Advance Care Planning and Goals-of-Care Decisions Among Veterans With Malignancy.

Background: There is a limited knowledge base about factors affecting advance directives and code status decisions among veterans with malignancy. In addition, few studies have focused on the benefit of palliative care (PC) in goals-of-care discussions among veterans with cancer.

Objectives: This study examined advance care planning and goals-of-care decisions among veterans with malignancy.

The effects of written emotional disclosure and coping skills training in rheumatoid arthritis: a randomized clinical trial.

Objective: Two psychological interventions for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) are cognitive-behavioral coping skills training (CST) and written emotional disclosure (WED). These approaches have developed independently, and their combination may be more effective than either one alone. Furthermore, most studies of each intervention have methodological limitations, and each needs further testing.

An Emotional Exposure-Based Treatment of Traumatic Stress for People with Chronic Pain: Preliminary Results for Fibromyalgia Syndrome.

Emotional trauma occurs in many patients with chronic pain, particularly fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS). Current cognitive-behavioral treatments for chronic pain have limited effects, perhaps because the trauma is not addressed, whereas emotional exposure-based treatments improve post-traumatic stress, but have not been tested on chronic pain. We present a novel, brief treatment protocol for people with chronic pain and unresolved trauma (Multi-Stimulus, Multi-Technique Emotional Exposure Therapy), which involves detecting avoidance of a range of emotion-related stimuli, implementing exposure techniques tailored to the patient's avoidances, and negotiating the process and therapeutic alliance.

The assessment of alexithymia in medical settings: implications for understanding and treating health problems.

The construct of alexithymia encompasses the characteristics of difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing feelings, externally oriented thinking, and a limited imaginal capacity. These characteristics are thought to reflect deficits in the cognitive processing and regulation of emotions and to contribute to the onset or maintenance of several medical and psychiatric disorders. In this article, we review recent methods for assessing alexithymia and examine how assessing alexithymia can inform clinical practice.

Trait and social processes in the link between social support and affect: an experimental, laboratory investigation.

This study investigated the extent to which the link between perceived social support and affect reflected support recipients' trait perceived support as well as three distinct social processes: the objective supportiveness of providers, the unique relationships among recipients and providers that were stable over occasions, as well as the unique relationships that varied across occasions. Ten recipients interacted with each of the same four providers on five separate occasions, for a total of 200 interactions. Recipients and independent observers rated recipient affect and provider support.

Extra-individual sources of social support as described by adults with mild intellectual disabilities.

The extra-individual social support responses provided by adults with intellectual disabilities on a social support survey were examined. Felton and Berry (1992) argued that extra-individual social support, support from larger than individual entities, is a valid source of social support for older adults. We hypothesized that extra-individual support would also be relevant to adults with intellectual disabilities.