Coming out in community psychology: personal narrative and disciplinary change

Community psychology as a discipline has not focused its attention on the lives of lesbians, gay men, and bisexual (LGB) people, despite the field's potential to collaborate with this population in dealing with the many psychosocial challenges they face. Professional and personal barriers that community psychologists must confront conducting research and developing interventions with the LGB community are described. Community psychology work with LGB communities is often a coming out experience for LGB community psychologists, and a questioning of sexual orientation fot heterosexual community psychologists. Conceptual analyses and empirical reports are presented that exemplify how community psychologist can contribute to decreasing the pervasive stigma LGB people face. The use of an ecological model, a focus on the development and evaluation of preventive interventions, and a recognition of the diversity within the LGB population are core perspectives that can direct future work by community psychologists. Issues ranging from testing ways to empower young LGB people to analyses of the impact of the sociopolitical climate on LGB lives demonstrate the rich range of contributions community psychologists can make.     

Community Psychology: Where Do We Go from Here?

Following a developmental analogy, community psychology may be experiencing a mid-life crisis as it enters middle age. The field needs to determine where to go from here. This paper argues that the field should attempt to expand. Expansion can best be accomplished by celebrating the diversity of orientations within the field (e.g., those emphasizing prevention, empowerment, and the ecological perspective) and the wide range of human problems of interest to community psychologists. To promote expansion of the field, community psychologists need to seek out relationships with diverse groups, such as the international community, those working in applied settings, ethnic minorities, and students and early-career professionals.     

Myth-conceptions concerning death-related behavior

Summary The discussion here has suggested that it is likely that the following beliefs are myth conceptions: Living is always prefarable to dying. It is possible for people not to play God. We can be sure that what happens biologically is willed by God. God speaks to us only through our biology. Dying occurs only at one point in time-at the end of the terminal period. Death or dead are more accurate labels than passed on. Persons who are dying know without being told that they are dying. Biological death is the most important thing happening when a person dies.The goal of achieving understanding of our death-related behavior can be facilitated by recognition of myth-conceptions such as these and the previously identified myths the acceptance of which may have an impact upon both biological and mental or spiritual health of those involved.He is the author ofSociology of Death and other books and articles.     

Egalitarian sex role attitudes: Scale development and comparison of American and Japanese women

The English Form of the Scale of Egalitarian Sex Role Attitudes was administered to 238 American women after the original Japanese Form was developed and administered to 420 Japanese women. The results reveal that the English Form has a potential for use as a measurement of American women's sex role attitudes. The results of cross-cultural comparisons suggest that American women have more egalitarian attitudes than their Japanese counterparts. However, they have basically similar attitudes toward more general egalitarian values. Among the four roles of woman, wife, mother, and person, the majority of the American women choose person as the most important role, whereas the Japanese women do not claim any clear dominant role. But the results show that the Japanese women's attitudes toward women's roles have become more egalitarian and individualistic during the past two decades.This research was partly supported by a grant from the Dentsu Corporation's Yoshida Hideo Memorial Foundation. The author wishes to thank Roger Brown, Cynthia Chataway, Matina Horner, Ellen Langer, and Annemette Sorensen, Yoshiyasu Uno, and the reviewers for their critical and helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. The statistical help by Ellen Herbener and Valerie Leiter are gratefully acknowledged.     

The Relationship of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) to Social Psychology

Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) includes several main theories and practices, especially the hypotheses that people are both constructivists and destructivists. It holds that they have powerful innate and socially acquired tendencies to often be self-helping and rational but also self-defeating and irrational. REBT largely derives its method of therapy from many clients seen by the author, from hundreds of therapy studies, and from the social psychology literature. This article shows how REBT formulations overlap with some of the findings of social psychology, how these findings can appreciably be used to improve REBT practice, how some of the unique theories and methods of REBT may contribute to the field of social psychology, and how social psychologists can help to research some of the main REBT principles.     

The Future of Psychology in Departments of Psychiatry

Health care reform has put increasing pressure on faculty of medical schools to become self-supporting. Opportunities for clinical revenue will decrease, but psychologists who are able to generate research funding will become increasingly competitive, albeit as mercenaries, i.e., capable of paying their own way plus generating a profit to support departmental operations and educational programs. Changes in the health care system signal an end to psychiatry's paternalistic relationship to psychology and present opportunities for psychology proactively to influence its future role in health care. Research, political action, and revised scientific mission, models, and roles represent important strategies in the redefining of psychology as a basic science and major profession in health care.     

Religion and mental health among blacks

The positive role of religion in the mental health of black Americans is a much neglected theme in the literature. This paper considers religion as one of the important retained black cultural traits, which continues to play a vital role in the mental health and survival strategies of black Americans. The paper examines Grier and Cobbs's appraisal of the religion-mental health connection in black communities and identifies different ways for mental health practitioners to think about religious phenomena and the primal partnership between religion and mental health. The paper concludes with a challenge to keep awareness of the religion-mental health partnership together in the treatment of black Americans.This paper was originally presented at a two-day conference on Some Dynamics and Psychotherapeutic Methods in Rendering Treatment to Blacks, March 15 and 16, 1980, in Oakland, California. This particular paper discussed religion as one of the important retained black cultural trains.     

Enlivening Models of Pastoral Care: Relating Theory to the Complex Life Experiences Depicted in Fiction

In this paper, the tradition in pastoral psychology of relating theoretical models to the specific practice of psychotherapy will be examined by using new hermeneutics to understand how psychological and theological studies are inter-related in pastoral psychology. The hazard of this tradition is that psychological languages being used in technical ways may arise out of a mechanistic orientation to the world. The benefits of using fiction as an experiential grounding for theory will be described. Two novels, Paradise news, by David Lodge and The autobiography of my mother, by Jamaica Kincaid will be employed to illustrate how using fiction can enliven models of pastoral care by pushing pastoral psychologists to interface imaginative language with conceptual language from several disciplines.     

Psychotherapy Integration: Contributions from Lifestyle Theory

The lifestyle theory of intervention is evaluated with respect to its status as an integrated psychotherapy using theoretical integration, technical eclecticism, and the common factors approach as criteria. Because lifestyle theory integrates concepts from evolutionary biology, existential philosophy, cognitive psychology, social learning theory, and various therapeutic models it satisfies preliminary criteria for theoretical integration. To the extent that it provides an internally consistent model and makes use of techniques from disparate schools of psychotherapy, it adopts a technical eclectic approach to intervention. The lifestyle model also appears to qualify as an integrated psychotherapy by virtue of its attention to several common factors in psychotherapy.     

Narrating survival and change in Guatemala and South Africa: the politics of representation and a liberatory community psychology

Peace accords and international interventions have contributed to the suspension of armed conflict and the censuring of repressive regimes in many parts of the world. Some governments and their opposition parties have agreed to the establishment of commissions or other bodies designed to create historical records of the violations of human rights and foster conditions that facilitate reparatory and reconciliatory processes. This paper explores selected roles that community psychologists have played in this process of remembering the past and constructing new identities towards creating a more just future. With reference to two community groups (in Guatemala and South Africa) we show how efforts to speak out about one's own experiences of political and military repression involve complex representational politics that go beyond the simple binary opposition of silencing versus giving voice. The Guatemalan group consisted of Mayan Ixil women who, together with the first author, used participatory action research and the PhotoVoice technique to produce a book about their past and present struggles. The South African group, working within the ambit of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and in collaboration with the third author and others, explored ways of speaking about their roles in apartheid and post-apartheid society. Although both these initiatives can be seen as moments in on-going struggles to overcome externally-imposed repressive practices that censor the voices of marginalized communities, they also serve to dispel overly romanticized notions of univocal communities now liberated to express themselves in an unmediated and unequivocal fashion. The paper discusses how each group of women instead entered into subtly nuanced relationships with community psychologists involving a continual interplay between the authenticity of their self-representational accounts and the requirements of the discursive technologies into which they were being inducted and the material conditions within their sites of struggle. In both cases the group's agenda also evolved over time, so that what emerged was not so much a particular account of themselves, or even the development of a particular voice for speaking about themselves, but an unfolding process—for the groups and for the community psychologists who accompanied them—of becoming active players in the postmodern, mediated world of self-representational politics and social struggle.     

Omega-consistency and the diamond

G is the result of adjoining the schema (qAA)qA to K; the axioms of G* are the theorems of G and the instances of the schema qAA and the sole rule of G* is modus ponens. A sentence is -provable if it is provable in P(eano) A(rithmetic) by one application of the -rule; equivalently, if its negation is -inconsistent in PA. Let -Bew(x) be the natural formalization of the notion of -provability. For any modal sentence A and function mapping sentence letters to sentences of PA, inductively define A by: p = (p) (p a sentence letter); = ; (AB)su}= (A B); and (qA)= -Bew(A )(S) is the numeral for the Gödel number of the sentence S). Then, applying techniques of Solovay (Israel Journal of Mathematics 25, pp. 287–304), we prove that for every modal sentence A, _G A iff for all , _PA A ; and for every modal sentence A, _G* A iff for all , A is true.I should like to thank David Auerbach and Rohit Parikh.     

Pavlov and the demise of the influence of Gestalt psychology in the Soviet Union

Summary The demise of the influence of the classical Gestalt psychology in the Soviet Union has been linked to I.P. Pavlov's negative stance toward Gestalt tenets. Actually, Pavlov's attitude toward Gestalt psychology was by no means uniform. Pavlov was receptive to, as well as critical of a number of substantive issues. He acknowledged the Gestalt interpretation of transposition, but criticized the Gestalt rejection of association and learning by trial and error. Pavlov's strongest objection to Gestalt psychology centered on the philosophical issues of causality, methodology, and on the problem of mind and body. Despite these objections, no direct evidence links Pavlov's criticism of Gestalt theses to the weakening of their influence on Soviet psychology. Instead, the demise of classical Gestalt psychology in the Soviet Union should be attributed to political exigency. Soviet authorities, in a period of political crises, were intent upon the elimination of all traces of bourgeois psychologies.     

Sex roles,social roles,and clinical judgments of mental health

This study examined whether clinical psychologists expect similar behavior from males and females in contexts that are traditionally male vs. female. In a modification of the task by Broverman et al. (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1970, 34, 1–7), practicing psychologists (N=104) rated the appropriate behavior of a mature, healthy, socially competent man in the home environment, man in the work environment, woman in the home environment, or woman in the work environment. There was a significant effect of environment, with ratings closer to the pole traditionally labeled masculine in the work environment (p<.001). However, clinicians did not assign significantly different ratings to men vs. women. These data call into question the continued use of feminine and masculine to describe behavior, and emphasize the need to specify the environmental context in research on sex role stereotypes.This report is based on an undergraduate honors thesis conducted by the second author under the sponsorship of the first. Order of authorship is alphabetical.     

A rose by any other name: Maintaining the name and highlighting the uniqueness of psychology as a health care profession

In this article, we reply to the comments made by Holden and Levant (preceding articles). While we agree with their goals of expanding the scope of practice of psychology, standardizing training, and educating the public and other health care professionals about the field of clinical psychology, we do not agree that changing the discipline's name to psychological physician is a necessary or sufficient means to these ends. We outline the bases for our disagreement with the name change proposal and provide other proposals for reaching the goals set forth by Holden and Levant.     

Gestalt in social psychology

Summary Citations superficially suggest that the relationship between Gestalt theory and contemporary social psychology is hardly recognizable if we disregard the occasional homage to Kurt Lewin. Neither Gestalt nor field theory belongs to the present pool of social-psychological theories. On the other hand, it can be shown that basic concepts of Gestalt theory have survived under various names and are still of central importance. The author outlines a model of theory sedimentation according to which Gestalt theory, after a brief period of impact on mainstream social psychology has, by sedimentation, become an implicit theory which still feeds explicit models and theories in contemporary social psychology.     

Psychological Aspects of Genetic Counseling. IX. Teaching and Counseling

The goals, philosophies, and procedures of the teaching and counseling approaches to genetic counseling are differentiated and compared. The teaching approach, inherited from academic practitioners earlier in this century, appears to remain the dominant form of contemporary practice. With the introduction of more nonphysician professionals, attempts are being made to combine a teaching model with counseling procedures. The goals of the two models are conspicuously different; one attempts to end up with an educated counselee whereas the other hopes to leave the latter psychologically more autonomous and functional. Both models have strengths and limitations. The teaching model is essentially a form of health education, not counseling, and, with some exceptions, tends to fulfill its goals. The strategy of teaching, however, tends to undermine the psychological self-directedness of counselees and thus interferes with the processes they need to draw on to make autonomous decisions. The strength of the counseling model is in helping counselees reach decisions and deal with the personal meaning of information. However, applying this model makes huge demands on the professional. Greater attention needs to be given by training programs to the pedagogical and counseling skills genetic counselors may need in their professional work.     

Establishing Clinical Neuropsychology in Germany Scientific,Professional, Political,and Legal Issues

German psychologists may have been first to establish a university curriculum in psychology with the expressed purpose to provide—after its successful completion—a certificate of professional qualification. This Diplom-Prüfungsordnung (Diploma Examination Regulation) was accepted nationwide in 1941. However, it took over fifty more years before some progress toward the political and legal acceptance of autonomous clinical activities of psychologists was made. Legislation to secure these advances is still pending. In this context the efforts to establish the profession of clinical neuropsychology are described and discussed within the historical development of professional psychology in Germany with special emphasis on the problems of compromises within the force fields of science and professional politics. Finally, the postgraduate training as well as the certification and accreditation procedures developed by the Gesellschaft für Neuropsychologie, the Society of German-speaking neuropsychologists, are presented.     

Adjustment and the near-death experience: A conceptual and therapeutic model

Most mental health practitioners, and counseling psychologists in particular, possess skills for helping near-death experiencers. What is needed is a conceptual framework that is both familiar to practitioners and highly relevant to that client group. Cross-cultural counseling in general, and the consideration of world views more specifically, are suggested. Using that framework, the world view assimilated during the near-death experience (NDE) is viewed as being in contrast to that of the old self, significant others, and the majority culture. The difficulties reported by NDErs are considered analogous to those associated with culture shock. The world views of the practitioner, NDEr, and relevant others should be taken into account in the formulation of psychoeducational and therapeutic interventions.     

Global Progress I: Empirical Evidence for ongoing Increase in Quality-of-life

This paper argues that both the relativist and the pessimist critiques of the idea of progress are inadequate. Progress is defined as increase in global quality of life (QOL). Such QOL is intrinsically subjective, but not relative. It can be reliably measured through life satisfaction-type questions. The World Database of Happiness provides extensive data on social, economic and psychological factors that correlate with overall QOL. They include wealth, health, security, knowledge, freedom and equality. Various statistical data suggest that all these QOL indicators have undergone significant improvements during the last half century, in most of the world. This gives strong support to the thesis that progress objectively occurs.