Unilateral Spouse Therapy to Reach the Treatment-Resistant Alcohol Abusing Partner: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Purpose: The aim of this research was to implement and evaluate unilateral family therapy (UFT) for alcohol abuse, an approach that assists the nonalcoholic spouse to induce their alcohol-abusing partner to enter treatment and/or reduce drinking. Method: Forty-two nonalcohol-abusing spouses participated in this randomized control trial, and 13 no-treatment spouses served as an additional comparison group. Repeated measures analysis over four time periods evaluated change in abuser alcohol use and spouse psychological, marital, and role induction (e.g., enabling) variables, whereas χ2 analyses evaluated alcohol abuser treatment entry. Results: The findings suggest that UFT is successful in facilitating abuser treatment entry, drink reduction as well as long-term improvement in the spouse’s psychological health, and marital functioning. Conclusions: Given the high numbers of treatment-resistant alcohol abusers in need of treatment and the related distress of their spouses, UFT represents an important approach for practitioners.

Exploring Athletic Training Educators' Development as Teachers

Context: Little research is available on how athletic training educators develop their instructional styles over the course of their careers and what influences their teaching practices. Understanding the development of athletic training educators' teaching practices may help promote effective teaching in athletic training programs and help guide professional development. Objective: To gain a better understanding of how athletic trainers develop as educators and how their experiences as an educator influence their teaching. Design: Qualitative study. Setting: Higher education institutions. Patients or Other Participants: We interviewed 11 doctorally trained athletic trainers teaching in undergraduate professional athletic training programs. Main Outcome Measure(s): Data were collected through in-depth interviews, and additional artifacts (curricula vitae, syllabi, videotaped teaching lessons) were used to triangulate data collected during the interviews. We used a phenomenological approach to analyze the data and maintained trustworthiness through member checking, data-source triangulation, multiple-analyst triangulation, and peer review. Results: Two main themes emerged from the data: (1) role induction through role continuance and (2) teaching for student learning. Participants discussed how their teaching evolved over the course of their careers, how they valued their clinical practice, how they promoted student learning, and how they aimed to challenge students to transfer knowledge learned into clinical practice. Conclusions: From the data, we are able to understand that athletic training educators develop their teaching practices through engaging in their role as a teacher. This was an informal, continual process of learning how to be an educator.

Using Psychoeducation and Role Induction to Improve Completion Rates in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

Background: Pre-treatment role induction interventions have been suggested to potentially enhance attendance and clinical outcomes in psychotherapy. Aims: This study aimed to evaluate the effects of a programme of three transdiagnostic seminars (TDS) for patients with common mental disorders accessing cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) in primary care. TDS included CBT psychoeducation and role induction. Method: A random sample of patients (n = 49) participated in TDS followed by CBT (TDS+CBT) and they were compared with matched controls (n = 49) accessing usual CBT. TDS participants rated the relevance and quality of this intervention using an acceptability questionnaire (AQ). Treatment completion (vs dropout) rates were compared across groups using chi-square tests. Post-treatment changes in depression (PHQ-9) and anxiety (GAD-7) symptoms were compared between groups using analysis of covariance controlling for potential confounders. Analyses were based on intention-to-treat principles. Results: Mean AQ ratings of the TDS intervention were comparable across diagnostic groups (p = .05). Treatment completion rates were significantly higher (p = .02) in the TDS+CBT group (87.8%) by comparison with usual CBT (68.8%). However, no significant differences in post-treatment symptom changes were found for depression (p = .34) or anxiety measures (p = .71). Conclusions: Incorporating a psychoeducational role induction prior to CBT significantly improved treatment retention, but not overall symptom reductions.

Similarity-Driven Semantic Role Induction via Graph Partitioning

As in many natural language processing tasks, data-driven models based on supervised learning have become the method of choice for semantic role labeling. These models are guaranteed to perform well when given sufficient amount of labeled training data. Producing this data is costly and time-consuming, however, thus raising the question of whether unsupervised methods offer a viable alternative. The working hypothesis of this article is that semantic roles can be induced without human supervision from a corpus of syntactically parsed sentences based on three linguistic principles: (1) arguments in the same syntactic position (within a specific linking) bear the same semantic role, (2) arguments within a clause bear a unique role, and (3) clusters representing the same semantic role should be more or less lexically and distributionally equivalent. We present a method that implements these principles and formalizes the task as a graph partitioning problem, whereby argument instances of a verb are represented as vertices in a graph whose edges express similarities between these instances. The graph consists of multiple edge layers, each one capturing a different aspect of argument-instance similarity, and we develop extensions of standard clustering algorithms for partitioning such multi-layer graphs. Experiments for English and German demonstrate that our approach is able to induce semantic role clusters that are consistently better than a strong baseline and are competitive with the state of the art.