Psychoanalysis and therapy

In Abnormal Psychology this week, we will be discussing psychotherapy. The NY Times has an opinion piece on the process of psychotherapy from the point of view of a patient. He suddenly and without warning has suicidal ideations and obsessive thoughts about hurting his children. His story is about the power of psychoanalysis. Also note that he is a very active participant in his therapy, which is important for successfully navigating the morass of emotions and memories that come to play in abnormal behavior.

I talked with increasing freedom and trust about anything and everything — dreams, memories, doubts, fears — and about matters that had been hiding in closed rooms of my mind.

Link to the article: Psychotherapy as a Kind of Art – NYTimes.com.

Mechanical Turk and Clinical Populations

Last night in Intro to Psychogical Testing, we discussed the use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system for recruiting participants for reliability studies. The new APS journal Clinical Psychological Science just published an article on the quality and characteristics of Mechanical Turk workers in relation to clinincal variables. Specifically, there was a much higher prevalence of social anxiety, unemployment, and potential substance use disorder. This is good for people studying these areas, but for those studying factors that might intercorrelate with those, it may be a suspect source of participants. Overall though, the reliability between the first wave and second wave of data collection was high, which means that Mturk might be a good place to run reliability and validity studies.

Here’s a link to the article at Clinical Psychological Science.