Two Minds Blog

Drs. Bill Miller and Steve Rollnick have published a new edition of their bestselling psychotherapy book, Motivational Interviewing . Similar to past editions, this is not just a minor update. Every time that Miller and Rollnick revise their work, they seem to sit down with a blank screen and start to explain their method from scratch, resulting in a completely new book about motivational interviewing. So what's in the new version? One update in the 3rd edition was the introduction of 4 "tasks" of motivational interviewing: engaging, focusing, evoking, and planning. In the new 4th edition, these tasks have become the overarching structure of the book, with a chapter on each one. Other frameworks, like the "MI micro-skills" of OARS (open-ended questions, affirmation, reflection, summarizing) are subsumed into the four tasks (OARS is in the "evoking" chapter now). The new book flows in a way that prior editions didn't always -- they more often had co...

I wrote previously about my colleague Dr. Mustafa Ozkaynak's study of fatigue among emergency-room nurses, which showed how fatigue impairs decision-making, especially at the level of the Narrative Mind. In a new paper that we published from the same dataset, Dr. Ozkaynak's team examined psychometric properties of the Swedish Occupational Fatigue Inventory (SOFI). We found that the emergency-room nurses' experience of fatigue was a good fit with what people have reported in other occupational contexts, with 4 different aspects of fatigue: (a) lack of motivation, (b) physical discomfort, (c) sleepiness, and (d) an overall "lack of energy" scale that both encompasses the other 3 elements of fatigue and also has some unique items associated only with lack of energy. We tested whether 2 additional items from another tool, which are generally understood to measure (e) mental fatigue, would be a meaningful addition to the SOFI, but in this case they were not -- either ...

The idea of "bootstrapping" in statistics means re-using limited data in creative ways to draw a broader conclusion. In ordinary discourse, though, the phrase "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" refers to self-help. In my last post I wrote about the current Federal policy backlash against antidepressant medications; some of that antipathy may date from a uniquely American view of how people can improve themselves and their life circumstances. Jess McHugh's book Americanon : An Unexpected U.S. History in Thirteen Bestselling Books argues that self-help is actually the single more characteristic literary form generated by Americans over the history of the United States.  McHugh used publishing data to identify the books by U.S. authors with the largest circulation and the greatest public impact, from colonial times onward. Her results were not works of literature, science, or religion, but rather books that had a definite psychological slant. They included Poo...