God-talk in therapeutic conversation

The article focuses on God-talk in the context of therapeutic conversations within a framework of psychodynamic and cognitive/narrative perspectives and develops a guide of five diagnostic questions for the critical analysis of God-stories as a tool in spiritual assessment. As a case-illustration, Anton Boisen's God-story is assessed with applications for Clinical Pastoral Education to learn from God-stories as "living human documents."     

Assessment of therapists' and patients' personality: relationship to therapeutic technique and outcome in brief dynamic psychotherapy

My first focus of this study was to explore therapists' personal characteristics as predictors of the proportion of interpretation in brief dynamic psychotherapy (N=39; maximum 40 sessions). In this study, I used data from the Norwegian Multicenter Study on Process and Outcome of Psychotherapy (1995). The main finding was that therapists who had experienced good parental care gave less interpretation (28% variance was accounted for). Therapists who had more negative introjects used a higher proportion of interpretation (16% variance was accounted for). Patients' pretreatment characteristics were not predictive of therapists' use of interpretation. The second focus was to investigate the impact of therapists' personality and the proportion of interpretation on the development of patients' maladaptive defensive functioning over the course of therapy. Better parental care and less negative introjects in therapists were associated with a positive influence and accounted for 5% variance in the reduction of patients' maladaptive defense.     

Healing elements of therapeutic conversation: dialogue as an embodiment of love

From our Bakhtinian perspective, understanding requires an active process of talking and listening. Dialogue is a precondition for positive change in any form of therapy. Using the perspectives of dialogism and neurobiological development, we analyze the basic elements of dialogue, seeking to understand why dialogue becomes a healing experience in a network meeting. From the perspective of therapist as dialogical partner, we examine actions that support dialogue in conversation, shared emotional experience, creation of community, and creation of new shared language. We describe how feelings of love, manifesting powerful mutual emotional attunement in the conversation, signal moments of therapeutic change.     

Women,men and Christ crucified

Abstract

Despite frequent claims to the contrary, Passion piety maintained a significant presence within English devotion throughout the sixteenth century. This article centres on several female contributors to evangelical Passion devotion, including Katherine Parr and Elizabeth Tyrwhit. Moving beyond essentialized notions of gendered authorship, the study offers a comparative, historicizing perspective on women's Passion writings, situating female-authored works within their wider contemporary devotional contexts. An argument is advanced for the fluidity and open-endedness of the early landscape of reform, uncovering the surprising continuities which shaped reformed spirituality and revealing a level of confessional interplay at variance with polarized models of Catholic and Protestant devotion.     

Beliefs about and experiences with battering: Women and men in two populations

A questionnaire was developed to measure beliefs about and experiences with violence in the family. Two groups of persons in two different states who had attended conferences on battered women participated in this research. Of the 177 subjects (84% women, 16% men), none of the men had been battered, yet over one-third of the women had been; more older women reported having been adult battering victims than did younger women; the women had less formal education than the men; the women in the lower educational groups were more likely to have been battered and to report fear of becoming victims; and the social service workers reported little fear of battering.     

Arguing about the ethics of past actions: An analysis of a taped conversation about a taped conversation

In the face of widespread cynicism as regards the possibilities for reasoned and reasonable adjudication of ethical differences in the postmodern age, this essay proposes a dialogic, reconstructive rhetoric as a vehicle for jointly arguing about the ethics of past actions, and looks to the friendship circle as a model arena for the playing out of such a rhetoric. Analyzed by way of illustration is a conversation among four good friends about the ethics of another, surreptitiously taped, conversation between two of those friends.The author wishes to thank Barbie Zeltzer and Micheal Krippondorf, both of Temple University, fot thier comments. Abridged versions of this paper were presented at the Iowa Conference on Narrative in the Human Sciences,1990 and at the England Symposium in Narratives in the Social Sciences. Commentaries at these conferences were also very useful.     

Movement and mirror neurons: a challenging and choice conversation

This paper raises fundamental questions about the claims of art historian David Freedberg and neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese in their article "Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience." It does so from several perspectives, all of them rooted in the dynamic realities of movement. It shows on the basis of neuroscientific research how connectivity and pruning are of unmistakable import in the interneuronal dynamic patternings in the human brain from birth onward. In effect, it shows that mirror neurons are contingent on morphology and corporeal-kinetic tactile-kinesthetic experience. Accordingly, it poses and answers the overlooked but seminally important question of how mirror neurons come to be. The original neuromuscular research of Parma neuroscientists and the findings of Marc Jeannerod concerning kinesthesia support the answer that the "underpinnings" of visual art appreciation are themselves underpinned. An abbreviated phenomenological analysis of movement and its implications regarding the fact that the making of all art is quintessentially contingent on movement, hence a dynamic enterprise, further bolster the given answer as does a brief review of an empirical phenomenological analysis of the natural dynamic congruency of emotions and movement. In the end, the paper shows that movement and life are of a piece in the creation and appreciation of art as in everyday life.     

Women outperform men in distinguishing between authentic and nonauthentic smiles

Women tend to be more accurate in decoding facial expressions than men. We hypothesized that women’s better performance in decoding facial expressions extends to distinguishing between authentic and nonauthentic smiles. We showed participants portrait photos of persons who smiled because either they saw a pleasant picture (authentic smile) or were instructed to smile by the experimenter (nonauthentic smile) and asked them to identify the smiles. Participants judged single photos of persons depicting either an authentic or a nonauthentic smile, and they judged adjacent photos of the same person depicting an authentic smile and a nonauthentic smile. Women outperformed men in identifying the smiles when judging the adjacent photos. We discuss implications for judging smile authenticity in real life and limitations for the observed sex difference.     

Women,men, and aggression in an egalitarian society

Vanatinai, a small island society off New Guinea, is egalitarian, with no indigenous formal systems of rank or authority. Assertiveness and autonomy are highly valued as personal qualities and equivalent for males and females. Overt aggression is condemned and violence is rare. Women were the aggressors in four out of five incidents over ten years. Sexual jealousy was the dominant motif in all five cases. This article considers, in historical contexts, indigenous concepts of the gendered person and their relations to anger, violence, and the supernatural aggression of sorcery and witchcraft. The Vanatinai case is evidence that the rarity of intragroup violence, especially of attacks by men on women, is a characteristic of egalitarian societies.An earlier version of this paper was read at the Session on Female Aggression at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, in November 1991. I would like to thank session participants, Douglas Fry, Victoria Burbank, Robert Lepowsky, Florence Lepowsky, and the anonymous reviewers forSex Roles for their helpful comments at various points. The fieldwork in Papua New Guinea on which this paper is based was carried out over a total of eighteen months in 1977–1979, 1981, and 1987. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the National Science Foundation, Chancellor's Patent Fund and Department of Anthropology of the University of California, Berkeley, the Papua New Guinea Institute of Applied Social and Economic Research, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.     

Remembering a criminal conversation: beyond eyewitness testimony

Unlike the important body of work on eyewitness memory, little research has been done on the accuracy and completeness of "earwitness" memory for conversations. The present research examined the effects of mode of presentation (audiovisual/ auditory-only) on witnesses' free recall for utterances in a criminal conversation at different retention intervals (immediate/delayed) within a single experiment. Different forms of correct recall (verbatim/gist) of the verbal information as well as different types of errors (distortions/fabrications) were also examined. It was predicted that participants in the audiovisual modality would provide more correct information, and fewer errors than participants in the auditory-only modality. Participants' recall was predicted to be impaired over time, dropping to a greater extent after a delay in the auditory-only modality. Results confirmed these hypotheses. Interpretations of the overall findings are offered within the context of dual-coding theory, and within the theoretical frameworks of source monitoring and fuzzy-trace theory.     

More than meets the eye: a consideration of the influence of a counsellor's visual impairment upon his therapeutic relationships

Other than through personal reflection and anecdotal evidence, I have had little opportunity to explore the influence of my visual impairment upon my therapeutic relationships. In order to address this, I conducted three research conversations with former clients (participants), each of whom had expressed an interest in participating in the research. Potential participants also had to meet the inclusion criteria for the research and provide informed consent prior to their participation. Research conversations were conducted between March and July 2009 and were analysed qualitatively, using a method informed by Moustakas's heuristic inquiry. Participants demonstrated idiosyncratic responses to my visual impairment; their perception of their responses to my visual impairment sometimes differed from mine. Feelings identified included uncertainty, disappointment and relief. My visual impairment appeared to influence the therapeutic relationship in a variety of ways, including resonance with the inner world significance of disability to the participant and interaction with my personal process. While not the therapeutic agent, my visual impairment had the potential to act as a catalyst in therapeutic change. The potential for me to either under-estimate or over-estimate the significance of my visual impairment highlights the need for continued self-awareness and the maintenance of an open and non-defensive attitude.     

Animal welfare and individual characteristics: a conversation against speciesism

It seems impossible for a human being not to have some point of view concerning nonhuman animal (hereafter animal) welfare. Many people make decisions about how humans are permitted to treat animals using speciesist criteria, basing their decisions on an individual's species membership rather than on that animal's individual characteristics. Although speciesism provides a convenient way for making difficult decisions about who should be used in different types of research, we argue that such decisions should rely on an analysis of individual characteristics and should not be based merely on species membership. We do not argue that the concept of species is never useful or important. To make our points, we present a conversation among a skeptic, an agnostic, and a proponent of the view that our moral obligations to an animal must be based on an analysis of that individual's characteristics. In the course of the discussion, concepts such as personhood, consciousness, cognitive ability, harm, and pain are presented, because one's understanding of these concepts informs his or her ethical decisions about the use of animals by humans.     

Women,men, and condoms: attitudes and experiences of heterosexual college students

Little is known concerning gender and ethnic differences in attitudes about condoms or about the impact of attitudes on condom use. College students ( N = 393) rated many features of condoms. Overall, students were mildly positive about condoms, believing they offer effective protection but detract from sexual sensation. Both past condom use and future intentions to use condoms were higher among students with more favorable global attitudes toward condoms and more favorable specific beliefs about the interpersonal dynamics of condom use. Future intentions to use condoms were also associated with greater worry about sexually transmitted diseases and fewer previous sexual partners. Women were more favorable toward condoms than men. Gender differences also emerged in the predictors of condom use. Implications for assessing condom attitudes and for increasing condom use among young heterosexuals are discussed.     

The emotional geographies of education: Beginning a conversation

While emotional geography is a burgeoning field of inquiry, to our knowledge no emotional geographies of education exist. Educational research on space and place largely ignores emotionality. In this special issue we begin to rectify this situation through the development of what we call socio-cultural-spatial analyses of education and emotion.     

Women who tell and men who ask: Perceptions of men and women departing from gender stereotypes during initial interaction

An experiment was conducted to determine if behavior that deviated from gender stereotypes during initial interaction produced less positive perceptions of a target than did behavior conforming to stereotype. Thirty-seven males and 38 females (targets) were randomly assigned to conditions where they either enacted a behavior stereotypical to their gender or engaged in a behavior departing from the stereotype during initial interaction with a randomly assigned different-gender stranger (perceiver). All of the participants were raised in the United States. The majority of participants were Caucasian, approximately 30% of the participants were Hispanic. The participants were predominantly middle class. The gender stereotypical condition required the female target to ask questions and the male target to talk about himself during the interaction. A second condition required male and female targets to do the reverse (female tell and male ask). Following the interaction perceivers completed measures of positive affect and social attractiveness. The results indicated that perceptions of targets engaging in behavior opposite of gender stereotypes depend on the perceiver's level of gender-schematicity. The level of gender schematicity indicates a person's tendency to depend on traditional gender stereotypes. While schematics tended to feel less positively or no differently during interactions with gender opposite versus gender norm targets, they tended to evaluate the gender opposite target as more or no differently socially attractive than gender norm targets. Results also suggest that men may have more latitude to engage in gender opposite behaviors than do women.