Video Home Training (the Orion Project): A Short-Term Preventive and Treatment Intervention for Families with Young Children

Developed in Holland and based on short-term, home-centered, filmed video feedback of family interactions, an experimental Orion project was conducted in Israel to determine whether it could be provided through local welfare departments as a routine treatment alternative. This article summarizes an evaluation of 52 families (with problems in parent-child interaction) and 64 control families that participated in the Orion Video Home-Training Project. Only the Orion families showed significant gains in all the eight areas of positive parent-child communication that are the focus of the program, which is based on reinforcing potential family strengths. These gains were generally sustained 6 months after program completion. There were several background variables, such as family status, income, health, education, and employment, that influenced the extent of family gains.     

Getting to the Bottom to Understand the Top

Culture is a vague and elusive concept that most individuals seldom explain or consciously think about and evaluate. It is imperative, however, that counselors engaged in multicultural counseling have an understanding of what is meant by culture. A myriad of definitions exist that focus on behaviors and artifacts to shared belief systems and worldviews. It is suggested that the philosophical assumptions underlying a worldview, the deep structure of culture, provide a framework for better understanding cultural differences. Viewing culture from this holistic perspective facilitates culturally relevant meanings to the explanation of behaviors, thus placing one at a greater advantage for understanding behavioral and attitudinal differences. Cultura es un concepto vago y evasivo que la mayoría de los individuos no suelen explicar, ni pensar conscientemente sobre él, ni tampoco lo evaluan. Sin embargo, es necesario que los consejeros que trabajan en la consejería multicultural entiendan lo que se quiere decir con cultura. Existe una miriada de definiciones que se centran en el comportamiento y los utensilios hasta formar un sistema verosimil y una visión universal. Se surgiere que las asunciones filisóficas que son la base de una visión universal, la estructura profunda de cultura, proporcionan un cuadro que permite entender mejor las diferencias culturales. El ver la cultura desde esta perspectiva holísitica facilita entiendimientos culturalmente pertinentes para la explicación de comportamientos y de este modo aumenta las ventajas para entender diferencias de conducta y diferentes actitudes.     

Self-esteem as a better predictor of restrained eaters' food intake than attributional style and disinhibition tendency

In the present study, a weight increase or decrease was experimentally manipulated in restrained and unrestrained eating subjects. It was hypothesized that restrained eating subjects in the high-weight condition will attribute the cause of this important negative event to internal, stable, and global factors. Such a depressogenic attributional style was expected to be reflected in a more depressed mood which, in its turn, should trigger disinhibitive eating during a bogus taste test. Moreover, it was hypothesized that high scores on Zuckerman's disinhibition subscale and low self-esteem were related to larger food intake. Main findings were that a manipulated weight increase indeed lowered the mood of restrained eaters, whereas it had no effect on the mood of unrestrained eaters. However, the weight increase and the mood decrease of restrained subjects in the high-weight condition were not reflected in a more depressive attributional style and increased food intake. Level of self-esteem appeared to be the best and only predictor of restrained eaters' food intake with lower-self-esteem subjects eating less during the taste test. Moreover, although the restrained subjects scored significantly higher on a general measure of disinhibition than the unrestrained ones, disinhibition was not a very strong predictor of food intake. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Can Changes in Differential Dropout Rates Reduce Adverse Impact? A Computer Simulation Study of a Multi‐wave Selection System

A simulation was used to explore the effects of variations in the rate at which applicants drop out of selection processes on racial differences in selection outcomes. Archival data was used to simulate a realistic range of selection scenarios in which test score differences between groups and selection ratios varied. The basis for dropping out was manipulated in two separate studies. Study 1 simulated dropout decisions that occurred at random within racial subgroups; in this study, dropout rates of minority versus White candidates were varied. Study 2 examined dropout decisions that occurred as a function of test scores. Results from both studies showed that mean test score differences between White and minority applicants have the largest influence on adverse impact. Interventions designed to reduce the tendency of minority applicants to withdraw from selection are likely to have, at best, small effects on the adverse impact of selection tests.     

Joy, 20 Years Later: A Conversation With Will Schutz

Will C. Schutz, an encounter groups pioneer, was interviewed about his personal life, the turning points of his life that led to his involvement in group work, his experiences before, at, and after Esalen, and his views on the field of counseling.     

Gender differences,similarities, and interdependencies: Some problems with the different cultures perspective

Nature begins with the cause and ends with the experience; we must follow the opposite course, that is, beginning… with experience, and from this investigate the reason.—Leonardo da Vinci     

The Nature and Correlates of Conversational Sensitivity

People differ in their sensitivity to what happens during conversations: Some individuals enjoy listening to social exchanges, pick up hidden meanings in conversations, can generate optimal ways of saying things in interactions, and are generally “savvy” about the different sorts of power and affinity relationships exhibited in conversations. In this article we explore the nature and correlates of conversational sensitivity. People high in sensitivity make more high-level inferences when listening to social exchanges, unitize conversation in smaller chunks, emphasize conversation characteristics in their memories of interactions, and make more self-referents about conversations than less sensitive individuals. In addition, conversational sensitivity is positively related to self-monitoring, private self-consciousness, perceptiveness, self-esteem, assertiveness, empathy, and social skills. It is inversely related to communication apprehension, receiver apprehension, and social anxiety. In a final study, conversational sensitivity is construed not as an individual difference but as situational response: In some settings under some conditions, people become more sensitive to what happens in conversation.