Gender and Aggression in Marital Relationships: A Life-Span Perspective

This study examines the relationship between age, gender, and marital aggression by comparing conflict resolution strategies, physical aggression, and injury across 6,185 married young, middle and older aged men and women. We found a consistent age effect such that younger participants used more maladaptive conflict resolution strategies, engaged in more physical arguments, and sustained more injuries than older participants. In terms of gender differences, women compared to men used calm discussions less (the least reported by women who were young) and heated arguments more. Analyses on the relation among age, gender, and injuries showed that more young and middle-aged women than men reported that they had sustained injuries at the hands of their spouse and more young men than women reported inflicting injury on their spouse. The results are discussed in relation to research on gender differences in intimate violence and the association of age and intimate aggression in general.     

Health and Illness from an Islamic Perspective

The Islamic understanding of the human self, its purpose and functions has a great effect on Muslims' understanding of themselves and on Islamic culture. Islamic psychology is a field that examines the Islamic perspective on health and illness and compares it to the Western perspective. The purpose of this paper is to introduce readers to the Islamic understanding of the self, its functions, and purpose, and to contrast it with Western theories about the self. It also aims at understanding Islamic definitions of health and illness and Islamic understanding of treatment.     

Family Functioning and Mental Illness: A Comparison of Psychiatric and Nonclinical Families

The primary objective of the present investigation was to examine adaptive functioning in the families of patients with a wide range of psychiatric disorders. Seven dimensions of family functioning, as measured by the Family Assessment Device (FAD), were compared across families of patients with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder (n = 61 ), bipolar disorder (n = 60 ), major depression (n = 111 ), anxiety disorder (n = 15 ), eating disorder (n = 26 ), substance abuse disorder (n = 48 ), and adjustment disorder (n = 46 ). Families in each psychiatric group were also compared to a control group of nonclinical families (N = 353 ). Results indicated that regardless of specific diagnosis, having a family member in an acute phase of a psychiatric illness was a risk factor for poor family functioning compared to the functioning of control families. However, with few exceptions, the type of the patient's psychiatric illness did not predict significant differences in family functioning. Thus, having a family member with a psychiatric illness is a general stressor for families, and family interventions should be considered for most patients who require a psychiatric hospitalization for either the onset of, or an acute exacerbation of, any psychiatric disorder.     

Migration, Illness and Health Care

This paper draws on research and clinical experience in discussing the challenges migration poses to experiences of illness, focusing on the relationships between migrant and non-migrant kin, exposure to different paradigms of health care, racism and other forms of prejudice; language differences; and the positions of health care professionals who are themselves migrants.     

Understanding the Links Between Social Support and Physical Health: A Life-Span Perspective With Emphasis on the Separability of Perceived and Received Support

ABSTRACT— Social support has been reliably related to physical health outcomes. However, the conceptual basis of such links needs greater development. In this article, I argue for a life-span perspective on social support and health that takes into account distinct antecedent processes and mechanisms that are related to measures of support over time. Such a view highlights the need to distinguish measures of perceived and received support and its links to more specific diseases (e.g., chronic, acute) and stages of disease development (e.g., incidence). I discuss both the novel implications of these theoretical arguments for research on social support and physical health, as well as the potential intervention approaches that are apparent from this perspective.     

Behavioral Interventions and Families: A Medical Rehabilitation Perspective

Behavioral interventions are pertinent to many issues faced by medical rehabilitation patients and their families in late adulthood. Despite their utility in managing chronic illnesses and reducing problematic behaviors related to cognitive impairment, behavioral interventions can be difficult to implement and maintain in a family setting. Problems resulting from countercontrol, caregiver fatigue, conflicting priorities, and impact on family relationships must be anticipated and addressed. These issues are illustrated through references to pertinent research and case examples. Recommendations are offered to reduce caregiver stress and to minimize shifts in relationships when family caregivers act to alter a member's behavior.     

Power Relationships in Families: A Social-Exchange Perspective

Although researchers have investigated power relationships in families for twenty-five years, conclusions about normative family power patterns have been inconsistent and contradictory. Comparisons across studies have been difficult owing to different definitions of the construct, multiple methodologies, and inconsistent goals. With such confusion, a new, more integrated theoretical approach to the power issue seems warranted, as is suggested by the present paper. The current individual focus on power as a personal attribute can be replaced by a more dynamic, reciprocal, interactive process. Instead of specific or stable power patterns, power interactions should be fluid and time- or situation- specific. No one member would dominate, since power involves a mutual relationship system that changes its content, though not its rules of operation, across decision-making areas. Furthermore, family adjustment would relate to those rules and the family members' reactions to their particular exchange system but not to specific types of power structures. With these considerations, future research should analyze the process, not the content, of power operations in order to maximize the clinical and theoretical utility of its construct.     

哲学咨询:精神疾病的新视角

哲学咨询旨在通过哲学的理论与方法帮助人们解决日常问题;预防与治疗精神疾病、为疾病的医学治疗提供辅助;并在此基础上启发培养智慧.哲学咨询的方法有非程式化的方法与程式化的方法两类.前者主张开放的多元化方法,后者在实践中形成了模式化的方法.哲学咨询因其超越治疗的视角优势而成为精神医学和心理治疗的补充,甚至是替代性选择.     

Reactive Depression and Chronic Illness: Counseling Patients and Their Families

Major theories and research findings are presented with specific suggestions for counseling approaches to reduce prevalence and impact of depression that often accompanies physical illness.     

Qualitative Changes in Creativity in the Second Half of life: A Life-Span Developmental Perspective

ABSTRACT Research on the relationship between creativity and age has been based on two seemingly incompatible sets of assumptions. The deficit approach maintains and has demonstrated that creative productivity and age have a linear relationship—that is, creativity declines over the life-span. The alternate approach, upon which the present paper is founded, maintains that creative productivity and creative ability are not identical. Further, this life-span developmental approach posits that supposed declines in creativity actually may reflect qualitative changes in the underlying creative process. Thus, different stages of the life-span are characterized by different kinds of creativity. Empirical and theoretical literature on wisdom and mature forms of thinking will be used to further answer the central questions of this paper: what might creativity in the second half of life look like?     

Cultural Influences on Perceptions of Health, Illness, and Disability: A Review and Focus on Autism

This conceptual paper considers the role of culture in shaping family, professional, and community understanding of developmental disabilities and their treatments. The meanings of health, illness, and disability vary greatly across cultures and across time. We use Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model to provide a theoretical framework for examining disability, with special attention to autism spectrum disorders. Cultural beliefs about the cause of a disorder influence families’ decision-making about what treatments to use and what outcomes to expect. Autism provides an example that is especially challenging, as there is no agreed-upon cause. Also, an overwhelming array of treatments is available in the West for autism, including behavioral, cognitive, pharmaceutical, sensory, relational, vitamin, and diet therapies. Other cultures contribute additional views on cause (e.g., Karma, Allah’s will) and treatments (e.g., acupuncture, herbal medicines, Ayurveda). We suggest how a broad cultural view can help us understand treatments and the treatment delivery system of a nation and a culture. For the best course of care, professionals need to understand and respect families’ views of autism and work toward mutually agreeable treatments that may involve a combination of biomedical and cultural practices. Although a family-focused, open teamwork model that aims to acknowledge the context of the child, take into consideration the strengths and limitations of the child and the family, and introduce appropriate, sustainable, and sensitive interventions is regarded as best practice in the United States, it will take sensitive work to find out whether it will suit other cultural groups across the world.     

Unemployment and Mental Health: A Longitudinal Perspective

Using longitudinal data, the current study examined the relation between mental health and unemployment. It was assumed that these concepts would mutually influence each other—that is, while the perceived characteristics of the situation of being unemployed affect mental health, mental health may also influence the intention to look for a job, amount and type of job-searching behavior, and the chances of finding a job. Drawing on partly longitudinal data from 229 unemployed Dutch youth, a model relating mental health, perceptions of the unemployment situation, job-searching behaviors, and employment status was tested using structural equation modeling and logistic regression analysis. While the expectations were largely supported, there were also several unexpected results, most notably that participants who felt powerless were more likely to be active job seekers, while only mental health (and not job-seeking behavior) was (weakly) related to the likelihood of finding a job.     

Illness Perceptions and Health: Innovations and Clinical Applications

Using a self-regulatory process, individuals act upon their cognitive and emotional representations of health threats to actively manage their health. Leventhal’s common-sense model describes cognitive representations of illness that include perceptions about the identity, timeline, consequences, control and cause of illness. Research has shown that individuals’ illness perceptions predict health behaviours and functional outcomes, particularly when perceptions are specific. Psychometric assessments of illness perceptions need to have the ability to detect specific and idiosyncratic perceptions and emotions; methods include rating scales and patients’ drawings of their illness. Recent randomised trials have demonstrated that interventions can change illness perceptions and improve health outcomes in patient groups, including those with normal test-results, and that family members also benefit from such interventions. These innovations inform clinical applications for improving patient health.     

Physician-Assisted Suicide: A Mental Health Perspective

Despite their wealth of relevant clinical and research experience, mental health professionals have contributed relatively little to the active and ongoing debate about physicians assisting in the suicide of their patients. Methodologies developed for the study of completed suicide, the knowledge they have revealed, and the complex questions that remain unanswered, all must be considered. Similarly, psychiatry's extensive contributions to our understanding of the doctor-patient relationship, fundamental to the practice of psychodynamically informed treatments, have been almost completely ignored. Mental health care providers have much to contribute to, and should become actively involved in, this important public health and policy debate.     

Fetal Programming: Prenatal Origins of Health and Illness

ABSTRACT— Research on young animals and humans has demonstrated the critical importance of the fetal stage as a formative period in normal development. However, the significance of these findings has not always been incorporated into our thinking when trying to elucidate the origins of health and disease. It is not only that babies react to the state of the mother and to salient environmental events while still in the uterus. This stimulation and priming seems to be essential for guiding the optimal maturation of the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems. Experiences during prenatal life also program the regulatory set points that will govern physiology in adulthood. During this malleable maturational phase, these biological processes should be viewed as flexible "learning systems" that guide the developmental trajectory toward health or derail it toward pathology. Our studies on infant primates have shown that the competence of their immune responses and the structure and activity of certain brain regions, as well as many aspects of behavior and emotional reactivity, are strongly affected by the pregnancy conditions of their mothers.