Contemporary Psychotherapy: Looking Backward, Looking Forward

This editorial summarizes the founding of the Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, and its evolution into its current form. Also, the editor provides several recommendations for authors hoping to publish their ideas regarding psychotherapy. Finally, the current editor acknowledges the numerous people who have worked to develop, improve, and strengthen the journal.     

Looking backward at the socialist utopia

Utopia and Anti‐Utopia in Modern Times, by Krishan Kumar, Basil Blackwell, 1987, x + 506 pages, hb £24.50     

Ideological Beliefs About Family Practices: Contemporary Perspectives Among North Indian Families

Ninety-two dual-wage and 103 single-wage Indian families with a preschool-age child residing in extended and nuclear households provided assessments regarding their beliefs about the division of household chores, financial responsibilities, childcare, and filial obligations. Analysis focused on possible differences in belief structures that may be attributed to the gender of the parent, family structural living arrangement, and maternal employment outside of the home. Husbands and wives did not differ in ideological beliefs on any of the components assessed, but differences did emerge as a function of family structural arrangements and whether or not the wife worked outside of the home. Data are discussed in terms of possible changes in ideological beliefs about family functions and practices and the broader socio-cultural factors operating within Indian society.     

Fetal Views: Histories and Habits of Looking at the Fetus in Germany

This article examines historical and ideological trajectories that have made looking at the fetus via ultrasound a normal part of being pregnant for many women around the world. How did looking into so unlit a bodily space as the uterus become so natural? So everyday? So habit-forming? The answers lie in the convergence over time of technological hardware with knowledge practices that moved from medical to public domains. Germany serves as a site for an interrogation of how learned ways of thinking about anatomy, the development of technologies that “look,” a privileging of the visual in medical domains, and seeing as metaphor for truth about health reinforced and normalized prenatal ultrasound use.     

A gandhian model of health: Looking at Alzheimer's disease

Mahatma Gandhi was often criticized for mixing religion, politics, economics, and health. However, it was his very insistence on the fundamental interrelationship of all aspects of life that gives his ideas such relevance for today's problems. This paper focuses on his views on health and attempts to develop a Gandhian model of health that has relevance for us today. This model is then specifically applied to the vexing problem of Alzheimer's disease, and an ongoing therapeutic trial that is based on this model is described.     

Looking at You or Looking Elsewhere: The Influence of Head Orientation on the Signal Value of Emotional Facial Expressions

The role of horizontal head tilt for the perceptions of emotional facial expressions was examined. For this, a total of 387 participants rated facial expressions of anger, fear, sadness, and happiness, as well as neutral expressions shown by two men and two women in either a direct or an averted face angle. Decoding accuracy, attributions of dominance and affiliation, emotional reactions of the perceivers, and the felt desire to approach the expresser were assessed. Head position was found to strongly influence reactions to anger and fear but less so for other emotions. Direct anger expressions were more accurately decoded, perceived as less affiliative, and elicited higher levels of anxiousness and repulsion, as well as less desire to approach than did averted anger expressions. Conversely, for fear expressions averted faces elicited more negative affect in the perceiver. These findings suggest that horizontal head position is an important cue for the assessment of threat.

Student’s Quality of Life at the University: a Qualitative Study

Since the end of the XX century the university has enlarged its traditional role focused on the production and reproduction of scientific knowledge, thus becoming a social institution, an academic reference for those whose lives are developed within its walls (Tonon 2012b, p. 4). For more than a decade, we have worked in this thematic field, and the development of three former research projects (2005–2013) has allowed us to identify a direct and positive relationship between the person’s access to university studies and their quality of life. This has reinforced the idea that access to the university is a strategy which improves people’s quality of life, generating an enhancement of their sense of well-being (Tonon 2005). The pilot study we are about to put forward has been conducted during the years 2018 and 2019, with students of different courses of study in the Faculty of Social Sciences of Universidad Nacional de Lomas de Zamora, Argentina, with the object of examining their opinion regarding their quality of life at the university. It is a pilot study which provides the university authorities with a situational analysis for the construction of an institutional agenda of higher education. Furthermore, it is the first step toward generating the construction process of a new indicator development on the study of quality of university life. The abovementioned research study was conducted by the qualitative method, and carried out on the basis of a sample of 200 university students between the ages of 18 and 20.

     

Narrative Ideas for Consulting with Communities and Organizations: Ripples from the Gatherings

This paper reviews Michael White's early work with communities and extends ideas and practices from that work into the realm of consulting with organizations. We draw on Michael's writing and the records of two specific projects, as well as the recollections of team members in those projects, to describe how ideas and practices that were originally developed in working with individuals and families came to be applied in community settings. Specifically, we show how the central intention of the work is to use narrative ideas and practices in ways that allow communities to articulate, appreciate, document, utilize, and share their own knowledges of life and skills of living. We discuss the basic narrative ideas of stories, double listening, telling and retelling, making documents, and linking lives through shared purposes. For these projects, the teams developed structures that made it possible to use the basic idea with whole communities. We show how this work with communities has offered inspiration and ideas for our work in consulting to organizations. Finally, we describe and illustrate a particular way of working with organizations that carries the spirit of Michael's community work into situations requiring shorter blocks of time and more limited commitments than the original community contexts.     

Looking at the Bright Side: Forgiveness and Subjective Well-Being in Divorced Spanish Parents

Marriage dissolution might cause frustration, resentment and pain. Forgiveness is view as an adaptive reaction that has positive effects on post-divorce adjustment and coparenting; but much remains unknown about the place of forgiveness in the subjective well-being of divorced parents. The objective of the present study was to analyze in a multidimensional model the role played by forgiveness in post-divorce subjective well-being, empirically examining the relationships between time since divorce, affect (positive and negative), forgiveness and satisfaction with life in a group of Spanish divorced parents. Data were collected from 223 divorced Spanish parents (58.3 % mothers) aged 21–64 years, and who had 1–3 children. Results showed that forgiveness and time since divorce partially mediated the effect of positive affect on satisfaction with life: individuals with high levels of positive affect, over time, were more forgiving of their ex-spouses, which in turn enhanced their satisfaction with life. The present study complements the existing literature about the importance of forgiveness in post-divorce coparenting highlighting the place of forgiveness in the subjective well-being of divorced parents.     

Believing in Make-Believe: Looking at Theater as a Metaphor for Psychotherapy

In this essay, I explore the theatrical dimensions of psychotherapy. I argue that many of the historical, practice-related, and conceptual connections between theater and therapy often are only alluded to in the literature, but rarely made explicit. In doing so, however, it seems apparent that, as a metaphor for psychotherapy, theater perhaps offers a more appropriate fit than those narrative and conversational metaphors that have been employed so far. Proposing that theater is, in fact, the metaphor on which psychotherapy bases itself, I briefly examine some of its implications for how therapy might be conceptualized and performed. I conclude by inviting other therapists to consider — by openly acknowledging theater as a metaphor for psychotherapy — if they might then become more engaging, creative, and imaginative in their work.     

现代医学人文回归的学术性与现实性

以生物-心理-社会医学模式为背景,以哲学和生态审美理论为起点,提出了"医学人文精神"、"医学人文关怀"等概念,在此基础上,分析了医学人文回归的内容及其与医学审美之间的内在联系.从学术性和现实性两个层面,针对我国存在的医学人文缺失的现状,分析了以"三观"(生命观、健康的可持续发展观、科学观)为基础的人文信仰的内容、功能与意义,以及如何从内容与形式辩证统一的审美视角出发,运用美的规律去改善、丰富和提升医学人文关怀的境界.     

Gaze Patterns When Looking at Emotional Pictures: Motivationally Biased Attention

Pictures of either emotionally neutral, pleasant (affectionate), or unpleasant (threat and injury) scenes were paired with nonemotional control pictures and presented for 3 s, while eye fixations were monitored. Preferential attention to the emotional picture of eah pair occurred at an early processing stage: The probability of placement of the first fixation and the proportion of viewing time during the first 500 ms were higher for both pleasant and unpleasant pictures than for neutral pictures, whereas later fixation location and time were not differentially affected. This suggests that, when emotional and nonemotional stimuli are presented simultaneously, emotional meaning captures initial overt orienting and engages attention early, as measured by gaze direction and duration. The possibility that this effect could be accounted for by perceptual differences—such as luminance and complexity—between emotional and neutral pictures was ruled out.