PEOPLE

Psychologist creates plays that ease family business stress

The play's the thing for corporate psychologist Erik Muten, PsyD, and he has found a way to combine his passion for the theatre with his expertise as a psychologist.

Muten is co-creator and executive director of DramaWorks Interactive Business Theatre™ a company that uses theatre to highlight the interpersonal issues that interfere with business success and help people in family businesses cope with the unique problems that arise when employees share genes and office space.

The first show Muten and DramaWorks created was "The Perils of Pauline's Family Business," a comedy that acted out how three generations manage their family businesses. Muten, who works mainly with small family-owned businesses in his corporate consulting practice, used his expertise to help "Perils" illustrate the challenges and characteristics of a business family, such as sibling rivalry and communication breakdowns. The play debuted to an audience of numerous business families at the University of Massachusetts Family Business Center in Northhampton. To empower the audience to address problems within their own companies, the actors led discussion about the characters and conflicts during the two intermissions.

"Perils" was a hit with the family business center and the play soon had 20 bookings at other family business centers on the East Coast and in the Midwest. Seeing that theatre is a unique way to make visible what are often invisible and costly problems in business, Muten and his DramaWorks colleagues started writing and improvising more plays.

Muten directed and acted in their next effort, a musical comedy titled "Wait Till Your Father Gets Home," which portrays a crisis that unfolds when leadership of a family hardware business is passed from a father to his twin sons. "Father" has been featured in the Boston Globe and on National Public Radio.

Muten, who has a bachelor's degree in theatre and a master's degree in stage direction, as well as a PsyD in psychology, is hoping DramaWorks can reach a new audience--physicians and people working in the health-care system. He enlisted the help of a physician and a nurse to write DramaWorks's newest play, "What Goes Around Comes Around," which depicts a frazzled physician who is having trouble managing his work and personal stress. DramaWorks has performed the play at the International Conference on Business and Consciousness in Mexico and as part of a continuing-education class on risk management for physicians at a local hospital in Northhampton.

_{--J. Chamberlin}

Developmental psychologist Daniel Berch, PhD, has accepted a three-year post as Senior Research Associate at the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI). He will serve as a research advisor to the Assistant Secretary.

Before going to OERI, Berch served as a Scientific Review Administrator at the National Institutes of Health's Center for Scientific Review. Prior to that, he spent a year at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) as a science policy fellow for the Society for Research in Child Development. There he helped develop a funding initiative on children's mathematical cognition. Before his stint at NICHD, Berch was a psychology professor at the University of Cincinnati.

Marian Fischman, PhD, has won the Div. 28 (Psychopharma-cology and Substance Abuse) Outstanding Basic Psychophar-macological Research on Affective Disorders Award for her investigations into the treatment of cocaine dependence. The award, sponsored by Solvay Pharmaceuticals, honors senior researchers for their contributions to the psychopharmacology of affective disorders.

Fischman, whose research focuses on the antecedents and consequences of substance abuse, is a professor of behavioral biology in the department of psychiatry at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. She was honored for her work in developing and implementing a laboratory model with which she and her colleagues study changes in the reinforcing, subjective and physiological effects of cocaine in nontreatment-seeking cocaine users to evaluate the effects of medications potentially useful in treating cocaine abuse and dependence. The National Institute on Drug Abuse funds her research.

With the honor, Fischman receives a $2,500 prize and invitations to address APA's 1999 Annual Convention in Boston and the annual Behavioral Pharmacology Society meeting. She will also contribute a review paper to Psychopharmacology as part of her award.

Retired gerontologist Armin Grams, PhD, has received the Clark Tibbitts Award from the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education (AGHE). The award honors Grams's work in advancing the field of gerontology through education and state and national advocacy.

Grams organized the first multidisciplinary committee on aging at the University of Vermont, which became the school's Center for the Study of Aging. After retiring as professor emeritus of human development in 1990, he taught gerontology classes through the university's Division of Continuing Education.

On the national level, Grams has served as AGHE president and was one of the association's three delegates to the White House Conference on Aging in 1995. He also served as a member of the Governor's Advisory Council to the state's Department of Aging and Disabilities.

This summer New York psychologist Anie Kalayjian, PhD, will travel to Armenia and Pakistan as a volunteer trainer of psychiatrists, general practitioners and psychologists in post-trauma therapeutic interventions.

These will be return trips to both countries for Kalayjian, an adjunct professor of psychology at Fordham University. She made her first trip to Armenia in 1988 to assist practitioners treating trauma cases following an earthquake, and traveled to Pakistan in December to conduct a three-day workshop on trauma intervention and improving resiliency in children. Kalayjian made the Pakistan trip despite warnings from the U.S. government that Americans were at risk stemming from the burning of the U.S. embassy several years ago. Her trip was organized by the International Medical and Educational Trust, in collaboration with the International Center for Psychosocial Trauma, University of Missouri-Columbia. More than 150 clinicians from all over Pakistan attended her training workshop in Karachi.

"The practitioners that came to the workshop were extremely open, thirsty for knowledge and excited to get tools that could address the needs of their people," says Kalayjian, adding that the country's main problems are severe poverty, violence and political unrest.

Kalayjian is a United Nations Representative for the World Federation of Mental Health and the president of the New York chapter of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.

Yale department of psychology chair Alan Kazdin, PhD, has been named 1999 Distinguished Scientist by Div. 12 (Clinical) Section III (Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology). Kazdin was chosen because he strives to increase the clinical relevance of psychological research and to develop evaluation methods for clinical use through his work, according to the society.

"He is one of the pre-eminent researchers in the field of clinical psychology," says Jacqueline B. Persons, PhD, president of the society. "His work embodies the ideals of our society, which views clinical psychology as an experimental science and strives to bring clinical psychology and the methods and findings of science closer together."

Kazdin is exploring ways that child- and family-based interventions can help children who have engaged in antisocial behavior such as aggression, theft or truancy. By looking at the cognitive and experiential features of childhood depression, Kazdin has developed measurement strategies for children to chart the course of depression in early development. As part of his honor, Kazdin will present an award address at APA's 1999 Annual Convention in Boston titled "Current (lack of) status of theory in child and adolescent psychotherapy research."

Kazdin has taught at Yale for 10 years.

Two researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center are part of a research program that has received a $10.6 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study schizophrenia. John Sweeney, PhD, and Gretchen Haas, PhD, will use their portions of the money to further their research at the Pittsburgh Center for the Neuroscience of Mental Disorders (CNMD). The grant will be divided between eight schizophrenia research projects at the center.

Sweeney, who has investigated schizophrenia for more than 20 years, is using brain imaging to compare schizophrenia patients before and after drug treatment to uncover clues about the effects that medication and the course of the disease have on cognitive functioning. An associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Sweeney is also investigating the postmortem tissue of schizophrenics to test his hypothesis that the frontal eye fields of people with the disease are abnormal.

Haas's work is devoted to characterizing the early stages of schizophrenia. She is exploring why schizophrenia--which has early neurodevelopmental antecedents--does not have significant clinical consequences until much later in the course of development, usually adolescence.

To answer this question, Haas is looking retrospectively at developmental characteristics of a large sample of first episode schizophrenics to uncover clues about the onset of the illness. Haas is an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Former chair of the APA Ethics Committee Jeffrey Younggren, PhD, was promoted to the rank of Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves on April 5. Only three of 272 people who were up for the same promotion within the medical service corps--which includes psychologists, social workers, optometrists, pharmacists and other health-care professionals--were elevated in rank this year.

Younggren had planned to retire from the Army Reserves this year, but the move up will enable him to remain in his post as the Clinical Psychology Consultant to the Army Surgeon General for the U.S. Army Reserves for two more years.

His achievements in the Army Reserves include developing an APA Ethics Committee statement that recognized the confidentiality dilemma military psychologists face when they are responsible to both their patients and their commanding officers. The statement offered guidelines for military psychologists to handle this dilemma. "Younggren changed the way military psychologists perform their job," says Col. (Retired) Daniel Grill, PhD, Younggren's former counterpart in the active duty side of the U.S. Army.

Younggren is a private practitioner in Rolling Hills Estates, Calif., and has served in the U.S. Army for more than 30 years--two years in active duty and 28 years in the Army Reserves.

He manages and communicates with the 100 Army Reserve psychologists in the United States and keeps these psychologists informed about training and funding opportunities and military policy changes.

--J. Chamberlin

Thirteen get Fulbright scholarships to conduct psychological research, lecture

The Council for International Exchange of
Scholars--the group that administers the Fulbright Scholar Program--selected 13 scholars to represent the field of psychology. The 13 will either conduct psychological research or speak on psychology issues. They are:

Syed Sohail Abbas, PhD, professor of psychiatry at Quaid-i-Azam Postgraduate Medical College in Islamabad, Pakistan. He is studying at the Allegheny University of the Health Sciences, Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety in Philadelphia, from September 1998 to May 1999. His research examines why behavioral treatments for obsessive compulsive disorders have poor outcomes.

Sigrun Adalbjarnardottir, PhD, a professor in the social sciences department at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. She will conduct research on the risk-taking behavior of adolescents at Harvard University, Graduate School of Education from June to November.

Yair Bar-Haim, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of psychology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem at Mount Scopus, Israel. He is conducting research in the department of human development at the University of Maryland, College Park, Institute for Child Study, from September 1998 to September 1999. His research focuses on children's biological, social and emotional development, and psychopathology.

Taly Dvir, PhD, an instructor in the department of management at Tel Aviv University in Israel. She is conducting a field experiment at the University of California at Berkeley from August 1998 to August 1999. She earned a PhD in management/
organizational behavior/leadership. Her study examines the affect transformational leadership training has on a follower's development and performance.

Ran Hassin, PhD, a teaching assistant in the department of psychology at Tel Aviv University. He is conducting research at New York University from September 1998 to August 1999. His research examines how people use facial features to make judgments and decisions about another person.

Elena Ivanova, PhD, head of the department of psychology at Kharkiv State University, Ukraine. Ivanova spent September 1998 to February 1999 at Washington University in St. Louis. During her stay in the United States, she and her collaborator, James Wertsch, PhD, examined whether Russians and Ukrainians have developed a new post-Soviet national identity.

Vivian Khamis, PhD, chair and associate professor in the department of social sciences at Bethlehem University in the West Bank of Israel. She is studying education programs on conflict resolution at Harvard University from September 1998 to June 1999.

Lubomir Kostron, PhD, associate professor in the department of psychology at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. He lectured on advanced social judgment theory and dynamical systems modeling at the State University of New York at Albany from August 1998 to January 1999.

Iris Nelissen, a researcher in the department of experimental abnormal psychology at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. She will research emotional reasoning and confirmation bias in post-traumatic stress disorder at Harvard Uni-versity from July to December. She is working on her PhD.

Valery Oryol, Candidate of Science, associate professor of psychology at Yaroslavl State University in Demidov, Russia. He studied burnout in professionals at the University of California at Berkeley from January to April.

Sylvia Rojas de Drummond, PhD, is a professor of psychology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She is studying social interaction, the construction of knowledge, and how children use cultural tools (i.e., books, computers or mathematical symbols) to achieve their goals in first through sixth grades at the University of California-San Diego, Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, from September 1998 to June 1999.

Jeanne Marie Rodrigues Stacciarini, a professor on the faculty of nursing at the Federal University of Goias in Brazil. She studied the effects of occupational stress on nurses from February to December 1998 at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She received her MA in psychiatric nursing and is working on her PhD in social psychology.

Kari-Brith Thune-Larsen, PhD, is an assistant professor in the department of family unit at the University of Oslo in Norway. While at the University of San Diego, January to July 1998, she studied intensive treatment models and training programs for mental health professionals helping families cope with a family member with anorexia nervosa.

--M. Waters



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