Personal Construct System of a Runaway Adolescent: An Illustrative Case Study

Personal constructs of an 18-year-old adolescent were explored by the use of a repertory grid focusing on the domains of family, self, and world. Results indicated that the runaway adolescent construed his family in a negative and rejecting way, whereas important people outside the family were perceived in a more accepting and friendly manner. It was also found that although the young man construed himself in a positive manner, at the same time he perceived himself as aloof and distant from both family and nonfamily members. The findings indicate that a young adolescent's decision to run away from home and jump into the world of the unknown is the consequence of certain push factors in the home environment and pull factors in the external world. Results of the grid are discussed in light of key elements in construct space.     

Network Techniques: Case Studies in the Screening-Linking-Planning Conference Method

This article describes a technique for receiving, assessing, planning, linking, and monitoring people in crisis. Called the Screening-Linking-Planning (S-L-P) Conference Method, the technique takes advantage of certain characteristics of people in the heat of crisis that make them particularly amenable to change and allow a care-giver to promote marked positive growth in brief periods of time. The method encourages the social network of the person in crisis to cluster around the person in a supportive way, to make positive expectations, and to provide feedback for identity-repair purposes. The technique has proved effective with persons in acute crisis as well as those who have chosen a career of chronic crisis (i.e., chronic patienthood). A major part of this paper is devoted to case studies describing the application of this technique in a variety of situations.     

Familial,Social, and Cultural Factors Influencing Panic Disorder: Family Therapy Case of Korean Wife and American Husband

This study examined the progress and causes of panic disorder symptoms in a client by focusing on family culture, events, and sociocultural background. The study results revealed that the underlying cause of the client's anxiety was originated from family characteristics. The present study suggested a new perspective on panic disorder by delving into family relations and sociocultural background in Korea, such as son preference, academic background-oriented culture, and collectivism. This study intended to provide a new perspective on how the experiences within family could affect panic disorder and to propose family therapeutic method for dealing with panic disorder.     

The Deferential Wife Revisited: Agency and Moral Responsibility

This paper rejects two main arguments for absolving the deferential wife and victims of deprived circumstances from responsibility or blame for their servility: for Susan Wolf, circumstances can determine their reasons and acts, and for Sarah Buss, circumstances can give them excusing reasons for their acts. The paper argues that circumstances can give them justifying reasons to act in ways defending their intrinsic worth when their acts can be legitimately interpreted as a protest against an attempt to degrade their intrinsic value.     

Introduction to the Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spatial Cognition: Cognition and Action in a Plurality of Spaces (ICSC 2021)

Cognitive Processing -     

Parenting,Protecting, Preserving:Mission of the Adolescent Female Runaway

This paper presents a systemic framework for therapy with families of adolescent female runaways. The runaway adolescent is viewed as serving three functions within her family. First, she often parents her parents and siblings. Second, she protects her parents' marriage and regulates marital distance. Third, she preserves her family unit at the preadolescent developmental stage. Interventions are described that remove the adolescent from those roles by empowering the parents to take charge of the adolescent, by changing the communication process such that the couple deal with their marital issues without the help of the teenager, and by facilitating the family's movement toward a new stage of separation and individuation.     

Spatial Cognition in a Multimedia and Intercultural World Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Spatial Cognition (ICSC 2018)

The logic operators (e.g., “and,” “or,” “if, then”) play a fundamental role in concept formation, syntactic construction, semantic expression, and deductive reasoning. In spite of this very general and basic role, there are relatively few studies in the literature that focus on their conceptual nature. In the current investigation, we examine, for the first time, the learning difficulty experienced by observers in classifying members belonging to these primitive “modal concepts” instantiated with sets of acoustic and visual stimuli. We report results from two categorization experiments that suggest the acquisition of acoustic and visual modal concepts is achieved by the same general cognitive mechanism. Additionally, we attempt to account for these results with two models of concept learning difficulty: the generalized invariance structure theory model (Vigo in Cognition 129(1):138–162, 2013, Mathematical principles of human conceptual behavior, Routledge, New York, 2014) and the generalized context model (Nosofsky in J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 10(1):104–114, 1984, J Exp Psychol 115(1):39–57, 1986).     

Attenuating the Attribution of Responsibility: The Lay Perception of Jealousy as a Motive for Wife Battery1

Jealousy can consist of a broad range of experiences, from an everyday feeling to a pathology that causes abuse and crime. Although historically jealousy has been positively valued, century has seen an antijealousy crusade the effects of which can be noticed everywhere–with the exception of the legal system. Using Weiner's attributional model as theoretical background, a questionnaire research survey was conducted to determine if lay perception considers jealousy to be a justification of wife battery. Results show that current views of jealousy are negative and do not justify a mitigation in responsibility. Additionally differences by age and education can be found in the victim's attributed responsibility independently of the motivation. Implications for the legal system as well as for defensive attribution theory are discussed.     

Runaway girls in distress: motivation, background, and personality.

This paper deals with girls aged 13 to 21 who have run away from home. Social workers who work with such girls point out that they are not a homogeneous population and that their motives can be very different. This study divides their motives for running away into two types, "running from" and "running to," and describes the specific personality traits associated with each. Findings indicate that girls who "run to" are younger, more impulsive, have an internal locus of control and a history of more runaways and longer periods of staying away from home. Girls who "run from," on the other hand, are older, more reflective, have an external locus of control and a history of fewer runaways and shorter periods away from home.     

Variables Associated with Therapy Attendance in Runaway Substance Abusing Youth: Preliminary Findings

Service providers and researchers note that youth with substance abuse problems are difficult to engage in treatment and, when engaged, often drop out early. Estimates of the alcohol and drug abuse rate of runaway youth range from 70% to 95%. This study evaluated predictors of therapy attendance in a sample of substance abusing youth recruited through two southwestern runaway shelters. Runaway youth and their families (N = 36) were engaged into a 15-session ecologically-based family therapy (EBFT) intervention. Fewer days between the pretreatment assessment and the first therapy session, as well as less perceived parental care, predicted more therapy sessions attended. No relationship was found between level of substance use and treatment attendance. The findings highlight the importance of engaging families in therapy soon after the youth's arrival to the shelter, as treatment motivation may decrease as the crisis lessens.