Biomedical subjects

P J Volans

Publications and source records attributed to P J Volans.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2003

Attitudes towards psychotherapy with older people among trainee clinical psychologists.

Therapists have been described as reluctant to work with older people. A legacy of pessimism towards psychotherapy with this group has been traced back to Freud's assertions that older people are no longer educable. It remains unclear to what extent these views continue to influence today's therapists. This study explores the attitudes of trainee clinical psychologists towards psychotherapy with this age group. A cross-sectional postal survey design was used and the data were analyzed using content analysis. Three hundred and seventy-one trainees responded, representing 38% of the total population of trainees in the UK. The majority of the trainees thought that work with older people provided the opportunity to apply psychological knowledge and skills, although therapists needed to respond differently when working with an older person. Factors to take into account included cognitive decline and physical health problems. The trainees described a number of rewards and challenges associated with working with older people. The responses suggest that although a significant minority of trainees continue to hold some negative stereotypes about therapeutic work with older people, positive attitudes are also clearly evident. Further research to explore the attitudes of other healthcare professionals is recommended and the implications for training and supervision are examined.

Adult↗

PubMed1986

The relationship between alternative assessments of self-care ability in the elderly.

The self-care performance of 126 residents of old people's homes was assessed by self-report, informant rating and performance test. Scores on all three scales were related but associations were low and gross disagreements between measures were found in almost half of the cases. The associations between self-report and the other two measures were significantly lower than those between informant and performance ratings. There was no evidence of systematic bias in self-report related to cognitive or to affective impairment. It is probable that the three scales measure different aspects of dependency.

Activities of Daily Living↗

PubMed1986

The retention of new information in senile dementia.

Paired associate learning performance of demented patients was assessed repeatedly over six months. Patterns of change of performance for repeated and for changing items were compared. Performance on changing items progressively declined, performance on repeated items was maintained at initial levels. This difference was significant and indicates that these patients are able to retain same information over one- and two-month intervals.

Alzheimer Disease↗

PubMed1983

Why do we assess the aged?

The relevance of assessment to the psychological management of elderly patients is outlined. Issues raised by Kendrick (1982) and Rabbitt (1982) are discussed in this context.

Aged↗

PubMed1982

A re-evaluation of an automated tailored test of concept learning with elderly psychiatric patients.

Aspects of a revised version of the Picture Matching Test were evaluated in a sample of 33 elderly psychiatric patients. The new version of the test shared many defects of the older form, e.g. an uneven increase in levels of difficulty and a low ceiling. The derived speed of response measure was more closely related to the way in which the system responded to a subject's errors than to any of the other more direct measures of a subject's performance. Furthermore, there was no evidence to suggest that the method of controlling for practice effects, as suggested by the test's distributors, would be effective.

Aged↗

PubMed1976

Styles of decision-making and probability appraisal in selected obsessional and phobic patients.

A questionnaire was administered to obsessional and phobic patients and normal subjects. The results of this survey confirmed the prediction that a sizeable proportion of phobic patients report irrational expectations associated with their most feared situations. A group of phobics who reported irrational expectations, a group of obsessionals who reported an abnormal degree of checking behaviour and a group of normal subjects, took part in a probabilistic inference task. Several predictions about the differential performance of these groups were fulfilled. (i) Deviations from the optimal model for individual responses were greatest in the obsessional group. (ii) When Neuroticism was partialled out, the three groups differed with respect to amount of evidence required prior to a decision, the obsessional group having the highest score on this variable. (iii) The phobic group were more likely than the other two groups to make irrational event predictions.

Age Factors↗