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Undergraduate Psychology and Self Help

In the presidential address to Division Two in 1959 1 cited a then current controversy regarding the nature of undergraduate instruction in psychology (McKinney, 1960). The Carnegie Study Group on Improving Undergraduate Instruction saw the training for rigorous habit of thought, and attitudes of caution and responsibility as the goals. They agreed these were best achieved by emphasis on knowledge of course content. They cautioned against "direct frontal efforts to modify students' habits and attitudes," and that "personal use of psychological material remains the responsibility of the student rather than of the instructor who should not be expected to act as therapist, consultant in practical affairs, or reformer of character." Other psychologists publishing at that time proposed that psychology should make fairly immediate and direct contributions to student adjustment problems. Now 20 years have elapsed and in the meantime we have experienced an unpopular war, an unprecedented, politically active student generation, and other marked cultural changes in the college milieu. A notable increase in psychological services on the campus has taken place as well as alterations in undergraduate psychology texts in the direction of the personal application of psychology. There has also been an unprecedented increase in personal improvement information available to the public, including many do-it-yourself self-help paperback books, some written by well-known psychologists. There are similar changes in the classroom (Worthington, 1979). As an example of some of the specific changes in undergraduate psychology courses and the attitudes about these changes, consider two courses in our department. Recently, as we shortened the closed circuit TV portions of our introductory course, we added among other "live" material, five lectures on self help material. One of these lectures is entitled "You and psychology." It demonstrates how the findings presented in the text and lectures can be applied to the students' daily lives. The sections on learning, personality and social relations provided many examples. This portion of the course included also the following: A lecture on the self-concept in which was discussed topics such as self-image and self-esteem; a brief video tape interview with a psychology major who was an experienced transcendental meditator, demonstrations of Jacobson's progressive relaxation, discussions of Wolpe's systematic desensitization and Benson's "relaxation response." The students who chose to remain in the class during these demonstrations participated in the exercises. The Personal Adjustment course consisted of five sections of approximately 50students each. They were taught by selected advanced graduate students. The texts used were a standard adjustment text plus a text on self-modification. The instructors strongly encouraged these projects and other changes in personal behavior. Students in both classes served as subjects in an assessment of the value of self-help material. A two page questionnaire with several parts was distributed. One part requested a rating on the extent they were helped by the activities in the course. A five point rating scale was used. The highest frequency of responses in the General course was "somewhat helpful" with 74% endorsing it, in the Adjustment course 46.6% checked this response and 44.1% of them checked "very helpful". Another section in the questionnaire listed 20 areas or sources of help included in the course. Five of the topics yielding the highest frequencies of checks by the Adjustment (A) class were also highest in the General (G) class. They were "importance of earlier experience and development" (G--42%; A-45%); "use of reward and reinforcement" (G-41%; A-20%); "coping with frustration, conflict and defenses", (G-34%; A-25%); "perception of others and social influences" (G-50%; A-28%); "systematic self observation" ( G 4 0 % ; A-63%). The part of the questionnaire that asked students to specifically describe the help they received was rated as to specificity (as contrasted to general statements) by two teaching assistants on a five point scale. The ratings showed only moderate specificity (rating 3, G = 45.2%; A = 38.3%; rating 4, G = 24.5%; A = 46.7%). (Five was the highest rating of specificity.) The students were also required to rate the value of this help. This was low (G = rating 1,38.3%; rating 2, 39.7%; A = rating 1, 35.0%; rating 2, 45.2%; 5 was the highest value). Finally, students had an opportunity to endorse the statement "I don't think much personal value can result from classes, especially lectures, demonstrations and illustrations." They could have checked these alternatives to classes: counseling services, or growth, ortraining sessions. The students in both classes as a majority rejected the first statement that discredited personal help from classes (G-56%, A-76.8%) and unlike their teachers' predictions, they only sparsely recommended any of the alternatives. The results of this questionnaire indicate a tendency of students to speak positively about the insights and suggestions applicable to thei rown life that they received from these undergraduate psychology classes. This is not a new discovery. Students for years have made such verbal comments to their instructors and others, but today we offer them better developed techniques. Also, presently more students expect some form of assistance with personal problems. We see from these data that the traditional General course, with afew lectures on application to oneself, will produce comments that compare fairly well with the Adjustment course which contains optional self-modification projects. Both groups of students do rather well in stating the area of the course from which the positive suggestions came. They are only moderately successful indescribing in theirown wordsspecifically the help they received. They are quite moderate in their rating of the amount of help they obtained from these