Measurement of adolescents' life events: The junior high life experiences survey

The first of these two studies examined the relationship between adolescents' scores on a social desirability questionnaire and scores of negative, positive, and total life events. Only number of positive events was significantly related to social desirability. The second study compared various scoring strategies with respect to their intercorrelation and their ability to predict adolescents' maladjustment (depression, anxiety, and number of missed school days). The results demonstrated that (a) total number of events and readjustment-weighted life change scores were equally predictive of the maladjustment criteria; (b) negative events, but not positive events, however scored, were significantly related to the maladjustment criteria; (c) indices based on psychologist-judges' ratings of event desirability were not more predictive of the maladjustment criteria than were indices based on the adolescents' self-reports; and (d) uncontrollable negative events and controllable negative events were equally predictive of the maladjustment criteria.     

The family life cycle: Impressions

This paper is concerned with the kind of everyday family experiences that most of us have gone through. It is written in a style that is more poetry than science, but, like poetry, probably gets closer to the truth about the nature of family life than does more technical conceptual material. Too often professionals write in such abstract, theoretical terms about families that they end up sounding unlike any family you ever knew. In this paper, I tried to write about the natural, typical incidents that occur to people as they get married, have kids, grow old, and die. It is hoped that the reader will connect and identify with these evocations, get shocks of recognition, as well as, who knows, some private chuckles. Families are where you live, emotionally and physically. Our family experiences — the passions, hates, loves, mysteries, paradoxes, measureless sacrifices, joys, injustices, jealousies, storms, comforts, bonds, and patterns— are burned into the cauldrons of the mind. The family memories lived through intimate others persist through space and time, sometimes sharply, usually as vague wisps of unremembered pasts, shaping the meanings of our lives and those close to us. The family, not anatomy, is destiny.a founder and past president of the American Family Therapy Academy.Editor's Note: This paper by Jim Framo was written 25 years ago, but for various reasons has not been published until now. Despite the fact that it focuses on the traditional middleclass family in the United States, it has wider implications and appeal than that focus.     

Called home: The creation of family life

Engendering family life is a spiritual process (theosis) based on human ethological constants of gender difference and generational turnover. Recent studies on ethnicity suggest that such a process retrieves a primordial sense of the human species as a whole, humankind. Families, especially in this broad sense, link together the living and the dead and, at their best, morally empower individuals who link their destinies to such a vision of creation and human health. Reference is made to work on human strengths and speciation by Erik Erikson and to that on maternal thinking by Sara Ruddick. A political program by which an ideology of familism can be made is offered.He is also Chairman of the Board of Management, Campus Kindergarten Company (Australia), Pty. Ltd.     

The web of work for technical and managerial employees

This study examines aspects of the job and off-job lives of technical and managerial employees. A framework for studying parallel dimensions in these two life spheres is developed. Variables include alienation—powerlessness and meaninglessness—and activities—variety, control, social interaction, and purpose. Findings show strong interaction between alienation from work and that experienced from life off the job. Limited relationships between activity dimensions were found. Overall, results suggest that employees' feelings of alienation carry over strongly between the two life spheres but that only limited carry-over occurs between job activities and those away from work. Findings give no support to the compensatory view of relationships between employees' job and off-job lives.     

The effect of life expectancy on aggression and generativity: A life history perspective

Following a model that is inclusive of both dispositional and situational influences on life-history behaviors and attitudes, the effect of life expectancies on aggression and generativity was examined. Consistent with the hypotheses it was found that shorter life expectancies led to an increase in the desire to aggress and a decrease in the desire to engage in generative behaviors. The results are discussed in terms of how life history theory can be used to frame research on person-situation interactions.     

敬畏生命是智慧的开端

敬畏是对万物尊严的直观,是对超然性的辨识。犹太-基督教认为,智慧由敬畏推动,敬畏是信仰的前提,是信仰的根源。人们应当接受敬畏的指导。丧失敬畏,就会缺少洞察力。科学主义是失去敬畏的结果。学术界最近对科学主义的讨论,说明人文精神开始崛起。科学主义大概是一种国产货。我们今天应当在世界大家庭的语境中说话或言说。敬畏自然与敬畏生命,二者同中有异。但是,我们所说的敬畏自然,一点也不意味着自然主义。我们反对科学技术的僭越。自然主义恰恰忽视不同于单纯物质的生命。国内学者已经普遍注意到人类道德的关怀应当扩大到人类之外的存在上。     

The family of later life: Strategies and interventions

The concerns of the family of later life have only recently become evident. Unlike other age groups, when problems of an elder surface, they almost always involve other family members. Family members tend to become highly involved, alter their lives, and offer support. All this provides a ready condition for family pathology to assert itself. Accordingly, three common strategies used by families of later life are presented and discussed. The effect on the whole family system is stressed. Also, two therapeutic interventions are presented. Since problems related to elders are particularly resistant to therapy, these two interventions are designed for well family members. Case material is presented.     

The last moments of life: Learning to cope

A large portion of youthful death in this country is caused by the intentional self‐destructive behavior of individuals who experience helplessness, alienation, loneliness, who suffer from social neglect, and who react to the loss of significant others. Analysts of youthful suicide view such events as being associated with attempts to cope with stress and crisis. This article describes those social forces that shaped the acts of suicide and provides a partial explanation for suicidal behavior among young people. As a strategy employed by the victims to cope with problems in living, suicide is, the author suggests, a plausible response to stress prompted in part by a fatalistic attitude.     

The dialectic of life

In the dialectic of debates about the extension of life, one witnesses a predictably repeating pattern: one side appeals to a motley of variegated criteria for something’s qualifying as a living system, only to find an opposite side taking issue with the individual necessity or collective sufficiency of the proposed criteria. Some of these criteria tend to cluster with one another, while others do not: metabolism, growth and reproduction; self-organization and homeostasis; an ability to decrease internal entropy by the appropriation of free energy; stimulus response suited to self-preservation and propagation; and adaptation. In competing approaches to the extension of life, these sundry criteria thus jockey for authority, with one group of theorists promoting some subset of them as essential for life, where the appeal to essence is as likely as not to be a simple modal sine qua non, and another denying that the nominated criteria are really necessary at all. The debate then stalls, because there seems to be no shared methodology for adjudicating such disputes. We may address this unhappy situation successfully by coming to appreciate that life is what we may call a core-dependent homonym.     

生命之灯

贫道回到故乡,在一个漆黑的夜晚,来到一个荒僻的村落中,在羊肠小径,村民们默默的来来往往着。正想离开此地,看见远处有一点微弱的灯亮移动过来。这时身旁的一个人说:“瞎子过来了。”贫道百思不得其解。一个双目失明的盲人,他没有一丝白天与黑夜的概念,他看不到庄严的神像,看不