Preparing patients for invasive medical and surgical procedures. 1: Adding behavioral and cognitive interventions.

The authors of three related articles look at various aspects of preparing adult and child patients psychologically for invasive surgical procedures. The first article is a review of the literature in the field, primarily from the last 30 years. Researchers have examined anxiety and coping mechanisms, patient-practitioner relationships, medical phobias, and the effectiveness of different types of psychological intervention. In the second article, the authors offer practical suggestions for implementing preparatory psychological interventions, describing effective communication techniques such as active listening, role plays, imaging, modeling, and progressive relaxation. In the final article in the series, the author considers policy, practice, and educational implications of the use of behavioral and cognitive interventions for patients, medical practitioners, and healthcare planners.

Low interrater agreement on the semantic base of textual material.

The present paper describes three experiments which were conducted to determine whether independent raters could agree upon the semantic base of textual materials. These experiments were occasioned by an earlier experiment in which the investigators reported success in increasing the ability of students to extract the semantic base from textual materials. The present paper reports our unsuccessful attempts to obtain an acceptable level of agreement among independent raters about what constituted the semantic base of a number of texts. The paper concludes by raising some doubts about the strategy of extending behavior-analytic research to verbal behavior by combining behavior-change procedures with cognitive constructs.