Psychological Contours of Multicultural Feminist Hermeneutics: Han and Relationality

The two key psychological contours, han and relationality, in interpreting and understanding biblical texts among Korean/Asian North American women are discussed. The Old Testament biblical narrative of Jephthah’s daughter (Judges 11) is employed in order to demonstrate how the concepts and the interconnectedness of han and relationality are being played out in the minds of Korean/Asian North American women. Some practical suggestions are offered for preachers, Bible teachers, pastoral counselors, and caregivers in assisting Korean/Asian North American women with their hermeneutical processes.

Re-Collection in Existential Psychotherapy with Couples and Families Dealing with Death

Re-collection is a treatment dynamic in existential family therapy in which the client family is helped to remember and honor meanings that family members have previously actualized and deposited in the past. This shrinks the family meaning vacuum and those symptoms and problems that grow and flourish in a family meaning vacuum. In this article, an existential orientation to re-collection with families who are dealing with the death of a loved one is presented, described, and illustrated with case material.     

A Multicultural Application of Attachment Theory with Immigrant Families: Contextual and Developmental Adaptations

This article explores attachment theory from a multicultural perspective to highlight adaptive considerations for immigrant families. The specific considerations of the theory reviewed are (1) attachment sensitivity based on social and cultural context and (2) the effect of maturation on families’ developmental needs and how this can be integrated within context. A case conceptualization of a Bosnian immigrant family living within the United States will highlight potential variations in the adaptation process. How therapists can support in providing culturally-sensitive applications of attachment theory to promote family relationships will be discussed.     

Measuring Myths about Domestic Violence: Development and Initial Validation of the Domestic Violence Myth Acceptance Scale

The past 2.5 decades have seen explosive growth in research and practice in the area of intimate partner violence (IPV), especially of perpetrators. In the present paper, the author reflects on his observations of key developments in the field and examines research that has increased our understanding of batterers, who they are, and how we might best work with them to end IPV. Issues and controversies that surround batterer treatment and research with batterers are also examined. The author calls for continued development of an empirical base to guide theory development and practice standards, as well as increased dissemination and translation of research into formats that are useful to clinicians.     

Barriers to Treatment in an Ethnically Diverse Sample of Families Enrolled in a Community-Based Domestic Violence Intervention

Using quantitative and qualitative data, we examined the association between barriers to treatment, motivating factors, treatment attendance, and outcome in a sample of 63 mothers (most of Asian or Pacific Islander descent) enrolled in a family-based domestic violence treatment program. A high number of perceived barriers was associated with lower attendance and lower scores on assessment of parenting practices at posttreatment. Mothers reported relying on their own motivation, observations of children's improvement, and the quality of their relationships with staff and group members to overcome barriers. A larger number of motivating factors was associated with positive parenting practices at posttreatment. Discussion includes the benefits of a mixed-method approach to measuring barriers and its clinical application to increase treatment participation.     

Solutions to the Research-Practice Gap in Domestic Violence: A Modified Delphi Study With Domestic Violence Coalition Leaders

The gap between research and practice in domestic violence (DV) has the potential to hinder advancements in both areas. This study used modified Delphi methodology to seek potential solutions for integrating DV research and practice. Expert panel members were representatives of DV coalitions who hold primary responsibility for determining the content of the training program and materials provided by coalitions to service providers. Through three rounds of questionnaires, potential solutions were identified in six areas: access to research, the practical application of research, DV coalitions' needs and usage of research, perceptions of research and researchers, researcher-practitioner collaborations, and the goals of DV. The findings of the study are integrated into recommendations for researchers and DV organizations.     

Understanding Familial/Cultural Factors in Adolescent Depression: A Culturally-Competent Treatment for Working With Chinese American Families

A significant challenge for researchers and clinicians is in the process of determining culturally sensitive strategies to ensure treatment effectiveness with ethnic populations in the United States. This article highlights key aspects of treating Chinese American families where a child is struggling with adolescent depression. Relevant literatures associated with adolescent depression and effective treatment of Chinese Americans are reviewed and organized according to the dimensions of therapist knowledge, awareness, and skills. Therapist guidelines are provided using key aspects of cognitive behavioral therapy. Additional suggestions are presented for culturally competent therapy with Chinese American youth and their families.     

Clinical Ethics and Intervention in Domestic Violence

Schizophrenia affects more than 1% of the world's population, causing great personal suffering and socioeconomic burden. These costs associated with schizophrenia necessitate inquiry into the causes and treatment of the illness but generate ethical challenges related to the specific nature and deficits of the illness itself. In this article, we present a systematic analysis of narrative data from 63 people living with the illness of schizophrenia collected through semistructured interviews about their attitudes, beliefs, and experiences related to psychiatric research. In the comments of these individuals, half of whom had had prior personal experience in research protocols, we identified factors influencing openness toward research involvement as well as deterrents that appear to lessen interest in participation. Clear response pattern differences emerged between those with prior research experience and those without such experience. In the discussion, we explore these key findings and outline the implications for safeguards in mental illness research.     

Rewards and Dangers in Researching Domestic Violence

The purpose of this article is to present a framework that reconciles the goals of advocates for victims of domestic violence with the goals of clinical researchers who study this phenomenon. I will be discussing the tension between those goals, and the way a research model can complement advocacy goals.     

Marital Equality and Satisfaction in Stay-At-Home Mother and Stay-At-Home Father Families

Two recent studies have focused on marital equality and satisfaction in couples where one of the spouses stays at home full-time with the children and the other spouse works full-time outside of the home. One study looked at couples with a stay-at-home mother/career father while the other study examined couples with a stay-at-home father/career mother. Similarities as well as differences emerged between the two samples when comparing the experiences of these couples. In general, couples in both arrangements shared positive feelings about their marriages, although the mothers across both samples reported higher levels of stress and exhaustion than fathers.     

Attitudes Toward Domestic Violence: Race and Gender Issues

Previous research has notextensively addressedhow attitudes toward domestic violence vary betweenethnicities and genders. This experiment utilizeddomestic violence scenarios with the husband's andwife's ethnicities varied to form four combinations ofEuropean-American and African-American couples.Participants were 156 European-American (87 female and69 male) and 109 African-American (73 female and 36 male)undergraduate introductory psychologystudents aged 18-24 years. Participants read thescenario and completed 7 questionnaires about theirattitudes toward the scenario, domestic violence, andwomen. Analyses showed that women relative to menblamed the husband more for the abuse, sympathized morewith the wife, and rated the incident as more serious,and African-American participants sympathized more with African-American victims. In addition,participants blamed the African-American husband lessfor the abuse than the EuropeanAmerican husband. Bothwomen and European-Americans, relative to men and African-Americans, had more positive views ofwomen and disapproved more strongly of wife beating.This research demonstrates that participant gender andethnicity, as well as abuser and victim ethnicity, do have an effect on attitudes toward domesticviolence.     

Women Court-Ordered for Domestic Violence: Improvements in Depression

A quasi-experimental design was employed to compare depression at intake and completion of a sample of primarily Latina women court-ordered to a batterer intervention program. Data were derived from the intake assessments of 112 women over 24 months. Overwhelmingly, women reported being abused by their current and former partners. Approximately 58% of the women in this sample were depressed at intake. When culturally competent, gender-appropriate treatment is given to court-ordered women, depression symptomatology may decrease to levels of normal functioning. Further research is needed to understand court-ordered women as well as how to meet their unique needs.     

Working memory in older subjects: Dealing with ongoing and stored information in language comprehension

The purpose of this experiment was to investigate the role of aging in working memory (WM), or at least the part involved in language comprehension, e.g., a double function of processing the ongoing information and keeping in memory the product of this processing. Young and older subjects were asked to simultaneously detect incongruities in sentences and keep increasing longer series of words (3, 4, or 5) in memory. The difficulty of incongruity detection was manipulated by variation of the number of intervening words (0, 6, or 12) between two critical words. Incongruity detection was assumed to be linked to the processing of information function of working memory. The concurrent mnemonic load consisted of material previously processed, and was assumed to be linked to the storage function of WM. Results showed that an increment in incongruity-detection difficulty led to a greater decrement in accuracy in older than in young subjects, indicating an impairment in the information-processing function. On the other hand, an increment in concurrent mnemonic load led to a slightly smaller decrement in accuracy in older subjects. Furthermore, fewer words from this mnemonic load were recalled in older subjects. It is suggested that older subjects are impaired in coping with both requirements of the task, and tend to sacrifice the storage of information recently processed to devote their resources to the immediate processing component of the task. These results are discussed in relation to their implications for language comprehension.     

Cultivating Resilience in Families Who Foster: Understanding How Families Cope and Adapt Over Time

Families who foster offer essential care for children and youth when their own parents are unable to provide for their safety and well‐being. Foster caregivers face many challenges including increased workload, emotional distress, and the difficulties associated with health and mental health problems that are more common in children in foster care. Despite these stressors, many families are able to sustain fostering while maintaining or enhancing functioning of their unit. This qualitative study applied an adaptational process model of family resilience that emerged in previous studies to examine narratives of persistent, long‐term, and multiple fostering experiences. Data corroborated previous research in two ways. Family resilience was again described as a transactional process of coping and adaptation that evolves over time. This process was cultivated through the activation of 10 family strengths that are important in different ways, during varied phases.     

An Object-Relations Approach to Psychotherapy with Marital Couples,Families, and Children

AN APPROACH to object relations is presented here that conceptualizes the dynamics of interpersonal relationships. Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to provide a thorough review of the object-relations school of thought, the concepts introduced here have direct clinical implications for understanding and influencing the dynamics of the patient-therapist dyad, of the marital pair, and of the family unit. Included are the following concepts: (a) Couples in conflict are viewed as more similar than dissimilar despite apparent differences; (b) The therapist's countertransference reactions are seen as not irrational but a valid reflection of the patient's struggle; (c) The adult or child who is the identified patient is often a carrier or container of the split-off, unacceptable impulses of the other(s); (d) The individual is perceived as part of a unit in which even the more obvious pathological traits have an inherent healthy reparative function.     

Beyond Typologies: Foregrounding Meaning and Motive in Domestic Violence Perpetration

In this article we use a single case study to query the presumption, inherent in typological approaches to domestic violence perpetration, that offender motivations are unchanging and deducible from self-reports and official records. We highlight the need to engage interpretively with the specific meanings acts of violence hold for domestic violence perpetrators–informed, as they can be, by sexist perceptions of entitlement and histories of conflict, suspicion and grievance–and how these can change self-perceptions in the aftermath of assaults and breakups, as the foreground of crime is reincorporated into a background narrative.