Alfonso Paredes

A Clinical Study Of Alcoholics Using Audiovisual Self-image Feedback

Sixty-six alcoholics were exposed to sound, color, motion pictures of themselves taken while under the influence of a small amount of alcohol. The pictures were obtained while patients discussed personal issues with a psychiatrist. Patients displayed three patterns of coping behavior during these sessions. These were: a consultative-receptive attitude, polite-impersonal attitude and a casual-impersonal attitude. These patterns indicated various degrees of cooperation and self-understanding. Confrontation of patients with their filmed behavior elicited responses indicating considerable dissatisfaction with the characteristics of their body image, and a low level of self-esteem. It is suggested that the negative self-evaluation of these patients is bound to have negative social consequences. The technique of self-confrontation offers possibilities in the study of the personality of alcoholics and in the therapy of these patients.

The relative accuracy of U.S. British, and Mexican raters in judging the emotional displays of schizophrenic and normal U.S. women.

Asked U.S., British, and Mexican male students of college age to discriminate among three affective displays presented by 10 schizophrenic and 10 normal U.S. women. Significant main effects for diagnostic category, nationality of judge and for the interaction of nationality and diagnostic category were obtained. Furthermore, U.S. judges did significantly better in judging normals as compared to schizophrenics, British judges tended in the same direction, and Mexican judges did not. Co-nationality and national similarity confer an advantage in judging normals as compared to schizophrenics. The data have relevance for questions about the effects of sending and receiving nonverbal emotional messages on communications or miscommunications between doctor and patient, doctors from different cultures and people including conference negotiators, from different national backgrounds.

Behavioral changes as a function of repeated self-observation.

Three groups of hospitalized psychiatric women patients were exposed to three experimental situations. The first group saw videotaped recordings of themselves in biweekly scheduled sessions, the second group saw audiovisual recordings of another person and the third group was not shown any recordings. It was predicted that the first group would show greater clinical improvement and increased feelings of self-acceptance and enter into a closer relationship with an interviewer. A battery of evaluation procedures was administered at the beginning and at the end of the series of exposures. The battery included indicators of clinical improvement, measures of self-acceptance and measures of interpersonal relationships. The psychiatrists who conducted the viewing and videotaping sessions observed striking reactions in those patients who saw their own videotaped recordings. These patients seemed: a) to become aware of negative feelings about themselves; b) to experience a decrease in these feelings and become more self-accepting as the sessions progressed; c) to enter a closer relationship with the interviewers; and d) to disclose personal items more readily. The psychological test data did not confirm the clinical impressions. Statistically significant differences were not found among groups along the dimensions measured by the test battery. A comparison of our subjects with a control group of female patients meeting the same criteria, but not involved in this study, revealed no significant differences in clinical outcome or number of days spent in the hospital. Thus our study offers no evidence that these procedures are necessarily either helpful or harmful.

Chlorpromazine in chronic schizophrenic women: I. Experimental design and effects at maximum point of treatment.

The present s tudy was designed to compare the effects of chlorpromazine, phenobarbital, and placebo in a randomly selected sample of chronic schizophrenic women in a state hospital setting. The purpose of this s tudy was to determine the possible therapeutic efficacy ol ehlorpromazine and to describe the effects of this agent in several areas of psychological functioning. The most comprehensive review of controlled studies with ehlorpromazine which has come to our attention is that of ttErLIZE~ (1960). His annotated bibliography includes reference to over 60 titles in which chlorpromazine effects are compared with placebo controls. The inherent difficulties in this area of research are sharply highlighted by his criticM analysis of these articles. The appheation (and sometimes misapplication) of a gTeat number of variations in methodology, design, subject.s, and analysis of results may be a basis for the seemingly contradictory conclusions often reported. One of the most extensive controlled investigations of ehlorpromazine was the Veterans Administration study recently summarized by CASEY et al. (1960). Thirty-seven hospitals contributed nearly 700 male subjects to the experiment i~ which the therapeutic superiority of ehlorpromazine over phenobarbital and placebo was demonstrated. The Multidimensional Scale for l~ating Psychiatric Patients ( L o ~ et al. 1953) was the principal measure of change. This report is particularly convincing in view of the extremely large sample, objectively evaluated