Doing research on the effectiveness of psychotherapy and psychotherapy training: a person-centered/experiential perspective

In this article, we present a framework for selecting instruments for evaluating psychotherapy and psychotherapy training from a person-centered and experiential psychotherapy (PCEP) perspective. The protocol is divided into eight therapy measurement domains, consisting of four research themes (therapy outcome, therapy process, client predictors, training outcome) and two levels (general/pan-theoretical concepts vs. treatment specific/PCEP-oriented concepts). This research protocol provides recommendations about what to measure, encouraging collaboration across different training sites, while still allowing flexibility for individual centers. Minimum and systematic case study data collection designs are described: Minimum designs are appropriate for use in private practice settings with one's own clients; systematic case-study designs can be used for student case-presentation requirements or for publication. The framework and research protocols described are part of an emerging international research project involving private and public training centers in several countries

Why Intelligent People Live Longer

Numerous studies find a positive relationship between cognitive ability, IQ as measured in childhood or youth, and subsequent survival. Explanations range from the idea that low ability is an indicator of adverse systemic events in early life to the idea that high cognitive functioning is required continuously to maintain health and reduce threats to survival. The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) has followed a large cohort of Wisconsin high school seniors from ages 18 to 69. As expected, in the WLS survival varies positively with adolescent IQ. However, rank in high school class accounts completely for the relationship between IQ and survival, and it has a much larger effect on survival. These findings suggest that cognitive functioning improves survival by promoting behaviours that boost health status, minimize exposure to known risks and optimize returns to health producing inputs, and that such behaviours are firmly in place by late adolescence

Derived autoequivalences and a weighted Beilinson resolution

Given a smooth stacky Calabi-Yau hypersurface X in a weighted projective space, we consider the functor G which is the composition of the following two autoequivalences of D^b(X): the first one is induced by the spherical object O_X, while the second one is tensoring with O_X(1). The main result of the paper is that the composition of G with itself w times, where w is the sum of the weights of the weighted projective space, is isomorphic to the autoequivalence "shift by 2". The proof also involves the construction of a Beilinson type resolution of the diagonal for weighted projective spaces, viewed as smooth stacks.Comment: 19 pages; minor modifications; accepted by J. Geom. Phy

Minimizing Cubic and Homogeneous Polynomials over Integers in the Plane

We complete the complexity classification by degree of minimizing a polynomial over the integer points in a polyhedron in $\mathbb{R}^2$. Previous work shows that optimizing a quadratic polynomial over the integer points in a polyhedral region in $\mathbb{R}^2$ can be done in polynomial time, while optimizing a quartic polynomial in the same type of region is NP-hard. We close the gap by showing that this problem can be solved in polynomial time for cubic polynomials. Furthermore, we show that the problem of minimizing a homogeneous polynomial of any fixed degree over the integer points in a bounded polyhedron in $\mathbb{R}^2$ is solvable in polynomial time. We show that this holds for polynomials that can be translated into homogeneous polynomials, even when the translation vector is unknown. We demonstrate that such problems in the unbounded case can have smallest optimal solutions of exponential size in the size of the input, thus requiring a compact representation of solutions for a general polynomial time algorithm for the unbounded case

Currency Unions

What is the optimal number of currencies in the world? Common currencies affect trading costs and, thereby, the amounts of trade, output, and consumption. From the perspective of monetary policy, the adoption of another country's currency trades off the benefits of commitment to price stability against the loss of an independent stabilization policy. The nature of the tradeoff depends on co-movements of disturbances, on distance, trading costs, and on institutional arrangements such as the willingness of anchor countries to accommodate to the interests of clients.