Vol VI, No. 2, 2006 9

6.2

Editorial: Five Years of Excellence!

The Romanian Journal of Cognitive and Behavioral Psychotherapies was founded in 2001, as the official publication of the Romanian Association of Cognitive and Behavioral Psychotherapies. Because of the high standards promoted by the editorial board, the Romanian Journal of Cognitive and Behavioral Psychotherapies has quickly become influential in promoting cognitive and behavioral psychotherapies in Eastern and Central Europe, and was abstracted in the PsycInfo (beginning with 2004). Taking into account the brief period of the journal’s activity (2001-2004) all these accomplishments are notable. Dwelling on these results and taking into account the suggestions of many professionals in the clinical field, we have pushed our contribution in cognitive and behavioral psychotherapies a step further.

Semantic fluency in schizophrenia

Background: Patients with schizophrenia exhibit various cognitive dysfunctions, most of them rendered evident by language.
Objectives: The aims of the current study are: to compare the global semantic performance of schizophrenics with those of normal controls and to explore the schizophrenics’ semantic network.
Method: 62 schizophrenic patients, admitted to the Second Psychiatric Clinic, diagnosed according to ICD-10 criteria and 158 healthy controls were evaluated with tasks for semantic fluency (animals, fruits, and body parts).
Statistical analysis: The correlation between clinical symptoms, demographic data and the verbal fluency variables has been determined using Pearson’s correlations. Data were analysed using ANOVA and for semantic fluency this was followed by multidimensional scaling (MDS).
Results: Patients with schizophrenia generated fewer words than healthy controls on semantic fluency tasks. The MDS analysis showed that the semantic structure for schizophrenics with hallucinations was more disorganized than that for schizophrenics without hallucinations. The study emphasized in the later subgroup a lack of any organisation or logical associations within their semantic network of animals, fruits or body parts.
Conclusions: The comparison between schizophrenia patients and normal controls indicated impaired semantic structure in the patient group, in addition to decreased word production.

Irrational beliefs, thought suppression and distress – a mediation analysis

The present study is an investigation of the relationship between irrational beliefs and thought suppression in predicting distress in cancer patients. While there is a significant amount of data supporting their role as vulnerability factors for distress, no attempts have been made so far to study the relationships between these two individual characteristics. Our results show that both irrational beliefs and thought suppression are related to distress, and that the impact of irrational beliefs on distress is completely mediated by thought suppression. Potential mechanisms and implications are discussed.

What changes in cognitive therapy? The role of tacit knowledge structures

Rarely has knowledge within cognitive psychology influenced the development and practice of cognitive behavior therapy. This article explores the integration of the contributions of the cognitive psychology areas of implicit learning, tacit knowledge structures, and encoding processes with producing or retarding change in cognitive behavior therapy. Differences are discussed between understanding something and knowing something. Implications for the practice of cognitive therapy, indeed all psychotherapy are discussed. A clinical example is provided.

The philosophy and role of discomfort anxiety in a case of promoting family well being and harmony

In this article we explore the role of philosophy and discomfort anxiety for promoting family well-being. Various important theoretical ideas are briefly presented and integrated and then a case example is discussed, based on discomfort anxiety.

The influence of attributional retraining on career choices

Attributional style can have an influence on the way people think about their performances, the kind of tasks people choose to perform, and as a consequence the career path people choose. Attributional styles could be more or less adaptive for certain situations. If a person has maladaptive attributional style, through attributional retraining he or she can be trained to develop more adaptive causal attributions. Results from this study show that attributional retraining for high school students is effective with as few as five training sessions and that attributional retraining has an influence on the career choices listed by the students before and after the attributional retraining.

The psychological profile of psychotherapists. Preliminary results in investigating the predictors of psychotherapists’ performance

Apparently, it is neither the type nor the length of education or psychotherapists’ clinical experience that are responsible for their performance. The present study is part of a larger research which aims at identifying the variables (emotions, cognitions, behaviors, personality traits) that predict psychotherapists’ performance in therapy. The main objective of this study is to assess psychotherapists’ personal variables and compare them with those identified in the general population. The study included 126 psychotherapists under supervision (psychologists and psychiatrists) in two Cognitive Behavioral Therapy training programs (Cognitive Therapy and Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy). During the final stage of the training program, the psychotherapists under supervision filled in self-reported check-lists; psychotherapists’ personal variables were analyzed and compared with those of 122 participants from the general population. The possible implications of the results in predicting psychotherapists’ performance and their impact on psychotherapy training programs are also taken into consideration.

Dysfunctional attitudes scale, FORM A; norms for the Romanian population

The results obtained following administration of the Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale, Form A (Hollon & Kendall, 1980) to a Romanian sample are, on the whole, consistent with those obtained in earlier normative studies involving American samples. The scale was administered to a group of 701 adults and teenagers selected from the normal population. Internal consistency coefficients (Alpha Cronbach) ranged from .79 to .86, which are adequate for reporting reliable results. A pilot study examining validity revealed the DAS-A discriminated between groups with extreme scores on different measures of emotional distress. Norms for the Romanian version of the scale are also included.

The Romanian version of young schema questionnaire – short FORM 3 (YSQ-S3)

The Young Schema Questionnaire - Short form 3 (YSQ-S3) consists of 114 items and measures eighteen cognitive schemas. To establish the psychometric properties of the Romanian version of YSQ-S3, 160 participants were involved in the research. The instrument and its sub-scales have a very good reliability, the α Cronbach coefficients run between .68 and .96. To test the discriminative validity of this measure, the comparisons between the subjects with low scores and high scores were made both for the level of anxiety as a state and as a trait. The Romanian version of YSQ-S3 has a good discriminative validity. Based on YSQ-S3 scores it can be predicted the social phobia development and significant correlation was found between YSQ-S3 and automatic thoughts (ATQ) scores.