Long Working Hours and Well-being: What We Know,What We Do Not Know,and What We Need to Know

Despite a widespread belief in both the academic and public policy literatures that working long hours is deleterious to health and well-being, our critical review of this large and complex literature fails to support a robust direct causal effect of work hours on either physical or mental well-being outcomes. Large-scale epidemiological studies, many of which are prospective and include objective health outcome measures, support a statistically significant association between long work hours and coronary heart disease and depression, but the effect sizes are very small. Moreover, there is an absence of true longitudinal studies that assess the consistency of working long hours over time and its relationship to well-being. Our review suggests that the effects of working long hours are nuanced in that they may vary considerably for different working populations based on gender, age, working conditions, and other factors. Primary and meta-analytic studies suggest that such moderator effects are plausible, yet rigorous testing of these remains to be done. We conclude with suggestions for specific moderator effects that seem worth investigating in future research.     

Psychotherapy With African American Men: What We Know and What We Need to Know

African American men are at an increasingly high risk of experiencing psychological disturbances. Strategies for establishing effective therapeutic relationships with these clients are provided in the literature. Notably absent are empirical data pertaining to the effectiveness of psychotherapy with African American men. This article reviews the literature on psychotherapy and proposes an agenda for the next decade of research with African American male clients.     

Millennials at Work: What We Know and What We Need to Do (If Anything)

There are a lot of opinions about who Millennials are, what they think and value, and how they will behave as they grow older and gain more experience in the workforce. The relatively sparse empirical research published on Millennials is confusing at best and contradictory at worst. As noted in this article and others in this special issue, however, there are a few topics including work attitudes, long-term health outcomes, and personality factors on which we have reasonably solid data to inform us about current and likely future behavior of Millennials. We address the importance of context for understanding behavior of people in different generations, a subject often missing from the discussion of generational similarities and differences. There are implications for practitioners of what we know and for how context affects behavior. We make suggestions for how practitioners can use the data available to inform decisions they make about working with Millennials. Finally, we discuss the importance of new directions of research on generational differences to help both practitioners and the research community better understand the realities of generational similarities and differences and rely less on urban myths or stereotypes.     

Living Danger: On Not Knowing What We Know

This paper contextualizes the struggle around the American Psychological Association's ethical standards regarding psychologists' participation in abusive interrogations of detainees by examining the psychological and political meanings of living in a society in which the state assumes the right to torture. To highlight the implications of authoritarian trends in America's post-9/11 political culture, I offer an interdisciplinary psychoanalytic analysis of the extreme social situation of the Argentine Dirty War, in which torture was used by the military government not as a tactic to make detainees talk but as a strategy to silence an entire population. I explore the defense mechanism of disavowal and its use by both perpetrators and victims in ways that contributed to sustaining authoritarian rule in Argentina. I suggest that it is within the legitimate arena of psychoanalysis to consider the psychological meanings of patients' experience in the larger social order. I argue for a psychoanalytic project that does not disavow the centrality of social reality in the formation of subjectivity and for a clinical model that provides a potential space in which the subject can develop a critical psyche able to co-construct a more democratic political as well as personal life.     

Human Nature: What We Need to Know about Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century

The Western worldview that now dominates the planet embodies beliefs about human nature that are inconsistent with our evolutionarily evolved natures. Its "logic" at best ignores and at worst creates the symptoms of the modern world, which if uncorrected predict severe crises in coming centuries: population growth, environmental destruction, economic collapse, and increasing social violence. In contrast, there are numerous communities today creating alternative solutions based on different understandings of human nature and human needs: cooperation rather than competition; meaningful social identity; and respect for and trust in the autonomous behavior of all persons. There exist optimistic future models.     

Resource Cost Analysis: We Really Need to Know

Analysis of costs in delivering special services is seen within the context of increasing demands by various consituencies for cost accountability and containment. The problem of analyzing such cost is considered and approaches to cost analysis are delineated. The Resource Cost Model is suggested as a useful cost analysis method and discussed in terms of potential advantages and limitations at local school levels.     

Sexuality and Perimenopause: What Counselors Need to Know

Perimenopause, which recently has been recognized as separate from menopause, affects approximately 22 million U.S. women. It is a time when women are at greater risk for emotional, relationship, and sexual problems. The authors describe the symptoms of perimenopause, discuss the resulting psychosocial and sexual impact, and present treatment implications for counselors.     

Clinical Guidelines for Working With Stepfamilies: What Family,Couple, Individual,and Child Therapists Need to Know

This article draws on four decades of research and clinical practice to delineate guidelines for evidence‐informed, clinically sound work with stepfamilies for couple, family, individual adult, and child therapists. Few clinicians receive adequate training in working with the intense and often complex dynamics created by stepfamily structure and history. This is despite the fact that stepfamilies are a fundamentally different family form that occurs world‐wide. As a result many clinicians rely on their training in first‐time family models. This is not only often unhelpful, but all too often inadvertently destructive. The article integrates a large body of increasingly sophisticated research about stepfamilies with the author's four decades of clinical practice with stepfamily relationships. It describes the ways in which stepfamilies are different from first‐time families. It delineates the dynamics of five major challenges stepfamily structure creates: (1) Insider/outsider positions are intense and they are fixed. (2) Children struggle with losses, loyalty binds, and change. (3) Issues of parenting, stepparenting, and discipline often divide the couple. (4) Stepcouples must build a new family culture while navigating previously established family cultures. (5) Ex‐spouses (other parents outside the household) are part of the family. Some available data are shared on the impact of cultural and legal differences on these challenges. A three‐level model of clinical intervention is presented: Psychoeducational, Interpersonal, and Intrapsychic/Intergenerational Family‐of‐Origin. The article describes some “easy wrong turns” for well‐meaning therapists and lists some general clinical guidelines for working with stepfamily relationships.     

Seeing What We Know, Knowing What We See: Challenging the Limits of Visual Acuity

Ageism has resulted in overstated expectations regarding the inevitable deterioration in human capabilities, such as visual perception, with age (Rowe and Kahn in Science, 237, 143?C149, 1987; Grant in Health and Social Work, 21, 9?C15, 1996). Human visual perception, however, is of a largely constructive nature, evidenced in the complementary interactions between top-down inputs (e.g., expectations) and bottom-up stimuli (Engel et al. in National Review of Neuroscience, 2(10), 704?C716, 2001; Miller and Cohen in, Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24, 167-202, 2001). Based on this constructive nature, we hypothesized that visual perception may be better than is typically expected. In three experiments, we demonstrated the malleability of visual acuity using a conditioning procedure involving manipulations in bottom-up stimuli. Experimental groups read a book excerpt with one letter in decreased font size, while the control groups read the same book excerpt with all letters in the same font size. Experiment 1 (N?=?112) examined whether visual acuity could be enhanced for a specific letter. Experiment 2 (N?=?70) assessed whether visual acuity could be enhanced for a non-conditioned letter, while Experiment 3 (N?=?108) evaluated whether the visual conditioning effects would transfer to all non-conditioned letters. Visual acuity for experimental groups was significantly better than that in the control groups, speaking to the general malleability of our visual sense.     

Residual Effects of Slavery: What Clinicians Need to Know

Marriage and family therapists grapple with the intersection of societal influence and African American clients’ presenting problems. Questions include: what impact has the historical trauma of slavery had on African Americans and what are the clinical implications of this trauma? This paper reviews the literature on the various residual effects of slavery (RES) within the African American community. A case vignette and a broad discussion of therapeutic techniques will be used to highlight the clinical implications of RES.     

The Predictive Validity of Ideal Partner Preferences in Relationship Formation: What We Know,What We Don't Know,and Why It Matters

A great deal of research on interpersonal attraction implicitly assumes that stated ideal partner preferences guide the mate selection, and therefore relationship formation, process. Nevertheless, recent research has yielded contradictory results. Whereas some research has failed to demonstrate that ideal partner preferences influence attraction to actual potential romantic partners, other studies have provided empirical evidence for the predictive validity of ideal partner preferences following interactions with potential romantic partners. A new meta‐analysis on the predictive validity of ideal partner preferences concluded that people may not preferentially pursue potential partners that more closely match their stated preferences. This conclusion has significant implications for several empirical literatures that have relied on self‐reported ideal partner preferences to test hypotheses. We demonstrate, however, that the majority of the research on the predictive validity of ideal partner preferences, and thus research included in this meta‐analysis, focuses on interpersonal attraction or later relationship processes and not on individuals transitioning into actual new relationships. We suggest that research that directly focuses on the transition into actual relationships is needed before firm conclusions can be made regarding the predictive validity of ideal partner preferences in the formation of new relationships.     

What We Know and Where We Go from here: A Review of Lesbian,Gay, and Bisexual Youth Hookup Literature

In this paper, we acknowledge and critique the absence of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) experiences in the recent proliferation of scholarship on “hooking up” among youth (aged 16 to 24). Although previous research has documented that LGB youth hookup at high rates (up to three-quarters of LGB youth), and oftentimes more than heterosexuals, the most basic aspects of hookups (e.g., motivations, experiences, and outcomes) have not been comprehensively explored. This is pertinent because young adulthood, in particular, is a time when young people explore their sexuality. Most scholarship on hooking up has focused on White heterosexual college students, mostly due to sampling constraints and impediments, and so we are left with a critical gap in our knowledge about LGB youth—a population that is typically at higher risk for sexual, mental, and emotional health issues. We begin by reviewing the literature on hooking up among heterosexual young adults as organized by four themes: hookup definitions/frequencies, contexts, motivations, and outcomes. We do this to explicitly highlight and contrast what little is known about LGB youth hookups. We then provide a research agenda that projects how future researchers can advance this area of scholarship and begin to fill its gaps, while considering the hookup experiences of diverse LGB youth.     

Split-Brain: What We Know Now and Why This is Important for Understanding Consciousness

Neuropsychology Review - Recently, the discussion regarding the consequences of cutting the corpus callosum (“split-brain”) has regained momentum (Corballis, Corballis, Berlucchi,...