READ INSTRUCTION:
Watch the movie “Cake”. In this movie, Claire is a patient with chronic pain from injuries suffered in a motor vehicle accident (MVA). She is also suffering from symptoms of trauma related to the MVA. The movie doesn’t include detail about the specifics of her injury although she appears to have scars on her body and demonstrates many pain behaviors often seen in patients with chronic pain. There is also a Hollywoodized aspect of the movie that includes preoccupations, manipulations,and hallucinations not typical for chronic pain patients. However, the movie is a rich source of information about Claire’s basic psychological state, the movie includes the social context and issues related to her relationships with others and the movie helps create a biopsychosocial illustration of chronic pain.
For your homework assignment, create a PowerPoint presentation relating Claire’s experience to illustrate the following topics.
1. Use psychological approaches, theories or concepts fromlecture and reading assignments from the following weeks of the course:
Week 1: Identify 5-8 Social Factors that contribute to Claire’s pain experience. Identify whether these factors provide benefit or add to the burden of her chronic pain.
Week 2: Identify one Cognitive Error that you see and identify how this affects her.
Week 3: Identify 2 emotions she is likely experiencing or somatizing and discuss interoception awareness and accuracy.
Week 4: Give an example of classical conditioning and operant conditioning in Claire’s experience. Example could be related to the MVA directly, behaviors based on loss, or medication behaviors.
Week 5: Focus on the context dependent presentation of her pain behaviors and describe the specific behaviors by context (2-3 different contexts e.g. home, car, restaurant).
Week 9: Identify symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder that you see in Claire. Illustrate each symptom that you have identified with a very short, few word descriptions from the movie.
Week 11: Identify 2-3 sleep issues you observe. These might be related to sleep hygiene or PTSD.
Week 12: Identify one example of countertransference that you have with Claire (what this character makes you feel like doing, saying or feeling). Describe what you see or hear from Claire that triggered this feeling or thought. Identify what this type of countertransference would make you say or do if you were unaware of the countertransference vs. if you were aware.
Week 15: Identify the two most important topics that you would want a psychologist to address with the patient.Why?
2. Only do one slide per topic of the week.3. Do not go below a 20 point font.4. Use a light background and black colored letters, spellcheck and check grammar.5. Include an introductory slide about your view orconceptualization of Claire to illustrate how you see this patient overall. The slides to follow should support this perspective. Put your name on this slide.6. Only 10 slides (including the introductory slide) total!7. Please do not do a voice over. Content in the voice over will not be counted in the grade.8. You don’t have to use citations or include definitions.
