Author: Andrew Marshall

Founder & Editor of the BootCampMilitaryFitnessInstitute.com, MilitaryGogglebox.com, and Mental-Health-Matters.org.

What is Invisible Support?

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Introduction

In psychology, invisible support is a type of social support in which supportive exchanges are not visible to recipients.

There are two possible situations that can qualify as acts of invisible support. The first possibility entails a situation where “recipients are completely unaware of the supportive transaction between themselves and support-givers”. For example, a spouse may choose to spontaneously take care of housework without mentioning it to the other couple-member. Invisible support also occurs when “recipients are aware of an act that takes place but do not interpret the act as a supportive exchange”. In this case, a friend or family member may subtly provide advice in an indirect manner as a means to preserve the recipient’s self-esteem or to defer his or her attention from a stressful situation. Invisible support can be viewed on both ends of an exchange, in which the recipient is unaware of the support received and the provider enacts support in a skilful, subtle way.

Background

It is known that perceptions of social support availability predict better adjustment to stressful life events; it has been found that the perception of support availability is inherently comforting, and can serve as a psychological safety-net that motivates self-reliant coping efforts in the face of stress. Although the perception of support availability is associated with better adjustment, the knowledge that one has been the recipient of specific supportive acts has often been unhelpful to effectively reduce stress. The knowledge of receiving help may come at a cost with decreased feelings of self-esteem and self-efficacy, because it increases recipients’ awareness towards their personal difficulties to manage stressors. People’s well-intentioned support attempts may also be miscarried, and their efforts could either fail or even worsen the situation for a person under stress. Since supportive acts benefit recipients but their actual knowledge of receiving support is sometimes harmful, it has been theorised that the most effective support exchange would involve one in which the provider reports giving support but the recipient does not notice that support has occurred. From a cost-benefit point of view, invisible support would be optimal for the recipient because the benefits of provision are accrued while the costs of receipt are avoided. Using the same idea, it also implies that the least effective type of support would be one in which the provider does not report providing support but the recipient reports receiving it.

The first investigation of invisible support involved a couples study in which one member was preparing for the New York State Bar Exam. Support receipt and provision were measured by having both couple members complete daily diary entries. Over the course of one month, stressed individuals who reported low frequency of received support (but whose partner ranked their own actions as highly supportive) rated themselves low on anxiety and depression compared to other individuals who reported high frequency of received support.

Compared to Visible Support

A substantial body of work has evidence to suggest that support is most effective when it is invisible or goes unnoticed by recipients. While invisible support has been shown to benefit recipients over visibly supportive acts in some cases, there have also been instances where recipients have benefitted from visible support as well. For example, greater observed support enacted by intimate partners during couples’ support-relevant exchanges have been shown to build feelings of closeness and support, boost positive mood and self-esteem, and foster greater goal achievement and relationship quality across time.

It has been recently suggested that acts of invisible support and visible support may be beneficial or costly depending on different circumstances. To investigate this idea, a recent study in 2013 compared the short-term and long-term effects of visible and invisible support reception during romantic couples’ discussions of each partner’s personal goal. It was found that either type of support was more beneficial depending on the emotional distress that recipients felt at the time. Visible emotional support (support through reassurance, encouragement, and understanding) was associated with perceptions of greater support and discussion success for recipients who felt greater distress during the discussion. In contrast, invisible emotional support was not associated with recipients’ post-discussion perceptions of support or discussion success. For long-term support effects, it was found that only invisible emotional support predicted greater goal achievement across the following year.

When put together, these findings suggest that visible support and invisible support have unique functions for well-being. When people are under distress, visible support appears to be a short-term remedy to reassure recipients that they are cared for and supported. These benefits are only present when recipients are actually distressed during the time that the supportive act takes place. On the other hand, while invisible support tends to go unnoticed by recipients, it seems to play an integral role in the long-term success of goal-maintenance. This increasingly complex view of the implications of support visibility is reinforced by a growing body of research suggesting the effects of invisible social support – as with visible support – are moderated by provider, recipient, and contextual factors such as recipients’ perceptions of providers’ responsiveness to their needs, or the quality of the relationship between the support provider and recipient.

Effects on Support Providers

Refer to Social Support, Psychology, Stress (Psychological; Eustress and Distress), Coping (Psychology), Self-Esteem, and Self-Efficacy.

The effects of invisible support on recipients have been extensively investigated, but the consequences of invisible support on providers are less known. One study in 2016 investigated the benefits and costs of invisible support on couple-members who enacted supportive behaviours by differentiating the processes of invisible emotional support (support through reassurance, encouragement, and understanding) from processes of invisible instrumental support (providing tangible aid such as sending money or childcare). No costs of support-giving were found for providers when they demonstrated acts of invisible emotional support. The effects for invisible instrumental support told a different story, where providers who reported high relationship satisfaction were unaffected, but providers who reported low relationship satisfaction were negatively affected by their acts of invisible instrumental support with an increase in negative mood. These findings suggest that emotional comfort may be a more central function to maintain close relationships than instrumental support. Therefore, providing invisible emotional support may lead to less perceptions of a costly inequity than providing invisible instrumental support on average. However, since invisible instrumental support did not incur costs for providers who reported high relationship satisfaction, it implies that high relationship satisfaction may buffer potential costs that would otherwise be felt by support-providers. The differential results between invisible instrumental and emotional support indicate that a solid distinction between instrumental and emotional social support may be useful to take into account when investigating effects of invisible support as a whole.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_support >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction?

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Introduction

Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is an eight-week evidence-based programme that offers secular, intensive mindfulness training to assist people with stress, anxiety, depression and pain.

Developed at the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre in the 1970s by Professor Jon Kabat-Zinn, MBSR uses a combination of mindfulness meditation, body awareness, yoga and exploration of patterns of behaviour, thinking, feeling and action. Mindfulness can be understood as the non-judgemental acceptance and investigation of present experience, including body sensations, internal mental states, thoughts, emotions, impulses and memories, in order to reduce suffering or distress and to increase well-being. Mindfulness meditation is a method by which attention skills are cultivated, emotional regulation is developed, and rumination and worry are significantly reduced. During the past decades, mindfulness meditation has been the subject of more controlled clinical research, which suggests its potential beneficial effects for mental health, as well as physical health. While MBSR has its roots in Buddhist wisdom teachings, the programme itself is secular. The MBSR programme is described in detail in Kabat-Zinn’s 1990 book Full Catastrophe Living.

Brief History

In 1979, Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre, and nearly twenty years later the Centre for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Both these institutions supported the growth and implementation of MBSR into hospitals worldwide. Kabat-Zinn described the MBSR program in detail in his bestselling 1990 book Full Catastrophe Living, which was reissued in a revised edition in 2013. In 1993, the MBSR course taught by Jon Kabat-Zinn was featured in Bill Moyer’s Healing from Within. In the year 2015, close to 80% of medical schools are reported to offer some element of mindfulness training, and research and education centres dedicated to mindfulness have proliferated.

Programme

A meta-analysis described MBSR as “a group programme that focuses upon the progressive acquisition of mindful awareness, of mindfulness”. The MBSR programme is an eight-week workshop taught by certified trainers that entails weekly group meetings (2.5 hour classes) and a one-day retreat (seven-hour mindfulness practice) between sessions six and seven, homework (45 minutes daily), and instruction in three formal techniques: mindfulness meditation, body scanning and simple yoga postures. Group discussions and exploration – of experience of the meditation practice and its application to life – is a central part of the program. Body scanning is the first prolonged formal mindfulness technique taught during the first four weeks of the course, and entails quietly sitting or lying and systematically focusing one’s attention on various regions of the body, starting with the toes and moving up slowly to the top of the head. MBSR is based on non-judging, non-striving, acceptance, letting go, beginners mind, patience, trust, and non-centring.

According to Kabat-Zinn, the basis of MBSR is mindfulness, which he defined as “moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness.” During the programme, participants are asked to focus on informal practice as well by incorporating mindfulness into their daily routines. Focusing on the present is thought to heighten sensitivity to the environment and one’s own reactions to it, consequently enhancing self-management and coping. It also provides an outlet from ruminating on the past or worrying about the future, breaking the cycle of these maladaptive cognitive processes. The validity and reliability of a weekly single-item practice quality assessment have been confirmed by research. Increases in practice quality predicted improvements in self-report mindfulness and psychological symptoms but not behavioural mindfulness, and longer practice sessions were linked to better practice quality.

Scientific evidence of the debilitating effects of stress on human body and its evolutionary origins were pinpointed by the work of Robert Sapolsky, and explored for lay readers in the book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Engaging in mindfulness meditation brings about significant reductions in psychological stress, and appears to prevent the associated physiological changes and biological clinical manifestations that happen as a result of psychological stress. According to early neuroimaging studies, MBSR training has an influence on the areas of the brain responsible for attention, introspection, and emotional processing.

Extent of Practice

According to a 2014 article in Time magazine, mindfulness meditation is becoming popular among people who would not normally consider meditation. The curriculum started by Kabat-Zinn at University of Massachusetts Medical Centre has produced nearly 1,000 certified MBSR instructors who are in nearly every state in the US and more than 30 countries. Corporations such as General Mills have made MBSR instruction available to their employees or set aside rooms for meditation. Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan published a book in 2012 titled A Mindful Nation and he has helped organise regular group meditation periods on Capitol Hill.

Methods of Practice

Mindfulness-based stress reduction classes and programs are offered by various facilities including hospitals, retreat centres, and various yoga facilities. Typically the programs focus on teaching

  • mind and body awareness to reduce the physiological effects of stress, pain or illness
  • experiential exploration of experiences of stress and distress to develop less emotional reactivity
  • equanimity in the face of change and loss that is natural to any human life
  • non-judgemental awareness in daily life
  • promote serenity and clarity in each moment
  • to experience more joyful life and access inner resources for healing and stress management
  • mindfulness meditation

Evaluation of Effectiveness

Mindfulness-based approaches have been found to be beneficial for healthy adults for adolescents and children, healthcare professionals, as well as for different health-related outcomes including eating disorders, psychiatric conditions, pain management, sleep disorders, cancer care, psychological distress, and for coping with health-related conditions. As a major subject of increasing research interest, 52 papers were published in 2003, rising to 477 by 2012. Nearly 100 randomised controlled trials had been published by early 2014.

The development of therapies to improve individuals’ flexibility in switching between using and not using emotion regulation (ER) methods is necessary because it is linked to better mental health, wellbeing, and resilience. According to research, those who attended MBSR training exhibited greater regulatory decision flexibility. In post-secondary students, research on mindfulness-based stress reduction has demonstrated that it can reduce psychological distress, which is common in this age range. In one study, the long-term impact of an 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) treatment extended to two months after the intervention was completed.

Individuals with eating disorders have benefited from the mindfulness-based approach. MBSR therapy has been found to assist individuals improve the way they view their bodies. Interventions, such as mindfulness-based approaches, which focus on effective coping skills and improving one’s relationship with themselves through increased self-compassion can positively impact a person’s body image and contribute to overall well-being.

Research suggests mindfulness training improves focus, attention, and ability to work under stress. Mindfulness may also have potential benefits for cardiovascular health. Evidence suggests efficacy of mindfulness meditation in the treatment of substance use disorders. Mindfulness training may also be beneficial for people with fibromyalgia.

In addition, recent research has explored the ability of mindfulness-based stress reduction to increase self-compassion and enhance the well-being of those who are caregivers, specifically mothers, for youth struggling with substance use disorders. Mindfulness-based interventions allowed for the mothers to experience a decrease in stress as well as a better relationship with themselves which resulted in improved interpersonal relationships.

It has been demonstrated that mindfulness-based stress reduction has beneficial impacts on healthy individuals as well as suffering individuals and those close to suffering individuals. Roca et al. (2019) conducted an 8-week mindfulness-based stress reduction programme for healthy participants. Five pillars of MBSR, including mindfulness, compassion, psychological well-being, psychological distress, and emotional-cognitive control were identified. Participants psychological functioning were examined and assessed using questionnaires. Mindfulness and overall well-being was significant between the five pillars observed.

Mindfulness-based interventions and their impact have become prevalent in every-day life, especially when rooted in an academic setting. After interviewing children, of the average age of 11, it was apparent that mindfulness had contributed to their ability to regulate their emotions. In addition to these findings, these children expressed that the more mindfulness was incorporated by their school and teachers, the easier it was to apply its principles.

Mindfulness-based stress approaches have been shown to increase self-compassion. Higher levels of self-compassion have been found to greatly reduce stress. In addition, as self-compassion increases it seems as though self-awareness increases as well. This finding has been observed to occur during treatment as well as a result at the conclusion, and even after, treatment. Self-compassion is both a result and an informative factor of the effectiveness of mindfulness-based approaches.

MBIs (mindfulness-based intervations) showed a positive effect on mental and somatic health in social when compared to other active treatments in adults. This effects may be gender dependent. However, the effects seemed independent of duration and compliance with these kind of intervention.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness-based_stress_reduction >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

On This Day … 27 January [2023]

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People (Births)

  • 1904 – James J. Gibson, American psychologist and academic (d. 1979).

James J. Gibson

James Jerome Gibson (27 January 1904 to 11 December 1979) was an American psychologist and is considered to be one of the most important contributors to the field of visual perception. Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs conscious visual perception, and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or processing. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked him as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth.

On This Day … 25 January [2023]

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People (Births)

  • 1923 – Shirley Ardell Mason, American psychiatric patient (d. 1998).

Shirley Ardell Mason

Shirley Ardell Mason (25 January 1923 to 26 February 1998) was an American art teacher who was reputed to have dissociative identity disorder (previously known as multiple personality disorder). Her life was purportedly described, with adaptations to protect her anonymity, in 1973 in the book Sybil, subtitled The True Story of a Woman Possessed by 16 Separate Personalities. Two films of the same name were made, one released in 1976 and the other in 2007. Both the book and the films used the name Sybil Isabel Dorsett to protect Mason’s identity, though the 2007 remake stated Mason’s name at its conclusion.

Mason’s diagnosis and treatment under Cornelia B. Wilbur have been criticised, with allegations that Wilbur manipulated or misdiagnosed Mason. Mason herself eventually told her doctor that she did not have multiple personalities and that the symptoms had not been genuine, although whether or not this statement accurately reflected Mason’s views later in life remains controversial.

On This Day … 24 January [2023]

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People (Births)

  • 1850 – Hermann Ebbinghaus, German psychologist (d. 1909).
  • 1853 – Sigbert Josef Maria Ganser, German psychiatrist (d. 1931).

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Hermann Ebbinghaus (24 January 1850 to 26 February 1909) was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory, and is known for his discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing effect. He was also the first person to describe the learning curve. He was the father of the neo-Kantian philosopher Julius Ebbinghaus.

Sigbert Josef Maria Ganser

Sigbert Josef Maria Ganser (24 January 1853 to 4 January 1931) was a German psychiatrist born in Rhaunen.

He earned his medical doctorate in 1876 from the University of Munich. Afterwards he worked briefly at a psychiatric clinic in Würzburg, and later as an assistant to neuroanatomist Bernhard von Gudden (1824-1886) in Munich. In 1886, he became head of the psychiatric department at Dresden General Hospital. Among his students was neurologist Hans Queckenstedt (1876-1918).

Sigbert Ganser is remembered for a hysterical disorder that he first described in 1898. He identified the disorder in three prisoners while working at a prison in Halle. The features included approximate or nonsensical answers to simple questions, perceptual abnormalities, and clouding of consciousness. Ganser believed that these symptoms were an associative reaction caused by an unconscious attempt by the patient to escape from an intolerable mental situation. The disorder was to become known as Ganser syndrome.

An Overview of Salutogenesis

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Introduction

Salutogenesis is the study of the origins of health and focuses on factors that support human health and well-being, rather than on factors that cause disease (pathogenesis).

More specifically, the “salutogenic model” was originally concerned with the relationship between health, stress, and coping through a study of Holocaust survivors. Despite going through the dramatic tragedy of the holocaust, some survivors were able to thrive later in life. The discovery that there must be powerful health causing factors led to the development of salutogenesis. The term was coined by Aaron Antonovsky, a professor of medical sociology. The salutogenic question posed by Aaron Antonovsky is, “How can this person be helped to move toward greater health?”

Antonovsky’s theories reject the “traditional medical-model dichotomy separating health and illness”. He described the relationship as a continuous variable, what he called the “health-ease versus dis-ease continuum”. Salutogenesis now encompasses more than the origins of health and has evolved to be about multidimensional causes of higher levels of health. Models associated with salutogenesis generally include wholistic approaches related to at least the physical, social, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, vocational, and environmental dimensions.

Refer to Positive Psychology.

Derivation

The word “salutogenesis” comes from the Latin salus (meaning health) and the Greek genesis (meaning origin). Antonovsky developed the term from his studies of “how people manage stress and stay well” (unlike pathogenesis which studies the causes of diseases). He observed that stress is ubiquitous, but not all individuals have negative health outcomes in response to stress. Instead, some people achieve health despite their exposure to potentially disabling stress factors.

Development

In his 1979 book, Health, Stress and Coping, Antonovsky described a variety of influences that led him to the question of how people survive, adapt, and overcome in the face of even the most punishing life-stress experiences. In his 1987 book, Unravelling the Mysteries of Health, he focused more specifically on a study of women and aging; he found that 29% of women who had survived Nazi concentration camps had positive emotional health, compared to 51% of a control group. His insight was that 29% of the survivors were not emotionally impaired by the stress. Antonovsky wrote: “this for me was the dramatic experience that consciously set me on the road to formulating what I came to call the ‘salutogenic model’.”

In salutogenic theory, people continually battle with the effects of hardship. These ubiquitous forces are called generalised resource deficits (GRDs). On the other hand, there are generalised resistance resources (GRRs), which are all of the resources that help a person cope and are effective in avoiding or combating a range of psychosocial stressors. Examples are resources such as money, ego-strength, and social support.

GRDs will cause the coping mechanisms to fail whenever the sense of coherence is not robust to weather the current situation. This causes illness and possibly even death. However, if the sense of coherence is high, a stressor will not necessarily be harmful. But it is the balance between GRDs and GRRs that determines whether a factor will be pathogenic, neutral, or salutary.

Antonovsky’s formulation was that the GRRs enabled individuals to make sense of and manage events. He argued that over time, in response to positive experiences provided by successful use of different resources, an individual would develop an attitude that was “in itself the essential tool for coping”.

Sense of Coherence

The “sense of coherence” is a theoretical formulation that provides a central explanation for the role of stress in human functioning. “Beyond the specific stress factors that one might encounter in life, and beyond your perception and response to those events, what determines whether stress will cause you harm is whether or not the stress violates your sense of coherence.” Antonovsky defined Sense of Coherence as:

“a global orientation that expresses the extent to which one has a pervasive, enduring though dynamic feeling of confidence that (1) the stimuli deriving from one’s internal and external environments in the course of living are structured, predictable and explicable; (2) the resources are available to one to meet the demands posed by these stimuli; and (3) these demands are challenges, worthy of investment and engagement.”

In his formulation, the sense of coherence has three components:

  • Comprehensibility: a belief that things happen in an orderly and predictable fashion and a sense that you can understand events in your life and reasonably predict what will happen in the future.
  • Manageability: a belief that you have the skills or ability, the support, the help, or the resources necessary to take care of things, and that things are manageable and within your control.
  • Meaningfulness: a belief that things in life are interesting and a source of satisfaction, that things are really worthwhile and that there is good reason or purpose to care about what happens.

According to Antonovsky, the third element is the most important. If a person believes there is no reason to persist and survive and confront challenges, if they have no sense of meaning, then they will have no motivation to comprehend and manage events. His essential argument is that “salutogenesis” depends on experiencing a strong “sense of coherence”. His research demonstrated that the sense of coherence predicts positive health outcomes.

Fields of Application

Health and Medicine

Antonovsky viewed his work as primarily addressed to the fields of health psychology, behavioural medicine, and the sociology of health. It has been adopted as a term to describe contemporary approaches to nursing, psychiatry, integrative medicine, and healthcare architecture. The salutogenic framework has also been adapted as a method for decision making on the fly; the method has been applied for emergency care and for healthcare architecture. Incorporating concepts from salutogenesis can support a transition from curative to preventive medicine.

Workplace

The sense of coherence with its three components meaningfulness, manageability and understandability has also been applied to the workplace.

Meaningfulness is considered to be related to the feeling of participation and motivation and to a perceived meaning of the work. The meaningfulness component has also been linked with job control and task significance. Job control implies that employees have more authority to make decisions concerning their work and the working process. Task significance involves “the experience of congruence between personal values and work activities, which is accompanied by strong feelings of identification with the attitudes, values or goals of the working tasks and feelings of motivation and involvement”.

The manageability component is considered to be linked to job control as well as to access to resources. It has also been considered to be linked with social skills and trust. Social relations relate also to the meaningfulness component.

The comprehensibility component may be influenced by consistent feedback at work, for example concerning the performance appraisal.

Salutogenics perspectives are also considered in the design of offices.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

On This Day … 22 January [2023]

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People (Births)

  • 1913 – Henry Bauchau, Belgian psychoanalyst and author (d. 2012).
  • 1932 – Berthold Grünfeld, Norwegian psychiatrist and academic (d. 2007).

Henry Bauchau

Henry Bauchau (22 January 1913 to 21 September 2012) was a Belgian psychoanalyst, lawyer, and author of French prose and poetry.

Berthold Grunfeld

Berthold Grünfeld (22 January 1932 to 20 August 2007) was a Norwegian psychiatrist, sexologist, and professor of social medicine at the University of Oslo. He was also a recognised expert in forensic psychiatry, often employed by Norwegian courts to examine insanity defense pleas.

On This Day … 21 January [2023]

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People (Births)

  • 1887 – Wolfgang Köhler, German psychologist and phenomenologist (d. 1967).

Wolfgang Kohler

Wolfgang Köhler (21 January 1887 to 11 June 1967) was a German psychologist and phenomenologist who, like Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology.

During the Nazi regime in Germany, he protested against the dismissal of Jewish professors from universities, as well as the requirement that professors give a Nazi salute at the beginning of their classes. In 1935 he left the country for the United States, where Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania offered him a professorship. He taught with its faculty for 20 years, and did continuing research. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Köhler as the 50th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

What is the Scale of Protective Factors?

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Introduction

The Scale of Protective Factors (SPF) is a measure of aspects of social relationships, planning behaviours and confidence. These factors contribute to psychological resilience in emerging adults and adults.

Brief History

The SPF was developed by Dr. Elisabeth Ponce-Garcia at the science of protective factors laboratory (SPF Lab) to capture multiple aspects of adult resilience. A Confirmatory Factor Analysis was subsequently published as collaborative research. The SPF was found to assess resilience effectively in both men and women, across risk and socio-economic status, and ethnic/racial categories.

In order to verify effectiveness in comparison to other measures, Madewell and Ponce-Garcia (2016) analysed the SPF and four other commonly used measures of adult resilience. They found that the SPF was the only measure that assessed social and cognitive aspects and that it outperformed three other measures and performed comparably with a fourth.

The structure of the SPF in comparison to four other adult resilience measures, as well as comparison data, is available as a Data in Brief article. Noticing the absence of research examining the effectiveness of adult resilience measures in child or adult sexual assault, Ponce-Garcia, Madewell and Brown (2016) demonstrated SPF’s effectiveness in that domain. An investigation of the effectiveness of the SPF in the Southern Plains Tribes of the Native American and American Indian community in 2016.

A brief version of the 24 item SPF was developed in 2019 to result in 12 item measure that can be taken as a self-assessment. The SPF-24 and the SPF-12 have been used throughout the United States and in several other countries to include Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, Australia, Malesia, Paraguay, Mexico, and Canada. It is listed as a resource by Harvard University, was included in the United States Army Substance Abuse Programme (ASAP-Fort Sill, OK), and is provided by the State of Oklahoma ReEntry Programme.

Contents

The SPF consists of twenty-four statements for which individuals are asked to rate the degree to which each statement describes them. The SPF assesses a wider range of protective factors than other scales. The SPF is the only measure that has been shown to assess social and cognitive protective factors. The SPF includes four sub-scales that indicate the strengths and weaknesses that contribute to overall resilience. The SPF is the only measure to have been used in measuring resilience in sexual assault survivors within the United States.

Properties

The SPF consists of four sub-scales, two social protective factors and two cognitive protective factors.

Social Subscales

Social support measures the availability of social resources in the form of family and/or friends. Social skill measures the ability to make and maintain relationships. The two should be positively correlated. Higher scores on the social sub-scales indicate unity with friends and/or family, friend/family group optimism and general friend/family support.

Cognitive Subscales

The goal efficacy sub-scale measures confidence in the ability to achieve goals. The planning and prioritising behaviour sub-scale measures the ability to recognise the relative importance of tasks, the tendency to approach tasks in order of importance, and the use of lists for organisation.

Scoring

Adding the scores from the four sub-scales results in an overall resilience score. Adding scores from either the two social sub-scales or the two cognitive sub-scales results in a social resilience or cognitive resilience score, respectively. The sub-scale scores can also be viewed as an individual profile of strengths and deficits to indicate priorities for therapeutic plans.

This additive approach could theoretically allow varying subscale scores to cancel each other out and incorrectly indicate low overall resilience. However, research shows that social and cognitive characteristics work together to support resilience. This concern is also not supported by the characteristics of the SPF. Rather than assessing the number of friends or the frequency of social interaction, the SPF assesses the level of comfort in interacting socially. Similarly, rather than assessing the number of goals or tasks, the SPF assesses confidence in reaching goals once set.

The sub-scales are moderately positively correlated and that they all contribute to overall resilience.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_of_Protective_Factors >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

On This Day … 20 January [2023]

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People (Births)

People (Deaths)

  • 1944 – James McKeen Cattell, American psychologist and academic (b. 1860).
  • 2012 – Alejandro Rodriguez, Venezuelan-American paediatrician and psychiatrist (b. 1918).

Nikos Sideris

Nikos Sideris (Greek: Νίκος Σιδέρης; born 20 January 1952), is a Greek psychiatrist, translator, poet and writer.

Sideris studied medicine at the University of Athens. He then settled in Paris for his postgraduate studies (specialising in Psychiatry, History and Neuropsychology-Neurolinguistics). He is a PhD of Panteion University Psychology Department and teaching psychoanalyst, member of the Strasbourg School of Psychoanalysis (E.P.S.) and the European Federation of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic School of Strasburg (FEDEPSY). He works as a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and family therapist in Athens.

His book “Children do not need psychologists. They need parents!” (Τα παιδιά δεν θέλουν ψυχολόγο. Γονείς θέλουν) became a non-fiction best-seller in Greece.

James McKeen Cattell

James McKeen Cattell (25 May 1860 to 20 January 1944), an American psychologist, was the first professor of psychology in the United States, teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, and a long-time editor and publisher of scientific journals and publications, including Science. He also served on the board of trustees for Science Service, now known as Society for Science & the Public (SSP) from 1921 to 1944.

At the beginning of Cattell’s career, many scientists regarded psychology simply as a minor field of study, or as a pseudoscience which is a collection of beliefs or practices regarded as a scientific method when it is not such as phrenology. Considerably more than his peers, Cattell helped establish psychology as a legitimate science, worthy of study at the highest levels of the academy. At the time of his death, The New York Times credited him as “the dean of American science.” Yet Cattell may be best remembered for his uncompromising opposition to American involvement in World War I. His public opposition to the draft led to his dismissal from his position at Columbia University, a move that later led many American universities to establish tenure as a means of protecting unpopular beliefs.

Alejandro Rodriguez

Alejandro Rodriguez (February 1918 to 20 January 2012) was a Venezuelan-American paediatrician and psychiatrist, known for his pioneering work in child psychiatry. He was the director of the division of child psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and conducted pivotal studies on autism and other developmental disorders in children.