EMDR minus eye movements equals good psychotherapy.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a therapy roughly equal in efficacy to others currently available. It is argued that this treatment method is efficacious independent of the value of its component parts (e.g., eye movements) and is successful because it applies common and generally accepted principles of psychotherapy. Ten curative principles of this procedure are discussed as reflective of sound psychotherapy practice. It is hoped that an understanding of this therapy from the perspective of the practice and theory of psychotherapy will assist in its study.

Personality antecedents of burnout among middle-aged physicians.

Utilizing a prospective design, this study addressed the question of whether vulnerability to burnout among physicians is associated with certain longstanding, maladaptive personality tendencies that predate entrance into medical training and subsequent exposure to the intrinsic stresses of medical practice. Subjects were 440 practicing physicians whose personality traits and psychological adjustment had been assessed with the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) shortly before entering medical school who were followed up by mail questionnaire an average of 25 years later to evaluate current symptoms of burnout with the Tedium scale. Results revealed that higher burnout scores were significantly correlated with a number of standard and special MMPI scales measuring low self-esteem, feelings of inadequacy, dysphoria and obsessive worry, passivity, social anxiety, and withdrawal from others. In contrast, burnout scores exhibited no significant associations with demographic or practice characteristics, including sex, age, medical specialty, practice arrangement, hours worked per week, or percentage of work time spent in direct contact with patients. Alternative interpretations of these findings and their potential implications for reducing the risk of burnout among physicians are discussed.

Hostility, coronary heart disease (CHD) incidence, and total mortality: lack of association in a 25-year follow-up study of 478 physicians.

Higher levels of hostility, assessed by a Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) scale (Ho), have been associated with the incidence of coronary disease and mortality from coronary disease and other causes in two prospective studies. In this study we examined the relationship between hostility and health status 25 years later in 478 physicians who completed the MMPI at the time of their medical-school admission interview. In contrast to earlier studies, higher Ho scores were not predictive of coronary disease incidence or total mortality. The implications of this finding for current research on the hostility component of the Type A behavior pattern are discussed.

A study of transsexuals seeking gender reassignment.

The authors report the results. of a computerized psychodiagnostic assessment of 19 males and 1 female seeking sex-reassignment surgery. The most pervasive finding was hysterical personality trend (13 of 20 cases). Twelve patients exhibited psychotic trends: 6 showed psychotic thinking on test scores, and 6 received computer-preferred diagnoses of paranoid or schizoid personality. However, most of these 12 patients were not considered psychotic on interview, and those who had sex-reassignment surgery had good results