Readers' Forum

The presence of intense and pervasive denial is a ubiquitous phenomenon in working with incest offenders and their families. This extraordinary defensiveness against acknowledging the occurrence of incest serves as a major resistance to the effective engagement of such families in rehabilitative efforts and often leads to the abandonment of the children and their families. This report is an attempt to illustrate clinically the working through of this denial in a group of incestuous fathers in a protective service setting in the community—a case management group work model designed to reach those children and their families who could not or would not testify in court against the sexually abusive father.     

Readers' experiences of characters' goals and actions

In this article, the authors examined readers' sensitivity to the match between characters' goals and characters' actions. In Experiment 1, readers integrated actions consistent with characters' goals more easily when there was a match between the extremeness of the actions and the urgency of the goals. In Experiments 2 and 3, characters' actions were consistent with either explicit or implicit goals. Participants showed different sensitivity to the mismatch between actions and urgent goals when they simply read the actions (Experiment 2) versus when they judged the likelihood of the actions (Experiment 3). Taken together, these results offer an account of how readers experience actions and goals when engaged in both local and global processing.