Fifty years ago, the Rosenhan experiment was one of the most impactful psychological studies across decades. One of the main claims of the experiment was that clinicians could be negatively biased in their first clinical impressions, which would negatively impact further clinical decisions. We conducted two experiments (N = 56 and 64) in which psychotherapists were asked to give their first clinical impressions in two consecutive cases after a brief presentation of the case (case description and video excerpt) and a short recall task of the information provided. The attentional focus in the recall task served as an independent variable. Therapists had to adopt either a symptom-focused or a strength-focused attentional focus to recall the cases, that is, therapists rated their first case in either the symptom-focused or the strength-focused condition and the second case in the opposite condition. In both studies, therapists in the symptom-focused conditions rated patients as slightly more distressed, less resilient, and less psychosocially integrated in comparison to the strength-focused conditions. However, even statistically significant, these effects were rather small to clinically negligible. Our preliminary results suggest that the first clinical impressions of contemporary psychotherapists are vulnerable in both experiments to be slightly, but not as dramatically, distorted as the Rosenhan experiment would suggest at the time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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心理治疗师的第一临床印象是否从根本上存在偏见？一种实验性方法。


50 年前，Rosenhan 实验是几十年来最具影响力的心理学研究之一。该实验的主要主张之一是临床医生在他们的第一临床印象中可能会有负面偏见，这将对进一步的临床决策产生负面影响。我们进行了两个实验 （N = 56 和 64），其中要求心理治疗师在简要介绍病例（病例描述和视频摘录）和对所提供信息的简短回忆任务后，在两个连续的病例中给出他们的初步临床印象。召回任务中的注意力焦点充当自变量。治疗师必须采用以症状为中心或以力量为中心的注意力来回忆案例，也就是说，治疗师在以症状为中心或以力量为中心的条件下对他们的第一个案例进行评分，而第二个案例在相反的条件下进行评分。在这两项研究中，与以力量为中心的疾病相比，以症状为中心的疾病中的治疗师将患者评为略微痛苦、弹性较差和社会心理整合程度较低。然而，即使具有统计学意义，这些影响也相当小到临床上可以忽略不计。我们的初步结果表明，当代心理治疗师的第一临床印象在这两个实验中都很容易像当时的 Rosenhan 实验所暗示的那样轻微扭曲，但不会那么剧烈地扭曲。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 （c） 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。