Robyn F Cruz

Lesley University · Department of Expressive Therapies

Background Research methods pedagogy (RMP) is critical to the development of future professionals’ research use as they learn to provide high-quality, evidence-based music therapy experiences. Music therapy practice relies on evidence (Abrams, 2010; Conklyn & Bethoux, 2013; de l′Etoile & LaGasse, 2013; Kern, 2010); it is, therefore, important that...

Objective This study assessed the effectiveness of group art therapy in improving social and emotional issues for adolescent boys of color living in poverty. Methods The sample consisted of 162 male ninth graders in the South Bronx; 70% identified as Latinx and 24% as African American. For 6 months, one pre-existing class from each of three academ...

This study examined dance/movement therapists’ attitudes and actions regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex (LGBTQI), and gender nonconforming communities (GNC). Building on similar studies conducted by music therapists and drama therapists, 42 survey questions were used to understand dance/movement therapists’ knowledge, pr...

One of a collection of six scholarly essays solicited by this journal to celebrate the first half-century of the American Dance Therapy Association, this paper describes the centrality of research to the profession since its inception. Using the works of Marian Chace, early conference proceedings, and some brief history about the development of psy...

For the dance/movement therapy clinician, reading research to keep up with current knowledge and trends is an important professional development activity that can sometimes seem daunting. Reading research can require a shift of focus, and include technical concepts and language that are different from those of clinical practice. However, profession...

The Research and Practice Committee of the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA) has sponsored the research poster session at each annual conference for the past 21 years. The studies represented in the current abstracts from the 2016 Research and Thesis Poster Session of the 51st Annual ADTA conference feature a wide range of scholarly works a...

Reading research is an important professional development activity that can seem like a lot of extra work! But professional reading can be enjoyable and rewarding when one feels confident interpreting and applying research findings to clinical practice. Even though qualitative research can be as complex and difficult to understand as quantitative,...

Objectives: There is ongoing concern that psychiatric medication management appointments add little value to care. The present study attempted to address this concern by capturing depressed patients' views and opinions about the value of psychiatric medication management appointments. Methods: Seventy-eight semi-structured interviews were perfor...

Many arguments have been made in the literature for why research is considered important for health practitioners. One of the most important has to do with continuing growth of practitioners and guarding against falling into practices that are based only on personal opinion. While most body psychotherapists would endorse the idea that research can...

Feeling comfortable reading and digesting quantitative research reports is difficult for many people. That is because it requires the use of concepts and information that we may not employ in everyday clinical practice settings. Refreshing that content and its associated skills from time to time can help to make it more available, and help you crit...

In this meta-analysis, we evaluated the effectiveness of dance movement therapy (DMT) and the therapeutic use of dance for the treatment of health-related psychological problems. Research in the field of DMT is growing, and 17 years have passed since the last and only general meta-analysis on DMT (Ritter & Low, 1996) was conducted. This study exami...

Objective: The authors explored the relationship between critical elements of medication management appointments (appointment length, patient-centered talk, and positive nonverbal affect among providers) and patient appointment adherence. Methods: The authors used an exploratory, cross-sectional design employing quantitative analysis of 83 uniqu...

Whether for diagnostic purposes or intervention, dance/movement therapists use movement observations to provide important data for the practice of dance/movement therapy (DMT). Regardless of the particular approach within DMT, observing clients' movements and changes in movement create the element that makes DMT unique among the psychotherapies. Th...

This study characterized psychiatrist and patient communication behaviors and affective voice tones during pharmacotherapy appointments with depressed patients at four community-based mental health clinics where psychiatrists provided medication management and other mental health professionals provided therapy ("split treatment"). Audiorecordings o...

Dance/movement therapy practice uses observation and assessment of movement as a key clinical component that guides intervention. Several movement observation systems are used by dance/movement therapists, yet few have documented information on validity and reliability for their use. The purpose of this study was to examine the validity of the Move...

Recent neuropsychological, psycholinguistic, and evolutionary theories on language and gesture associate communicative gesture production exclusively with left hemisphere language production. An argument for this approach is the finding that right-handers with left hemisphere language dominance prefer the right hand for communicative gestures. Howe...

This preliminary study explored the effect of camera resolution and bandwidth on facial affect recognition, an important process and clinical variable in mental health service delivery. Sixty medical students and mental health-care professionals were recruited and randomized to four different combinations of commonly used teleconferencing camera re...

Several studies of patients with unilateral brain damage and a patient with spontaneous callosal disconnection [Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 61 (1996) 176; Neuropsychologia 37 (1999) 559; Neuropsychologia 39 (2001) 1432] suggest that the imitation of positions of the hand relative to the head is a strongly lateralised left hem...

Neuropsychological changes in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) were studied longitudinally. Sixty-nine idiopathic PD patients, with Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores falling within normal range, and 37 elderly control participants were given neuropsychological tests twice approximately two years apart. The PD group performed poor...

Neuropsychological changes in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) were studied longitudinally. Sixty-nine idiopathic PD patients, with Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores falling within normal range, and 37 elderly control participants were given neuropsychological tests twice approximately two years apart. The PD group performed poor...

Investigations of left hand praxis in imitation and object use in patients with callosal disconnection have yielded divergent results, inducing a debate between two theoretical positions. Whereas Liepmann suggested that the left hemisphere is motor dominant, others maintain that both hemispheres have equal motor competences and propose that left ha...

Whether for clinical evaluation or research purposes, the reliable assessment of movement behavior is central to the practice of dance/movement therapy. While few researchers have examined the rater training process for movement observation tools, this pilot study is an investigation of the agreement of novice raters on the Kestenberg Movement Prof...

In May of 2000, the 1,178 professional and nonprofessional members of the American Dance Therapy Association were surveyed about their attitudes and needs regarding research. After gathering demographic information and questions about workload, members were queried in the areas of Research Experience, Computer Experience, Preparation for Research,...

Case management (CM) team models are a well-established mode for delivery of mental health services to individuals with serious and persistent mental illnesses. Although numerous aspects of CM models have been investigated, a neglected component is compliance to outpatient appointments. This pilot, quality assurance study examined the relationship...

Dance/movement therapy developed as a formal psychotherapy practice in the 1940s and has spread internationally. Dance/movement therapists address a great range of difficulties experienced by individuals of all ages in their work. This article offers an overview of the history, development, and current state of the profession of dance/movement ther...

Researchers report that nondemented patients with Parkinson disease (PD) are impaired on recall tests, but perform normally on recognition tests. Patients with PD and dementia are impaired on both tests. PD patients with and without dementia also are reported to benefit less from semantic cues presented at recall. These studies used explicit learni...

The communication abilities of 49 individuals in the late stage of Alzheimer disease were examined in relation to other markers of late-stage Alzheimer disease (e.g., incontinence and ambulatory ability). Two existing tools used to stage severity of dementia, the Global Deterioration Scale and the Functional Assessment Stages, have represented comm...

The Meaning of Movement: Developmental and Clinical Perspectives of the Kestenberg Movement Profile. Janet Kestenberg Amighi, Susan Loman, Penny Lewis and K. Mark Sossin with invited contributors. Gordon and Breach Publishers. 1999. 369 pages, hardcover $58.00. The Art and Science of Evaluation in the Arts Therapies: How Do You Know What's Working?...

Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) can experience changes in mental status and intellectual functioning. Those with dementia are said to exhibit a pattern of intellectual change similar to that experienced by individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD), including deterioration of lexical-semantic knowledge. A popular theory about the dissoluti...

Sixty individuals with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 48 normal elders were given a task in which they had to judge the relatedness of concepts as a means of evaluating semantic memory. Very mild AD patients performed similarly to normal elders. Mild AD patients were significantly inferior in performance to normals but the pattern of their p...

Results of recent investigations suggest that Alzheimer disease (AD) has a more deleterious effect on language in women than in men. This intriguing finding motivated an analysis of the language performance of probable AD patients, equally divided as to gender, on a variety of language comprehension and production tests. Cross-sectional data were a...

Although perseveration is a recognized sign of disturbed brain function, it also occurs in normal individuals. Determination of the frequency of perseveration in normal subjects would enable clinicians to use perseveration as a marker of possible pathology. The purpose of this study was to document the extent of perseveration in normal young and ol...

Perseveration by type (recurrent, continuous, or stuck-in-set) was examined for 30 stroke patients, 20 of whom exhibited fluent aphasia, and 10 with non-fluent aphasia. Comparisons were made between the two aphasic subject groups on two verbal and two non-verbal tasks. Twenty-eight of the patients (93%) produced at least one instance of perseverati...

Research on the effect of Parkinson's disease (PD) on verbal fluency has produced conflicting results. In this study, 88 PD patients with no dementia, 11 PD patients with questionable mental status, 15 PD patients with dementia, and 46 elders free from mental disorder were administered a variety of semantic, letter, and name fluency tasks. The resu...

The CSBS is intended to generate profiles of strengths and weaknesses for a child across communicative, social-affective, and symbolic domains of development for use in diagnostic assessment and intervention planning. Because of the well documented variability in normal development of language, the sensitivity to different rates of growth in childr...

To study the effect of idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD) on language competence and performance, study participants were given an extensive battery of 15 linguistic communication tasks to assess both linguistic knowledge and the ability to use language. No evidence was obtained of impaired linguistic competence or performance in the non-demented...

To study the effects of Parkinson disease (PD) on cognitive function by determining the frequency and amount of change in Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) performance. During a 4-year period, 77 patients with idiopathic PD and 43 normal elders were administered a neuropsychological test battery twice at 2 years apart. A 4-point score difference...

Performance on the Arizona Battery for Communication Disorders of Dementia was compared to performance on other neuropsychological tests routinely given to Alzheimer's dementia patients. Thirty-seven Alzheimer's disease patients and 37 normal elders were given the Mini-Mental state Examination, the Block Design subtest of the Wechler Adult Intellig...