Religiosity and unmarried black adolescent fatherhood

This paper examines the relationship between religiosity and unmarried adolescent fatherhood in a select population of unwed black adolescent fathers and their counterparts. The results indicated that the fathers did not differ so much from the nonfathers in the degree that they are religiously oriented but in the manner that they give expression to their religious involvement. The fathers were more likely to be responsive to nongroup modes of institutionalized religion, i.e., media forms; whereas the nonfathers religious involvement was likely to be within institutionalized groups.     

Homelessness and the problem of containment

Homelessness is a problem that is hardly spared to any society in our modern world. Usually discussed by people concerned with social policy, sociology, public health and politics, homelessness has only quite recently begun to command the attention of professionals concerned with psychological and psychotherapeutic processes. Following from the author's experience of working therapeutically with homeless people, as well as in discussions with homeless services, the paper follows a line of thinking around homelessness that is explicitly psychodynamic in orientation. The central argument here is that homelessness is an experience that is, so to speak, waiting to happen. Homelessness is portrayed as a natural extension of an underlying experience of the sister states of uncontainment and alienation. I argue that the homeless person not only experienced a lack of containment in his earliest interactions, but has grown through life with significant difficulties in this area. Homelessness then is an extreme response to a deeper psychological reality that projects into a part of the person's life the agonies associated with uncontainment. Homelessness is the realization of an internal situation –a shifting of a personal struggle into a new and more visible stage. This view of homelessness is designed to provide an amendment to current views that privilege the roles of poverty and social exclusion in the origins of homelessness rather than as an alternative account of the origins of homelessness.     

Sex roles among married and unmarried couples

This article investigates sex roles among married and cohabiting couples. Male career precedence was more firmly entrenched both attitudinally and behaviorally among the former. Cohabiting women in couples planning to marry generally gave attitudinal support to their partner's career precedence, but were delaying the translation of these attitudes into concrete actions until after marriage. Cohabitors not planning to marry were essentially equalitarian, but the males in these couples were also less successful in career attainment than the other males. Male career precedence, the decision to marry, conventional allocation of household tasks, and male career success were all concomitant, although the exact causality could not be confidently established.The data for this article were collected for a doctoral dissertation in sociology at Temple University, Philadelphia, Pa.     

Rhetorical processes in therapy: the bias for self–containment

This paper argues that therapy tends to reproduce a particular version of personhood, identified by Sampson's notion of the self–contained indi–vidual. The self–contained individual is a contemporary Western construction, which requires a denial of the interactive processes that permit its appearance and idealization. Focusing on constructionist therapies, it is argued that therapists use rhetorical strategies to more or less systematically argue for self–containment as a preferred way of being. These rhetorical manoeuvres render different aspects of self–containment plausible, practicable and 'real', while alternative versions of the self and behaviour are discursively minimized, becoming less plausible in the process. An analysis of two family therapy sessions is then used to illustrate these processes. It is suggested that therapy may reproduce Western ideals about being human.     

Common vs. Uncommon Sexual Acts: Evidence for the Sexual Double Standard

The lack of consistent evidence for the sexual double standard may be related to the rather benign nature of the heterosexual behaviors often studied (e.g., casual sex, premarital sex). College students from the southwestern U.S. evaluated targets who engaged in mixed-gender threesomes (where three people engage in simultaneous sexual acts; Study 1: N?=?120) and targets in a monogamous sexual relationship (Study 2: N?=?105). Evidence for the sexual double standard was found via effects of targets’ gender among those who engaged in threesomes. Targets who had monogamous sex were evaluated more favorably than the targets who engaged in threesomes. We suggest that the sexual double standard may still exist for uncommon sexual behaviors.     

Sexual Socialization for Therapists

No abstract available for this article.     

Cost containment as professional challenge

Cost containment by means of prospective payment and other mechanisms is widely seen as a challenge to modern medicine; but the challenge is seldom articulated clearly in terms of core professional values and the moral content of a claim to professionalism. Medical ethics, as it has evolved as a field of study in the past twenty years, has contributed little to the concept of professionalism in medicine. For an investigation of professionalism in the face of cost containment to evolve fruitfully, several things must occur. The true nature of today's challenge to medicine must be appreciated. The balance between tradition and response to social change in defining a professional value system must be appreciated. Physician income must be explicitly addressed as a moral issue. And practical strategies for investigating and affirming core professional values must be developed for health delivery systems and medical education settings.     

当前中国青少年性教育中存在的若干问题

在如何对青少年进行科学的性教育的问题上 ,当前还存在着诸多认识上的误区 :首先是没有注意性生理、性心理和性道德教育三者的有机结合 ;其次是没有遵循循序渐进的教育规律 ;再次是教育的基本定位存在着较大的偏差。     

Sexual Arousal and the Polarization of Perceived Sexual Attractiveness

It was predicted that sexual arousal would lead to polarized evaluations of the sexual attractiveness and desirability of those of the opposite sex. More specifically, sexual arousal was hypothesized to enhance the perceived sexual attractiveness of medium and highly attractive target persons but to decrease the perceived sexual attractiveness of unattractive target persons. Sexually aroused and nonaroused subject's of both sexes rated the sexual attractiveness, dating desirability, and marriage desirability of low, medium, and high attractive people of the opposite sex. As expected, sexually aroused subjects rated medium and high attractive targets as more sexually attractive but low attractive targets as less sexually attractive than did nonaroused subjects. The findings were interpreted as consistent with a two process evaluative polarization hypothesis but also discussed in terms of arousal misattribution and arousal transfer hypotheses.     

Sexual Enhancement for Young Adults

Despite the recent development of sexual enhancement programs, young, premarital aged adults (18 to 20) have usually been excluded from participation. Few models exist that attempt to meet the needs of this age group. In an effort to bridge this gap, a sexual enhancement workshop has been developed that focuses specifically on the needs of young adults.