Mentoring and Networking for Helping Professionals

Awareness of mentoring and networking assists helping professionals personally and as they work with and guide their students and clients toward their life and career goals.     

Comfortably Numb: Desensitizing Effects of Violent Media on Helping Others

ABSTRACT— Two studies tested the hypothesis that exposure to violent media reduces aid offered to people in pain. In Study 1, participants played a violent or nonviolent video game for 20 min. After game play, while completing a lengthy questionnaire, they heard a loud fight, in which one person was injured, outside the lab. Participants who played violent games took longer to help the injured victim, rated the fight as less serious, and were less likely to "hear" the fight in comparison to participants who played nonviolent games. In Study 2, violent- and nonviolent-movie attendees witnessed a young woman with an injured ankle struggle to pick up her crutches outside the theater either before or after the movie. Participants who had just watched a violent movie took longer to help than participants in the other three conditions. The findings from both studies suggest that violent media make people numb to the pain and suffering of others.     

Helping Others Shows Differential Benefits on Health and Well-being for Male and Female Teens

Objectives Adults who engage in altruistic social interest behaviors experience better mental health and have lower mortality rates than non-altruistic adults. The present study investigated the relationship between altruism and health and well-being in teens, and demographic and lifestyle variables. Methods A cross-sectional survey was implemented with a national sample of teens recruited through the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Measures included the PedsQL, the Ryff Psychological Well-Being Scale, and a new self-report scale of Altruism (subscales: Receiving/ Providing Emotional Support, Family Helping Behavior, General Helping Behavior, and Helping Orientation). Results Data were collected from 457 teens (M age = 15.6, sd 1.2). Psychometric analyses revealed that a five-factor model fit the altruism data well. Multivariate regression revealed no association between providing emotional support and psychosocial health. There were, however, many associations between altruism and well-being, and differential associations by gender. Family helping was the most salient aspect of altruism for males, showing associations with positive social relations, purpose in life, and self-acceptance. For females, General Helping Behavior was associated with positive social relations, and Helping Orientation was associated with better purpose in life. Family Helping was associated with better physical health in females, but not for males. The only correlates of altruism were higher age, more physical activity, and engaging in positive religious coping. Conclusions Altruism is positively associated with health for females and with well-being for both males and females. Different gender-specific interventions to guide teens in doing more altruistic activities may have to be designed to capitalize on these different associations.

Helping New Acquaintances Make the Right Impression: Balancing Image Concerns of Others and Self

People strategically regulate information about the identities of friends to help those friends create desired impressions on audiences. Are people willing to help acquaintances manage their impressions, and if so, are such efforts moderated by the helper's own self-presentational concerns? Participants were 234 same-sex strangers who went through a structured self-disclosure procedure designed to induce psychological closeness. They later described this partner to an opposite-sex third party who supposedly preferred either extraverts or introverts as ideal dates, and who their partner regarded as attractive and wanted to impress or as unattractive and did not care to impress. As predicted, participants described their partners consistently with the preferences of the attractive other, but only when their own self-presentational concerns about accuracy were low. If the third party was unattractive, participants whose accuracy concerns were low tended to describe their partners opposite the preferences of the other, suggesting they were “not your type.” The results indicated that beneficial impression management occurs even among acquaintances, but is held in check by self-presentational concerns about accuracy.     

Cross-Cultural Awareness: A Framework for Interaction

In order to facilitate cross-cultural understanding, a framework for interaction is provided by focusing on personal experience and on attrition theory and the W-curve,     

Analysis of Self-Reported Motives for Task-Related Helping: Implications for an Integrated Theory of Helping

Purpose

In organizations where work is complex, dynamic and interdependent, maintaining an environment where employees offer help to one another is essential for organizational effectiveness. This research is aimed at understanding the antecedent motives underlying task-related interpersonal helping.

Design/Methodology/Approach

The research took an atypical approach by asking employees directly to explain in their own words why they would, or would not, help co-workers with work-related problems. Content analysis yielded five categories of motives for helping. The qualitative motive categories were able to explain variance in quantitative scales assessing respondents’ affect, attitudes, organizational perceptions, and demographics.

Findings

Employees who gave altruistic reasons for helping (i.e., helping was a personal value or a contribution to the team) reported performing more helping behaviors, expressed greater organizational commitment, and perceived more organizational justice than did employees who expected reciprocity for helping, or whose help was contingent.

Implications

No existing theory of helping explains the total collection of motives identified in this research. We encourage researchers to develop integrated theories capable of explaining the totality of motives for task-related helping. Our research identities several essential parameters of such integrated theories and provides guidance for carrying out the task of theory integration.

Originality/Value

This phenomenological research is the only empirical investigations into task-related helping based on respondents’ own reasons for helping. It also is one of the few to incorporate both qualitative and quantitative methodologies.     

Physical Distance and Helping: Some Unexpected Benefits of “Crowding In” on Others1

One hundred and sixty undergraduates (80 males, 80 females) participated in a field experiment designed to examine the influence of invasions of personal space and sex of requester upon subsequent helping. On the basis of previous research, it was predicted that helping would be markedly inhibited by invasions of personal space, and that the magnitude of these effects would be mediated by the sex of the individuals who perpetrated such intrusions. Surprisingly, however, results indicated that subsequent helping was actually facilitated by such invasions. A follow-up investigation replicated these results and suggested that they stemmed from a tendency on the part of subjects to perceive close physical approach by the requester as indicative of a high need for assistance.     

Traditional Healing in Africa: Implications for Cross-Cultural Counseling

Even though the change in Africa from traditional societies to modern ones is evident in many institutions throughout the continent, the transition is uneven. One institution that seems to have changed little over the years is the healing establishment. In general, traditional healers still treat their patients as their forebears did in the distant past. This article indicates who the indigenous doctors are, the role the family plays in health maintenance, the nature of the healing relationship, what diagnostic techniques are used, the specific healing methods used, how music is used as a therapeutic accompaniment, how healers are selected and prepared, and the implications of traditional healing for cross-cultural counseling. Aunque el cambio en Africa desde sociedades tradicionales a sociedades modernas es evidente en muchas instituciones por todo el continente, la transición es desigual. Una de las instituciones que parece haber cambiado poco a través de los años es la del curandero. En general, los curanderos tradicionales todavía tratan a sus clientes de la misma manera que sus antepasados. Este artículo indica quienes son los doctores indígenas, el papel de la familia en el mantamiento de la salud, el cáracter de la relación de curación, las ténicas de diagnóstico que se usan, los métodos específicos de curación, cómo se usa la música como acompañamiento terapeútico, cómo se escogen y preparan los curanderos, y las implicaciones de la curación traditional en la consejería intercultural.     

Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others

ABSTRACT— Positive self-statements are widely believed to boost mood and self-esteem, yet their effectiveness has not been demonstrated. We examined the contrary prediction that positive self-statements can be ineffective or even harmful. A survey study confirmed that people often use positive self-statements and believe them to be effective. Two experiments showed that among participants with low self-esteem, those who repeated a positive self-statement ("I'm a lovable person") or who focused on how that statement was true felt worse than those who did not repeat the statement or who focused on how it was both true and not true. Among participants with high self-esteem, those who repeated the statement or focused on how it was true felt better than those who did not, but to a limited degree. Repeating positive self-statements may benefit certain people, but backfire for the very people who "need" them the most.     

Collaborative Helping: A Practice Framework for Family-Centered Services

This article offers a framework for collaborative family-centered practice that can reinvigorate our work with families who have not responded to more traditional approaches. Collaborative Helping is grounded in family-centered principles that include: striving for cultural curiosity, believing in resourcefulness, working in partnership, and making our work more accountable to the clients we serve. The article introduces collaborative inquiry as an organizing metaphor for clinical practice and offers a five-step practice framework with clinical illustrations and sample questions. The framework draws from appreciative inquiry, motivational interviewing, the signs of safety approach to child protection work, and solution-focused and narrative therapies.