Monitor on Psychology - March 2012 - (Page 30)
Questionnaire
Social and clinical psychologists have known [about story editing] for decades. The surprising part is that it may be easier than we thought to get people to edit their stories in ways that lead to sustained changes in behavior.
people recover from past traumas by helping them reframe and reinterpret those events. Ethan Kross, at the University of Michigan, and Ozlem Ayduk, at the University of California, Berkeley, have also demonstrated that writing about negative events is helpful, particularly if people take a thirdperson perspective on those events and think about why they occurred. The third approach is the “do good, be good” method. It capitalizes on the tried-and-true psychological principle that our attitudes and beliefs often follow from our behaviors, rather than precede them. As Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” People who do volunteer work, for example, often change their narratives of who they are, coming to view themselves as caring, helpful people. Well-designed studies have shown that teen girls who participate in community service programs do better in school and are less likely to become pregnant. Was there an “aha moment” when you realized how effective the story-editing approach is? There was such a moment early in my career when I did the academic
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performance intervention with firstyear college students. We included some short-term measures in that study that worked as we’d predicted: The students who got the intervention did better on sample items from the Graduate Record Examination. This was nice but not all that surprising; after all, the students had just gotten the story-editing prompt. We included the long-term measures, grades over the next year and dropout rates as kind of a lark, not really believing that our intervention would change behavior over the long run. I’ll never forget the moment I got the results showing it did — all from attending a session that lasted about 30 minutes. in the book, you describe how story editing can tackle some major social problems such as child abuse, substance abuse and racial prejudice. Can you talk about that? These problems have multiple causes, of course, and are notoriously hard to solve. But sometimes a little story editing goes a long way. One of my favorite examples is the research of Daphne Bugental, [a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara] who works with parents at
risk of abusing their children. One of the most common approaches to preventing child abuse, the Healthy Families America program, involves screening parents with newborns before they leave the hospital. Those deemed at risk for child abuse are given counseling and home visits. But studies that have randomly assigned parents to take part in the program or to an untreated control group have found that the intervention has no effect on the likelihood that the parents will abuse their children. Bugental and her colleagues added a seemingly small story-editing intervention to the home visits. The prompt involved getting parents to reinterpret why their babies were cranky or difficult. Often, the parents would blame their babies (for instance, “He’s trying to provoke me.”). The home visitor would ask parents if they could think of any other reasons, prompting them to attribute their babies’ behavior to situational factors that were easy to solve (such as, “Maybe I didn’t burp him enough.”). These story prompts had a dramatic effect. Among both a control group and those who participated in the traditional Healthy Families America program, about 24 percent of the parents physically abused their children. In the
M o n i to r o n p s yc h o l o g y • M a rc h 2 0 1 2
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Monitor on Psychology - March 2012
Monitor on Psychology - March 2012
Letters
President’s column
Contents
From the CEO
Supreme Court rejects eyewitness protections
New member benefit: prevention screenings
A psychodynamic treatment for PTSD shows promise for soldiers
Was ‘Little Albert’ ill during the famed conditioning study?
New research identifies ways to improve eyewitness identifications
In Brief
‘Our health at risk’
Perspective on Practice
APA endorses higher education guidelines
TIME CAPSULE
QUESTIONNAIRE
Random Sample
Judicial Notebook
Help for struggling veterans
Driving out cancer disparities
In the Public Interest
SCIENCE WATCH
Practice, virtually
The legal and ethical issues of virtual therapy
Psychologist PROFILE
EARLY CAREER PSYCHOLOGY
Bringing life into focus
Pay attention to me
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATION
Division Spotlight
Personalities
Monitor on Psychology - March 2012
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https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/apa/monitor_201111
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