Date of Award

1-1-2023

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology

Content Description

1 online resource (vi, 84 pages) : illustrations (some color)

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Myrna Friedlander

Committee Members

Myrna Friedlander, Mariola Moeyaert, Jamie Forsyth

Keywords

ACT, FACT, Multiple Baseline, Single Case, Public defenders

Subject Categories

Counseling Psychology

Abstract

Every day in the U.S., criminal courts render decisions that affect the people involved for the rest of their lives. Crucial to the functioning of these courts is the mental health of their public defender trial attorneys (Levin et al., 2012), who speak for the innocence and the rights of the accused. Since public defender work is highly demanding, both professionally and emotionally, their psychological distress is often high (Levin et al., 2012).It was reasoned that a brief training that teaches flexible responding skills could increase the psychological flexibility and decrease the general distress experienced by public defender attorneys. In this multiple baseline, A/B single-case study, a one-session FACT intervention (Strosahl et al., 2012) based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT; Hayes et al., 2006) was adapted for this population and offered individually to 11 public defender trial attorneys. For 3 weeks before and after the 2-hour online FACT training, participants gave daily responses to the 12-item General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12, Goldberg et al., 1997) and completed the Multidimensional Psychological Flexibility Inventory (MPFI; Rolffs et al., 2016) 21 days before, on the day of, and 21 days after the training. The effectiveness of the intervention on reducing general distress was evaluated using both visual analysis and statistical analysis (i.e., regression-based effect size, non-overlap of all pairs statistic, and standardized mean difference). Psychological flexibility was analyzed at the group level using the nonparametric Wilcoxon Signed Rank test. Across all analyses, 10 participants provided sufficient data to assess pre-/post- changes in levels of general distress and psychological flexibility. Across all analyses, 4 participants reported reductions in their daily general distress, while 6 participants reported no significant change. Seven participants reported significant increases in psychological flexibility, 3 of whom reported flexibility increases above the Minimally Detectible Change cutoff for the MPFI (Rolffs et al., 2016). The importance of this study is that it demonstrates the efficacy of FACT as an intervention for increasing the psychological flexibility of 7 of the public defender trial attorney participants. It also demonstrates significantly decreased general distress among 4 participants. With replication and addition of repeated flexibility measurements, these results might generalize to the overall population of public defender lawyers, or test the mediation effect of flexibility on distress. The study was limited by missing data and lack of a daily measure of flexibility. Follow-up interviews would also have been informative to help understand participant’s lived experience and possible explanations of their daily distress patterns and the relationship to changes in their psychological flexibility.

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