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Biomedical subjects

Robert A Neimeyer

Publications and source records attributed to Robert A Neimeyer.

12 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2007

The efficacy of personal construct therapy: a comprehensive review.

Prior narrative and quantitative reviews have suggested that personal construct therapy (PCT) is an efficacious and viable form of treatment. However, these reviews failed to include all published, controlled PCT outcome studies and did not account for all measures of outcome. The present quantitative review, therefore, offers a comprehensive integration of the 22 published studies that compare PCT to a control group, examining its overall efficacy at posttest and follow-up as well as its effects for different types of outcome measures. Overall, the efficacy of PCT was found to be somewhat weaker than that reported in previous reviews. It was also found that traditional self-report and behavioral observation measures tended to yield larger effects compared to measures that focused on personal meanings and scored content supplied by the client.

Bibliometrics↗
PubMed2006

Sense-making, grief, and the experience of violent loss: toward a mediational model.

Bereavement following violent loss by accident, homicide or suicide increases the risk for complications in grieving. This is the first study to examine a constructivist model of grief that proposes that sense-making, or the capacity to construct an understanding of the loss experience, mediates the association between violent death and complicated grief symptomatology. An ethnically diverse sample of 1,056 recently bereaved college students completed the Inventory of Complicated Grief (ICG) and questions assessing the degree of sense-making and the circumstances surrounding their losses. Consistent with this study's primary hypothesis, sense-making emerged as an explanatory mechanism for the association between violent loss and complications in grieving. Specifically, the results revealed that sense-making explained this relation, even when the element of sudden bereavement was shared by all of the participants. Overall, this study provides initial support for a model of grief in which failure to find meaning in a loss is conceptualized as a crucial pathway to complicated grief symptomatology.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed2006

Continuing bonds and reconstructing meaning: mitigating complications in bereavement.

Drawing on attachment theory and constructivist conceptualizations of bereavement, the authors assessed the relation between continuing bonds coping and meaning reconstruction following the death of a loved one and complicated grief symptomatology. Five hundred six young adults in the first two years of bereavement from a variety of losses completed the Inventory of Complicated Grief along with measures of the strength of their ongoing attachment to the deceased and their capacity to make sense of the loss, find benefit in the experience, and reconstruct a progressive sense of identity following the death. Several variables concerning the survivor, his or her relationship to the deceased, and the nature of the death functioned as risk factors for heightened distress, but their role was generally moderated by meaning-making, often to the point of non-significance. In contrast, higher levels of benefit-finding and positive identity change were associated with lower levels of bereavement complication. Finally, an interaction emerged between sense-making and ongoing attachment to the deceased, suggesting that strong continuing bonds predicted greater levels of traumatic and especially separation distress, but only when the survivor was unable to make sense of the loss in personal, practical, existential, or spiritual terms.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed2005

Meaning-making and the matrix model: does one size really fit all?

Despite the multifocal complexity of the matrix model (C.R. Snyder & T.R. Elliott, this issue, pp. 1033-1054), its close correspondence with the theoretical dialectics and philosophy of clinical constructivism auger well for its capacity to articulate with existing approaches to graduate education in psychology. In this article points of contact are documented between the two approaches, and a caveat is included about the limits of the matrix model in ensuring greater relevance of clinical training to the settings in which contemporary professionals will work.

Curriculum↗
PubMed2005

Reducing the risk of burnout in end-of-life care settings: the role of daily spiritual experiences and training.

OBJECTIVE: Individuals in the helping professions are subject to unique stressors that may lead to burnout, and research has shown that those who work with dying or bereaved individuals might be particularly at-risk. This study explores how factors such as spirituality and level of training might buffer the stress of working with terminally ill clients and their families. METHOD: A total of 80 medical and mental health practitioners attending palliative care seminars were surveyed, with each completing validated measures of daily spiritual experiences and caregiver burnout, as well as assessments of demographic factors, their general education and training experiences specific to working in end-of-life care and bereavement settings. RESULTS: Findings indicate that daily spiritual experiences might mitigate physical, cognitive, and emotional forms of burnout in the workplace. In addition, a negative correlation was found between the amount of end-of-life training received and burnout in the physical and cognitive domains. However, training was not related to professionals' level of emotional exhaustion. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE RESEARCH: Results reinforce a growing literature on the salutary effects of spirituality, and underscore its relevance as one possible form of constructive coping for professionals attending to the needs of the dying and bereaved. The study carries further implications for how the stresses of such work might be ameliorated by enhanced training efforts, as well as creative facilitation of diverse spiritual expressions (e.g., inclusive forms of ritual recognition of loss) in the workplace.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Insomnia and complicated grief symptoms in bereaved college students.

In this study, we extended previous research by concentrating on sleep- and grief-related symptoms in a cohort of bereaved college students, in view of the potential for each of these problems to exacerbate the other. A sample of 815 college students completed the Inventory of Complicated Grief (H. G. Prigerson & S. C. Jacobs, 2001), along with an assessment of diagnostic criteria for insomnia and associated sleep behaviors. As predicted, the rate of insomnia was significantly higher (22%) in the bereaved sample than in a nonbereaved comparison group (17%), a difference that was particularly pronounced in terms of middle insomnia. Also as hypothesized, bereaved insomniacs reported higher complicated grief scores than bereaved noninsomniacs, and several specific sleep variables (including sleep-onset insomnia related to nighttime rumination about the loss and sleep-maintenance insomnia associated with dreaming of the deceased) were significantly related to complicated grief symptomatology.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2004

Psychological research on death attitudes: an overview and evaluation.

One of the most substantial legacies of Herman Feifel was his pioneering research on attitudes toward death and dying in a variety of populations. The authors review the large and multifaceted literature on death anxiety, fear, threat and acceptance, focusing on the attitudes toward death and dying of relevant professional and patient groups, and the relationship of death concern to aging, physical and mental health, religiosity, and terror management strategies. We conclude with several recommendations for improving the conceptual and practical yield of future work in this area.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Cognitive anxiety as a function of speaker role for fluent speakers and persons who stutter.

UNLABELLED: Fransella [Personal change and reconstruction. London: Academic Press] suggested that persons who stutter experience a lack of meaningfulness of their fluent speaker role and demonstrated that a Personal Construct Psychology approach to therapy with persons who stutter may be useful. Few studies, however, have investigated her claims. This study investigated the "meaningfulness" with which fluent and disfluent persons were able to construe themselves in stuttering and non-stuttering speaker roles. Results indicated that persons who stuttered displayed greater cognitive anxiety (difficulty integrating their experience meaningfully) in a fluent speaking role than in a stuttering role, whereas the reverse was found for fluent speakers. These results suggest the relevance of assessing and addressing the meaningfulness of the "dominant" disfluent speaker role in treating persons who stutter, insofar as a tendency to maintain the predictability of this familiar role may contribute to stuttering maintenance and relapse. The refined guidelines developed for applying the Cognitive Anxiety Scale to the content analysis of self-descriptions of persons who stutter can make a practical contribution to this effort. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will learn about and be able to (1) describe the potential influence of speaker roles in the maintenance of stuttering; (2) define cognitive anxiety and how it relates to meaningful interpretations of experience; (3) detect potential signs that a person who stutters may be engaged in "defending" a stutterer role; and (4) describe the clinical implications of this view of stuttering maintenance.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Death anxiety and attitudes toward the elderly among older adults: the role of gender and ethnicity.

The article investigated the relationship between death anxiety, attitudes toward older adults, and personal anxiety toward one's own aging in a group of 197 older men and women. As predicted, negative attitudes toward other older adults were predicted by personal anxieties about aging and death, and, more specifically, fear of the unknown. In addition, several distinctive anxieties were noted for particular subgroups of respondents. Older women scored higher on the Fear of the Dead subscale of the Multidimensional Fear of Death Scale (MFODS) than did men. Caucasian participants displayed higher Fear of the Dying Process than did older African American participants. Lastly, older African American participants reported higher levels of death anxiety on 3 of the subscales of the Multidimensional Fear of Death Scale (Fear of the Unknown, Fear of Conscious Death, and Fear for the Body after Death) when compared with older Caucasian participants and also tended to accord less social value to the elderly. These findings are interpreted in terms of patterns of socialization, and their implications for end-of-life care preferences are noted.

Black or African American↗
PubMed2003

Does grief counseling work?

Most bereavement caregivers accept as a truism that their interventions are helpful. However, an examination of the bereavement intervention literature suggests that the scientific basis for accepting the efficacy of grief counseling may be quite weak. This article summarizes the findings of four recent qualitative and quantitative reviews of the bereavement intervention literature. It then discusses three possible explanations for these surprising findings and concludes with recommendations for both researchers and clinicians in thanatology that could help to focus efforts to answer the questions of when and for whom grief counseling is helpful.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed2002

A personal construct psychology view of relapse: indications for a narrative therapy component to stuttering treatment.

UNLABELLED: Relapse following treatment for stuttering is a common problem for many clients. It has often been suggested that one factor contributing to relapse is the client's difficulty in adjusting to a new role as a fluent speaker. In this tutorial article, we first present a personal construct view of relapse, which suggests that this difficulty may be addressed by increasing the meaningfulness of the fluent speaker role for the speaker. Section 3 proposes that post-treatment success for persons who stutter may be facilitated by the use of a narrative approach to counseling in which the meaningfulness of the fluent speaker role is elaborated. In this approach, clients are guided through a process of deconstructing their stuttering-dominated personal narrative, followed by the reconstruction of an alternative narrative that is more compatible with being a fluent speaker. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will (1) learn about a personal construct psychology perspective on resistance and relapse in stuttering therapy, (2) be able to describe a narrative approach to counseling for people who stutter that is directed toward the long-term maintenance of fluent speech and the steps of deconstruction of the dominant stuttering narrative and reconstruction of a new, more fluent personal narrative, and (3) be able to prepare a series of narrative interview questions with which to engage clients in conversations that may facilitate the deconstruction and reconstruction processes.

Counseling↗