JOB SEEKING SKILL GROUPS

Deinstitutionalization of psychiatric patients to community living arrangements has increased the demand for psychiatric rehabilitation services. Although job seeking skill groups have reported success with varied rehabilitation populations, to date little research has attempted to adapt these methods to a group of chronic psychiatric patients. Forty-four patient entered a ten week job seeking skills group designed to increase their effectiveness in job interviews. At follow-up, over one-third were productively employed and over half of the subjects reported satisfaction with their community adjustment. The results suggest that although employment is a viable goal, it is not the only factor which determines successful community adjustment.     

FOCUS: European Views on Complexity,Recursion, and Planetary Ethics Preface to the FOCUS Section

Global geographical patterns of repressive, painful, traumatic, and violent patrist behaviors and social institutions, which thwart materal‐infant and male‐female bonds, were correlated and developed through a systematic analysis of anthropological data on 1170 subsistence‐level cultures. When the behavior data were mapped, the hyperarid desert belt encompassing North Africa, the Near East, and Central Asia, which I call Saharasia, was found to possess the greatest areal extent of the most extreme patrist behaviors and social institutions on Earth. Regions farthest removed from Saharasia, in Oceania and the New World, were found to possess the most extreme matrist behaviors, which support and protect maternal‐infant and male‐female bonds. A systematic review of archaeological and historical materials suggests that patrism first developed in Saharasia after c.4000 BCE, the time of a major ecological transition from relatively wet grassland‐forest conditions to arid desert conditions. Settlement and migration patterns of patrist peoples were traced, from their earliest homelands in Saharasia, to explain the later appearance of patrism in regions outside of Saharasia. Prior to the onset of dry conditions in Saharasia, evidence for matrism is widespread, but evidence for patrism is generally nonexistent. It is argued that matrism constitutes the earliest, original, and innate form of human behavior and social organization, while patrism, perpetuated by trauma‐inducing social institutions, first developed among Homo Sapiens in Saharasia, under the pressures of severe desertification, famine, and forced migrations.     

SEQUENTIAL STRUCTURE OF INTERACTION IN ENCOUNTER GROUPS

This study investigated patterned distribution of communication across time in an effort to assess temporal development in T-groups through the use of verbal interaction measures. Two groups conducted with a “meaning-attribution” facilitation style had their verbal interaction recorded as contiguous units of communication. Factor analysis of interaction categories produced nine dimensions labeled: Antagonistic, Assertive-Supportive, Dominant Assertive, Aggressive-Assertive, Assertive, Reactions to Group Laughter, Task-Determining Activity, Reactions to Group Tension, and Supportive-ness. Analysis of the cell means indicated three separate stages of group life could be extrapolated from the sequential distribution of interaction: Boundary-seeking, Ambivalence, and Actualization.     

MOTHERS' DEVELOPMENTAL TIMETABLES IN TWO CULTURAL GROUPS*

To explore differences in concepts about development, mothers in two cultural groups were interviewed to determine: (a) their developmental timetables (the ages at which they expected various skills to appear); (b) the extent to which they taught various skills before school; and (c) the extent to which they perceived several qualities, once established, as stable over time. Variables were the child's gender, the child's birth order (first or not first to begin school), and the mother's ethnic background (Australian-born or Lebanese-born). Gender and birth order showed minimal effects; ethnicity had a strong effect in areas (a) and (b) but not (c). The results bring out the content of mothers' ideas, raise questions about factors affecting this content, and point to some aspects of mothers' ideas as inter-related.     

FOCUS INTRODUCTION: TOWARD SHARING VALUES ACROSS CULTURES AND RELIGIONS

The contributors to this focus issue participated in a unique gathering of over sixty scholars in Lukenya, Kenya in January 2009, organized by Globethics.net. The three contributions here by Sumner B. Twiss, Shanta Premawardhana, and Ariane Hentsch Cisneros are not the outcome of the deliberations and discussions there; however, they led to the idea of this focus issue. Each essay incorporates major aspects of the general themes discussed in different groups at the Lukenya meeting: (1) defining global ethics; (2) ensuring a successful interreligious dialogue on ethics; (3) integrating means and methods of sharing values in a human to human approach; (4) balancing power relations, inducing a real transformation; and (5) sharing values in the Kenyan and East‐African contexts.     

THE WILL ROGERS ILLUSION IN JUDGMENTS ABOUT SOCIAL GROUPS

Abstract— Subjects' judgments of the mean of 12 scores were influenced by the way in which the scores were dichotomized. The estimated mean was higher when the three highest scores formed one group (e.g., payments for women) and the nine lowest formed the other (e.g., payments for men) than when the nine highest were one group and the three lowest the other. We call this phenomenon the Will Rogers Illusion (WRI). The WRI occurred only when estimates of the subgroup means were made prior to the estimates of the mean of the whole group. When the latter mean was judged first, the WRI was reversed. These and other data indicate that the means of subgroups can influence judgments of group means, a finding that is relevant to research on social stereotypes.     

A STOCHASTIC ANALYSIS OF COMMUNICATION DEVELOPMENT IN SELF-ANALYTIC GROUPS

The purpose of this research was to examine patterns of information-processing over time in self-analytic groups. The communication in two groups was categorized by means of the Systems Information Processing Analysis (SIPA) category system. Messages were coded on four dimensions of information-processing: (1) source of information, (2) time orientation, (3) evolution of information, and (4) reduction of equivocality. The sequence of coded messages was then compared with a first-order Markov chain model. The results indicate the communication data from the groups are first-order; the groups are nonhomogeneous; stereotypy (predictability of patterns) is low to moderately high across the four dimensions; patterns in the evolution of information dimension are stationary over time. Patterns in the three other SIPA dimensions are nonstationary (time dependent) and suggest nonlinear changes. The information-processing patterns in the groups indicate that most information was spontaneously generated within the groups; the predominate time orientation was “present”; the form of message generally was either neutral opinion or new information; and moderate to moderately high uncertainty existed over time.