  When individuals arrive to receive help from mental health providers, they do
not always have well specified and well established goals. It is the mental
health providers responsibility to work collaboratively with patients to
clarify their goals in the therapy sessions as well as life in general through
clinical interviews, diagnostic assessments, and thorough observations.
However, recognizing individuals important life goals is not always
straightforward. Here we introduce a novel method that gauges a patient
important goal pursuits from their relative sensitivity to goal related words.
Past research has shown that a person active goal pursuits cause them to be
more sensitive to the presence of goal related stimuli in the environment being
able to consciously report those stimuli when others cannot see them. By
presenting words related to a variety of different life goal pursuits very
quickly for 50 msec or less, the patient would be expected to notice and be
aware of words related to their strongest motivations but not the other goal
related words. These may or may not be among the goals they have identified in
therapy sessions, and the ones not previously identified can be fertile grounds
for further discussion and exploration in subsequent therapy sessions. Results
from eight patient volunteers are described and discussed in terms of the
potential utility of this supplemental personal therapy aid.
