Indigenous and Interdependent Perspectives of Healing: Implications for Counseling and Research

Because of the dramatic increases of culturally diverse individuals in the United States, indigenous perspectives of healing must be understood in the context of interdependent cultural selves. The authors present an extensive review of the literature with a focus on understanding the role of spirituality, balancing energies, close social networks, and interconnectedness in indigenous healing perspectives and philosophies. Examples of indigenous healing approaches are presented, and implications for counseling and research are discussed.     

Facing a Disruptive Face: Embodiment in the Everyday Experiences of “Disfigured” Individuals

In recent years, facial difference is increasingly on the public and academic agenda. This is evidenced by the growing public presence of individuals with an atypical face, and the simultaneous emergence of research investigating the issues associated with facial variance. The scholarship on facial difference approaches this topic either through a medical and rehabilitation perspective, or a psycho-social one. However, having a different face also encompasses an embodied dimension. In this paper, we explore this embodied dimension by interpreting the stories of individuals with facial limb absence against the background of phenomenological theories of the body, illness and disability. Our findings suggest that the atypical face disrupts these individuals’ engagement with everyday projects when it gives rise to disruptive perceptions, sensations, and observations. The face then ceases to be the absent background to perception, and becomes foregrounded in awareness. The disruptions evoked by facial difference call for adjustments: as they come to terms with their altered face, the participants in our study gradually develop various new bodily habits that re-establish their face’s absence, or relate to its disruptive presence. It is through these emergent habits that facial difference comes to be embodied. By analyzing the everyday experiences of individuals with facial limb absence, this article provides a much-needed exploration of the embodied aspects of facial difference. It also exemplifies how a phenomenological account of illness and disability can do justice both to the impairments and appearance issues associated with atypical embodiment.     

Thinness and eating expectancies predict subsequent binge-eating and purging behavior among adolescent girls

One's expectancies for reinforcement from eating or from thinness are thought to represent summaries of one's eating-related learning history and to thus influence the development of binge-eating and purging behavior. In a 3-year longitudinal study, the authors tested this hypothesis and the hypothesis that binge eating also influences subsequent expectancy development. The authors used trajectory analysis to identify groups of middle school girls who followed different trajectories of binge eating, purging, eating expectancies, and thinness expectancies. Initial eating and thinness reinforcement expectancies identified girls whose binge eating and purging increased during middle school, and expectancies differentiated girls who began these problem behaviors from girls who did not. Initial binge-eating scores differentiated among eating expectancy developmental trajectories. The onset of most behaviors can be understood in terms of learned expectancies for reinforcement from these behaviors. The same model can be applied to the risk for eating disorders.     

Effect of exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation on mobility and self-esteem of persons after cardiac surgery

This study adopted an experimental design with using a nonequivalent, posttest only control group to study the rehabilitation outcomes of 152 persons who received cardiac surgery. 37 subjects in a rehabilitation group participated in a 2-mo. exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation programme, and another 115 subjects who did not attend the programme formed the control group. The subjects' self-esteem was measured on the Adult Source of Self-esteem Inventory by Elvoson and Fleming, and their mobility skill was measured by a simple mobility test based on New York Heart Association Classification. Analysis of covariance (with covariance analysis of the subjects' age, years of education, occupational skill, and mobility skill) indicated that the experimental group scored higher on positive self esteem and showed significantly better improvement in mobility skill. The exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation programme positively affected physical and psychological outcomes. Also, subjects' self-esteem was significantly correlated with their mobility skills (r=.21, p<.05) among those aged under 60 years (n=96) but not among those aged 60 or above (n=53).     

Seasonality of suicide in Eastern Europe: a rejoinder to Lester and Moksony

Seasonality of suicide in Hungary decreased from the 1980s to the 1990s, supporting the 2003 conclusion of Lester and Moksony. However, it was the strongest ever to be documented with contemporary suicide data, supporting the conjecture of Voracek, et al. (2002) that seasonality of suicide remains high in Eastern Europe. A new hypothesis regarding the co-occurrence of high incidence and strong seasonality of suicide is presented.     

Lost in the wilderness: terror management, action orientation, and nature evaluation

The authors propose that wilderness is intrinsically associated with death, and, consequently, terror management concerns may promote more negative evaluations of wilderness. Consistent with this, wilderness inspired more thoughts about death than either cultivated nature or urban environments (Study 1), and death reminders reduced perceived beauty of wilderness (Study 2). The authors further suggest that active self-regulation facilitates suppression of the dark side of wilderness. Consistent with this, action orientation was positively related to perceived beauty of wilderness (Study 3), and after viewing wilderness, action-oriented individuals were more efficient at suppressing the association between wilderness and death than state-oriented individuals (Study 4). Direct death reminders overruled the effects of action orientation on nature evaluation (Study 5), presumably because direct death reminders are difficult to suppress even for action-oriented individuals.     

A comparison of personality function among patients with seasonal depression, nonseasonal depression, and nonclinical participants

Although a large body of research has accumulated concerning the relationship between nonseasonal depression and personality, comparatively few studies have examined the relationship between seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and personality. This study compared dimensional aspects of personality in patients diagnosed with SAD (N = 60), nonseasonal depression (N = 273), and nonclinical controls (N = 297) using the Dimensional Assessment of Personality Pathology (DAPP-BQ; Livesley & Jackson, in press). Analysis by ANCOVA indicated that significant between-group differences occurred in several of the 18 DAPP-BQ dimensions, with patients with SAD exhibiting personality psychopathology that was intermediate between the nonclinical sample and patients with nonseasonal depression. The results demonstrated that the traits associated with seasonal and nonseasonal depression differ in degree, not kind.