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Biomedical subjects

J G Barber

Publications and source records attributed to J G Barber.

29 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1990

Computer-assisted drug prevention.

Although the psychological treatment of addiction is premised on the notion that addictive behavior is learned behavior, addiction workers have been slow to exploit the capacity of the computer to promote new learning. The best computer-assisted learning programs are fully adaptive; their design anticipates the responses a user can make, classifies them, and provides feedback for each. This paper reports on two recent attempts to achieve this level of sophistication in computer-assisted drug prevention. One program seeks to prevent heroin relapse among currently abstinent prisoners, and the other promotes controlled drinking in alcohol abusers. Given the fact that most drug users can be expected to opt for self-help materials over the offer of formal therapy, and that most (licit) drug users who solve their addiction problems do so without recourse to professional help anyway, the use of computer-assisted drug prevention programs like these provides an important new direction in substance abuse treatment.

Alcoholism↗
PubMed1990

Can microcomputers help the problem drinker?

The evidence in favour of brief interventions and self-help materials for problem drinkers raises the possibility that microcomputer programmes can provide an effective and inexpensive treatment option in the addictions field. This paper reports on a controlled drinking computer programme currently in operation with drink driving offenders.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1989

Reducing alcohol consumption through television advertising.

Regular drinkers from the general public whose drinking behavior was known to be unaffected by a previous antidrug advertising campaign were involved in a field experiment to assess the impact of a television commercial based on controlled-drinking principles. In a 2 x 2 factorial arrangement of exposure to the advertising campaign (advertisement, no advertisement) and exposure to a letter announcing the campaign (letter, no letter), 96 subjects from two cities in tropical North Queensland provided baseline and posttreatment details of alcohol consumption and alcohol-related attitudes. Baseline measures were taken approximately 12 months prior to the start of the campaign, and posttesting occurred 3 weeks after the campaign. Results were consistent with the proposition that the advertisement reduced intake provided that subjects also received the standard letter alerting them to the start of the campaign.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

The impact of quality of family life on drug consumption.

The nuclear family, particularly its role modeling during primary socialization, is found to exert an influence as strong as or stronger than the more stock-in-trade factors typically used for explaining alcohol and drug ingestion. With regard to the general North Queensland population quality of family life, past and current parental drinking are of almost equal importance.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

Fighting drug abuse in Australia.

On the basis of a sample survey (N = 919) of North Queensland considerable evidence is provided that education is the most favored and treatment the least favored intervention strategy in fighting drug abuse. Law enforcement takes an intermediate position. However, there is even more evidence that people do not agree about the definition and meaning of these three intervention mechanisms and that people frequently make contradictory recommendations. There is but limited evidence that these recommendations vary in terms of personal and socioeconomic background.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1987

The assessment of drug attitudes among university students using the short form of the Drug Attitude Scale.

A short form of the Drug Attitude Scale (Goodstadt, Cook, Magid, and Gruson, 1978) was constructed and used to assess the structure of drug attitudes among beginning university students. Results revealed that students distinguish between socially acceptable and socially unacceptable drugs, with alcohol and tobacco being classed together with prescription medications. Moreover, unlike socially unacceptable drugs, students reported using alcohol more for its physical than for its social effects.

Adult↗
PubMed1987

Three accounts of the learned helplessness effect.

Two experiments tested predictions drawn from test anxiety theory, learned helplessness theory, and Wortman and Brehm's (1975) integration of helplessness and reactance theories. Experiment 1 demonstrated that performance deficits predicted by learned helplessness do not rely on experimenter-induced failure. It also showed such deficits to be unrelated either to negative affect following exposure to pretreatment or to causal attributions about pretreatment task performance. Experiment 2 showed that experience of uncontrollability need not result in impaired performance, because failure on an unimportant task did not produce the deficits predicted by learned helplessness theory. This result provides qualified support for the integrative model. Finally, because the subjective measures used in Experiment 2 were not consistent with performance measures, the reliability of self-reports is questioned.

Achievement↗
PubMed1986

Learned helplessness as conditioned inattention to the target stimulus.

Learned helplessness theory explains the impaired performance that follows exposure to uncontrollable outcomes by assuming learned expectation of response-outcome independence that is transferred between tasks. Recent evidence has shown that introducing a second neutral stimulus, contingent on the offset of the uncontrollable stimulus, removes the subsequent interference. This finding has been claimed to support the view that the interference is a result of conditioned inattention rather than of the expectation of response-outcome independence. These conflicting explanations were examined in a series of four experiments that varied induction procedures (passive exposure or inescapability) and stimulus quality (aversive or nonaversive). All four experiments found the predicted interference, but only one, in which passive exposure was combined with an aversive stimulus, obtained results supporting the conditioned inattention hypothesis. We conclude that learned helplessness probably involves more than a single mechanism and that the passive exposure procedure may not be appropriate for demonstrating genuine helplessness deficits.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Microcomputers and prevention of drug abuse.

In recent years, the psychological treatment of drug addiction has been dominated by an emphasis on learning theory and an interest in minimal and self-administered treatment. The computer provides the consummate medium for bringing these components together. This paper reports on two computer-assisted learning programs, one for the prevention of relapse in former heroin users and the other for the promotion of controlled drinking in early-stage problem drinkers. The need for this type of technology is supported by mounting evidence that drug and alcohol misusers prefer self-help to psychotherapy and that most addicts who manage to overcome their addiction do so on their own.

Adult↗