similar patients receiving no psychotherapy. His results were highly controversial of course, but they spurred psychologists to look for better approaches to psychotherapy.

In the 70+ years since Eysenck first published those results, new approaches to psychotherapy have been developed and shown to be effective compared to no treatment and even to older forms of treatment. Among the most effective treatments today are several cognitive-behavioral psychotherapies. But the effort to find new and better approaches all began with Eysenck and his 1952 paper.

Why Is It Hard To Do Two Things At Once?

Divided attention can be deadly, as we know from warnings not to text or talk while driving. But why exactly is it sometimes difficult to divide our attention between two tasks like driving and talking? Back in the 1980’s, psychologists were testing and debating several competing theories to explain the costs of doing two things at once. Chris Wickens and I wondered if perhaps some of these different theories were not really competing after all but were rather complementary, each tapping into different ways that simultaneous tasks might interfere with each other. Could we design an experiment that would help us find out?

We realized that a dual-axis tracking task could provide us with the opportunity to test the distinctive contributions of different sources of difficulty in divided attention. Dual-axis tracking, after all, could be configured in different ways such that, on one hand, subjects were literally performing two separate one-dimensional tracking tasks simultaneously or, on the other hand, performing a single tracking task in two dimensions. We knew that control system engineers had devised mathematically sophisticated ways of measuring tracking performance that might reveal more precisely what the sources of interference in dual-axis tracking could be. So we designed an experiment in which we measured how well participants performed dual-axis tracking tasks under a variety of different configurations, and then we looked at what our results meant for the different competing or complementary theories in play.

Reducing Negative Bias in Future Expectations with an Online Self-Directed Intervention

Some people expect things to go wrong in their lives, and this negative cognitive bias in their thinking can aggravate and maintain clinical anxiety and depression disorders. These researchers evaluated whether an online treatment could reduce negative bias and lead to improved mental health. They conducted an experiment with over 900 participants organized into five groups including two positive treatment groups, two half-positive/half-negative treatment groups, and one neutral control group. Participants in the two positive treatment groups showed more improvement in cognitive bias than either of the other three groups, and this relative improvement persisted over a one-month period.

Can People Learn to Speak in Tongues?

The first time I ever heard anyone “speak in tongues”, defined as a seemingly miraculous occurrence of speaking in a language they had never learned, it did indeed appear miraculous as the person began speaking in tongues spontaneously with only minimal encouragement from others who were praying with them. That was in 1968 at Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church in Seattle. I was 15 years old.

Decades later, around 2003, I listened to a Pentecostal Catholic priest not just encouraging others to speak in tongues but actually instructing them in how to do it, and also modeling this behavior by speaking in tongues himself. This experience suggested that speaking in tongues (also known as glossolalia) may, at least in some cases, be a learned behavior. Motivated by this suggestion, I went searching for any scientific evidence one way or the other. Thus, I came upon this experiment confirming that speaking in tongues can indeed be learned.

This confirmation does not mean that all instances of speaking in tongues are learned of course. Some such instances could be miraculous: as far as I know, there is no way to prove they are not.

Transfer of Training in Memory

This research by George Cutler Fracker (yes, a relative) was written in 1908 while Psychology was still dominated by Wundt’s Structuralism, as can be seen from the reliance on introspection by a small number of experimental subjects (one of whom was the researcher). Primarily of historical interest, this article does demonstrate that the focus on cognition and memory which came into full bloom in the 1960’s and later, had its antecedents in the early history of psychology before the rise of behaviorism shut it down, temporarily as it turned out.

How Does Culture Influence Mental Health Attitudes?

Clinical psychology originally developed in the Western World, primarily in Europe and North America. As a result, it is often not clear whether psychotherapies known to help clients in Western cultures will also be effective with individuals in other cultures. The following series of experiments was designed to determine whether attitudes towards psychotherapy in Chinese culture may make individuals less likely to seek out help when they need it.

I particularly like this study for two reasons. First, the researchers took an empirical approach with four controlled experiments, with each subsequent experiment designed to answer questions raised by the previous experiment. Second, rather than ask study participants about their attitudes, the researchers assessed attitudes indirectly from their behavioral intentions: would participants recommend psychotherapy for an individual described in a series of scenarios.

This study was also particularly clever in how it used language (English or Chinese) to prime cultural attitudes among the participants. Conducted by Heller, Grant, Yasui, and Keysar, these four experiments were reported in a special issue of Clinical Psychological Science focused on cultural issues in clinical psychology.