Faculty Reads: Psychologist Adds Heart to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Techniques

What we think affects how we feel, and how we feel affects how we behave, and how we behave then affects what we think about ourselves…

If one or all facets of this thoughts-feelings-behavior triangle become dysfunctional, though, life can fairly quickly turn chaotic. Luckily, therapeutic techniques such as cognitive behavioral therapy help restore our inner life to harmony and break the cycle of disorder.

The question is: Are these techniques doing enough?

Psychology Professor Dean McKay, Ph.D. recently published Working with Emotion in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: Techniques for Clinical Practice (November 2014), a book he co-edited with his former doctoral student Nathan Thoma, Ph.D., GSAS ’08, ’11, a clinical psychologist in New York City.

The book features writings from leading psychologists on the role of emotion in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a psychotherapy that focuses on the relationships between thoughts, behaviors, and feelings. This short-term, goal-oriented, and empirically validated treatment aims to change a client’s problematic behaviors and thinking patterns, which thereby improve how the client feels. It has proven to be effective for a range of psychopathologies, including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The problem, McKay says, is that the emotional aspect does not always get its due, which means that clients sometimes leave treatment with a reduction in symptoms, but without fully resolving the issue at hand.

“Clients often seek treatment due to a range of emotional struggles, ones that might linger after successful treatment for behavioral problems and [improving] patterns of thinking,” said McKay, who specializes in treating people with anxiety disorders. “While emotion has never been neglected in CBT, the emphasis on emotional processes has not been as high as it is for the other two domains.”

The book offers information about emotional processes and includes techniques that clinicians can use to better address emotion in therapy. Topics covered include the use of mindfulness therapy and the importance of exposing clients to difficult emotions so that they learn to face uncomfortable feelings rather than use maladaptive behaviors to escape them.

“CBT has long emphasized behaviors and thoughts (or cognitions) as centrally important in psychopathology,” McKay said. “But [we] developed the book in an effort to fill an important gap in the available sources for clinicians.”

— Joanna Mercuri

One Wrongly Accused Speaks on the Challenge of False Confessions

Jeffrey Deskovic, executive director of  the Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice, was just 16 years old when his friend Angela was found murdered on Nov. 17, 1989 in upstate New York. In all of the disturbance surrounding the event, Deskovic said he was lured into a false confession by zealous police officers under pressure of a polygraph test, and the teenager ended serving several years in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit.

Deskovic addressed his ordeal to more than 100 students, administrators, and faculty at a Sept. 26 Fordham Law-Psychology seminar at the Lincoln Center campus, co-sponsored by Psi Chi, SPSSI-NY and the Manhattan Psychological Association. The seminar was part of a Law & Psychology course being given by Harold Takooshian, Ph.D., professor of psychology.

Deskovic said his repeated appeals were all denied, including the a U.S. Supreme Court appeal in 2001. The Innocence Project at first rejected him, too, until investigator Claudia Whitman intervened, and he was fully exonerated in 2008 with a simple DNA test that identified the true killer of his friend.

Since then, Deskovic has used a $1.5-million compensation to launch his foundation, which works to free other innocents in prison and to help correct the legal system. The foundation works with the Innocence Project to advocate dozens of important reforms, including: videotaping of all confessions, preservation of DNA evidence, limiting incentivized witnesses, requiring corroboration for informants, and punishment of prosecutorial misconduct.

The forum also featured Robert Emmons, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, forensic psychologist Ann Winton, and attorney-psychologist Cory H. Morris. 

Jeffrey Deskovic (Photo: Harold Takooshian)

Psychology Student Wins Diversity Scholarship

Jeremy J. Eggleston, a doctoral candidate in Fordham's psychology program, has just been awarded one of two Michael Sullivan Diversity Scholarships.

The scholarships, which are awarded by the Ohio Psychological Association, are geared toward research, training and community projects in the area of diversity.

Eggleston, who was one of 30 applicants for the scholarship, shared the honor with Calia A. Torres of the University of Alabama. His research centers on inner city residents with HIV/AIDS. Through his clinical work, he said he began to wonder why some clients appeared to actually grow and make immense positive changes within themselves following the often times traumatic diagnosis of HIV/AIDS.  

His dissertation, which he has been writing under the mentorship of Kathleen Schiaffino, Ph.D., chair of the psychology department, focuses on gay and bisexual men of color and the various psychological, spiritual, and physical-health related outcomes on their post-traumatic growth.  

Eggleston said he's interested in the potentially moderating and mediating effects of personal spirituality and religious engagement in this population, and hopes to shed further light upon its role in empowering minority-identified populations. 

He came to Fordham from Union Theological Seminary, where he earned a master's in psychology and religion. Upon finishing at Fordham this year, he will complete his predoctoral clinical psychology internship at NYU-Bellevue Hospital where he hopes to conduct clinical work within the hospital's esteemed ‘Survivors of Torture’ program.  

“I am especially humbled to receive the Michael Sullivan Diversity scholarship," he said.  

"This award inspires me to strengthen my commitment to clinical work with underserved populations especially at a time when public health grants for populations affected by HIV/AIDS have dwindled.” 

—Patrick Verel

FordhamScience: Adapting Research Methods in HIV Study

Being a successful researcher requires not only painstaking attention to detail and boundless curiosity. It also required being flexible enough to alter your approach when faced with new findings.

Monica Rivera-Mindt, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology, is doing just that as she works on a five-year study conducted at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.

The grant, which was awarded in 2007, involves recruiting 150 volunteers to take part in a pilot study of an intervention that is culturally tailored specifically toward Latinos. Rivera-Mindt said they’ve successfully recruited 110 volunteers, and hopes to hit the goal by February.

“Any time you engage in research with people, there are always bumps and surprises along the way, and my study is no exception in that regard,” she said. Recruitment was slow initially, and I had this desire to get involved in the community, but I didn’t know exactly how to approach the community in a meaningful way.”

Part of the challenge, she said, has been earning the trust of the community, so as to understand the needs of a disenfranchised population. Working with groups like Harlem Community Academic Partnership, the Manhattan HIV Care Network has helped.

“It’s not only about how my research can help them, but also how their perspective can inform my research. Because of their input, my research has evolved, and questions are emerging in ways that I didn’t expect and could not have known had I not been involved in the community,” she said.

“It turns out that broader social issues are also rally important to medication adherence in a way that I hadn’t thought about things like housing, and child care in order to go to the pharmacy or to see the doctor in order to get your medication.”

“Part of the population that I’m working with is somewhat transient, and sometimes they’re living with family or with friends, wherever, and they can’t disclose their HIV status, for issues of safety and other things, or being ostracized. So they hide their medications; they might not be able to take them into where they’re living.”

Rivera-Mindt is also working on a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse with a team at Albert Einstein College of Medicine examining the neurocognitive effects of bupenorphine (an opioid addiction therapy) among HIV-positive and HIV-negative opioid dependent adults.

Rivera-Mindt’s work has not gone unnoticed. When it meets for its annual conference in Vancouver on Oct. 13, The National Academy of Neuropsychology will present her with its 2010 Early Career Service Award, for her service to the profession, service to the community, and teaching, including supervision and mentoring. It’s the first national award she’s won for her work, and one she’s extremely grateful for.

“My research, teaching and supervision are all inter-connected. For me, the ultimate goal is to improve services and outcomes in terms of neuro-psychological functioning for all kinds of people, but especially for ethnically diverse, disenfranchised populations who tend to be underrepresented or under served,” she said. “So I feel this is part of that greater mission for me.”

—Patrick Verel
Edited: Friday, Oct. 1, 2010 | 4 p.m.

FordhamScience: Pigeons Lead the Way in Teaching Language Skills

At Rose Hill a couple of pigeons are looking into ways to help learning disabled children and stroke victims learn (or relearn) vocabulary. Of course the pigeons don’t know that’s what they’re doing: they’re just pecking at keys to get food rewards, but Jim MacDonall, Ph.D., and his undergraduate researchers are watching them, and they’re taking notes.

MacDonall, a professor of psychology at Fordham, has recently started a new line of research in animal cognition, so-called “concept formation,” an essential precondition for language.

“For example, seeing the word 'dog,' hearing someone say 'dog' and seeing a picture of a 'dog' are all equivalent,” says MacDonall. “Language-able adults and children can readily substitute for one another. Only if pressed do we say the specific stimuli are different but the 'concept' is the same.”

Photographs
Top: (L to R) Peter Sanneman, Jim MacDonall and Anne Neuendorf with some experimental subjects.
Middle: The experimental apparatus.
Bottom: A White Carneaux takes a spin in the apparatus.

MacDonall’s pigeons, like young children, stroke victims and children with autism or learning disabilities, can’t readily connect the stimuli to the label. In experimenting with how pigeons can be trained to make certain associations, MacDonall believes researchers can develop strategies to better teach language skills to children and adults who otherwise have difficulty learning them.

MacDonall uses pigeons (White Carneaux, from the Palmetto Pigeon Plant in Sumter, S.C.), because they’re hardy, long lived, have excellent eyesight and see colors. The pigeons are set up in their own room, with a separate ventilation system, as required by the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare. The equipment and part of the renovation to animal room funded by a faculty grant through the office of Michael Latham, the interim dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill.

The experiment is simple: three circles can either be lit red or green. MacDonall trains the pigeons to peck the right- or left-hand circle that matches the color of the center circle (the birds aren’t actually matching the colors, in this case, but the pattern of colors). Each correct peck gets a food reward of mixed grain from a slot beneath the lighted circles.

Normally pigeons will make several hundred errors learning to peck the correct match, and their steady performance will be 85 to 95 percent correct. But preliminary results from MacDonall’s training scheme seem to show that pigeons can learn correct matching with fewer than 20 errors, and with a steady performance rate of about 97 to 100 percent correct.

What’s the difference? When the pigeons begin their training, they are only given the correct choice to peck (and of course rewarded when they do so). Once the pigeons reliably peck the target circle, the researchers introduce the wrong choice, but only for a fraction of a second. The bird has time to see the incorrect choice, but not time enough to peck it. Over time, the duration of time the incorrect circle stays lit is increased until it matches that of the correct choice.

MacDonall’s work has implications for how stroke patients who lost language ability should be retaught, and for teaching language skills to autistic children who have never had the ability to begin with. For adult stroke victims, relearning language can be very frustrating, and instruction is frequently delayed by outbursts of temper at getting the wrong word for an object the patient feels he or she should know.

The inherent frustration aside, MacDonall says the research on stroke recovery shows that the more quickly language skill is reacquired, the more complete it will be. Diminishing the time lost to aggressive outbursts increases the number of language lessons a patient can complete in a day. And that’s where MacDonall’s work comes into play: by giving stroke victims a more painless learning curve, they can potentially reacquire language more quickly and completely.

In teaching language skills to autistic and otherwise learning disabled children, MacDonall says if we can offer them an easier path to acquiring the skills, why shouldn’t we? “Kids don’t like to be frustrated, either,” he says.

The obvious question is, why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? MacDonall pauses for a long minute before answering.

“I think a lot of investigators don’t pay close enough attention to the details in the stimulus,” he says. “You need to pay very close attention to exactly what’s happening in the environment, and to the consequences of responding—to the reinforcement you’re offering.”

As for why techniques developed on pigeons should work as well in humans, MacDonall says “Most of the time it does. Conditioning applies across species, though you may find parameter differences: pigeons may require thirty seconds between trials, and humans only two.”

The next step, according to MacDonall, is to try and replicate his early findings with four more pigeons, then publish the results.

“Individuals who do not have language ability (developmentally disabled children and autistic children) and those who have lost language (some stroke victims) are in a very difficult situation,” MacDonall says. “We need to do everything we can to speed their learning or relearning of language.”
__________

The current undergraduate assistants in MacDonall’s lab are:

• Anne Neuendorf, FCRH, psychology, junior
• Peter Sanneman, FCRH, theology, junior
• Caitlin Nosal, FCRH, undeclared, sophomore
• Eileen Moran, FCRH, psychology, senior
• Jessica LaRusso, FCRH, psychology, junior
  

Over the summer, Sanneman and Neuendorf helped with the research discussed above, and were supported by an Undergraduate Summer Science Fellowship from FCRH. Nosal, Moran and LaRusso joined the lab this semester. Funds for equipment used in this research were provided by the Office of the Dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill.

Conference on Cognition and Education Research Held at Fordham

Faculty and graduate students from four New York City universities convened at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus to discuss research about cognitive psychology science and education.

Held on Feb. 27, the second annual Subway Summit on Cognition and Education included scholars from Fordham, New York University, the City University of New York and Columbia University. The event was sponsored by the Fordham Graduate School of Education’s Center for Learning in Unsupervised Environments (CLUE).

"It was great for all of the participants, but particularly for the graduate students,” said William B. Whitten II, Ph.D., Distinguished Research Scholar and co-director of CLUE. "They are studying in New York, and sometimes think the whole world is wrapped around their university. This gave them an opportunity to possibly find something related to their research going on just a few blocks away.”

The conference also gave graduate students an opportunity to attend a top-notch academic research conference at a low cost—the cost of a subway ride, Whitten said.

“It’s a low-cost, local conference in which they can build linkages that might lead to future collaborations,” he said.

Whitten and Mitchell Rabinowitz, Ph.D., professor and chairman of the psychology and educational services division and co-director of CLUE, made presentations along with students, as did Fordham faculty members Fran Blumberg, Ph.D., and John Houtz, Ph.D.

The presentations included topics such as “Academic Lessons from Video Game Learning” and “Developing Student Argumentation and Inquiry.”

The goal of CLUE at the Graduate School of Education is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of learning in unsupervised environments. CLUE participants engage in applied educational psychology research to produce practical knowledge toward optimizing unsupervised learning, and to extend theories of learning, memory, and comprehension.

–Gina Vergel

GSAS Alumna Named to Influential APA Committee

Scyatta A. Wallace, Ph.D., (GSAS ’02) associate professor of psychology at St. John’s University, has been appointed to the American Psychological Association’s Committee on Psychology and AIDS (COPA) for a three-year term. She began her term on Jan. 1.

"Psychologists have a lot to contribute to shaping HIV/AIDS policy and informing HIV/AIDS research given our expertise in understanding decision making and behavior," Wallace said. "This is important for informing prevention and treatment efforts."

In her new position, Scyatta will be one of six COPA members to help shape the APA’s policy regarding the HIV epidemic. All members are chosen for their expertise and commitment to AIDS-related issues.

The APA is a scientific and professional organization that represents psychology in the United States, and, with 148,000 members, the largest association of psychologists worldwide. It supports legislation on mental health issues, encourages new research initiatives and assists community-based organizations with volunteer members.

Scyatta said she first became interested in the problem of HIV among youth when she was a doctoral student at Fordham. For her practicum in applied developmental psychology, she was assigned an evaluation of HIV testing and treatment among homeless youth at a Manhattan outreach center.

Today, Scyatta’s research is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She focuses on HIV prevention among African-American youth, and looks at factors that affect their risk-taking and substance abuse behaviors.

Scyatta taught at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn before moving to St. John’s in 2008.

—Janet Sassi