From the private I to the public ear: Effective learning groups for college-age students

This paper addresses the problem of organizing and conducting groups at a college counseling center. It focuses on the importance of a therapist learning from his/her errors, of appropriately matching a client with a particular group and of preparing clients and group leaders for work with a group. The concept of boundary management is used as a way to understand group events and to make sense of group leader errors. Throughout the paper, attention is given to how best to develop groups within the unique framework of a college community.This paper was presented at Brandeis University's Conference on Psychological Work with College Students, November 6, 1982. It was written in the memory of Eugenia Hanfmann, Ph.D., who as Director of the Brandeis University Counseling Center encouraged the author to appreciate the value of learning from his errors! In writing this paper the author is grateful for the support and for the suggestions offered by his colleagues, Bruce Weiss, Ph.D., and E. Martin Schotz, M.D.     

Post-Adoption Services for High-Risk Families and Their Children: Preliminary Results of a State-Wide Intervention

Despite well-documented post-adoption needs of adoptive families, most states provide no or very limited post-adoption services. This study describes Right Turn® (RT), a state-wide program for strengthening adoptive families and preventing adoption dissolution. Results suggest: (a) RT is serving its targeted audience of adoptive families with challenging problems indicated by older adopted children with a history of multiple placements, extended time in social services systems, and a host of mental health challenges; and (b) adoption training, family support when navigating access to post-adoption services, and collaboration with adoption-competent therapists appeared to have helped improve program outcomes.     

The fundamental and the brute

Philosophical Studies - This paper distinguishes bruteness from fundamentality by developing a theory of stochastic grounding that makes room for non-fundamental bruteness. Stochastic grounding...     

The Flesh and The Devil: Belief in Religious Evil and Views of Sexual Morality

Review of Religious Research - We examine an understudied connection between religion and sexuality: beliefs about the reality of supernatural evil (Satan, hell, and demons). After controlling for...     

Religion,Self Control,and Substance Use

Previous research has examined a number of mechanisms through which religion might have an indirect influence on substance use. One potential intervening mechanism that has received little empirical attention is self control. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) we (1) examine the association between religion and self control, (2) determine if self control mediates the effect of religiosity on substance use, and (3) determine if the effect of self control on substance use varies depending on adolescents’ religiosity. The results suggest that religious youth exhibit higher levels of self control. Also, self control partially mediates the effect of adolescents’ religiosity on marijuana use and drinking. The only evidence we find for an interaction between self control and religiosity suggests self control has a moderately greater effect on alcohol use among those of low, rather than medium or high, religiosity.     

Experiential pre-group preparation and screening

This article describes an experiential approach to pre-group preparation and screening. The technique is described in some detail, as is the underlying rationale. The authors believe that such an approach to pre-group preparation and screening expands upon the more familiar cognitive approaches and allows both therapist and patient a trial run of group psychotherapy.     

Pre-group preparation model for long-term group psychotherapy in a private practice setting

In this paper the authors describe a method of pre-group preparation which has the function of establishing and maintaining a working alliance between the client and the therapist, reducing unproductive anxiety, generating hope for future productive therapeutic work, as well as providing the therapist with a screening technique for assessing the type of group composition that would be most beneficial for the client.We are grateful to our colleague, the late Walter Gruen, whose comments on this paper contributed to the final product.     

Selection in touch: negative priming with tactile stimuli

Abundant experimental evidence has demonstrated attentional selection within the visual modality. Furthermore, the consensus view is currently that two processes contribute to selection: the amplification of the target stimuli and the ignoring (or suppression) of any distractor information. However, at present it is less clear how selection is achieved within the tactile modality. In the present study, we analyze the aftereffects of ignoring tactile distractors, in a novel tactile variant of the negative priming paradigm. In the typical negative priming paradigm, repeating an ignored distractor stimulus as the target on the following trial usually leads to a cost in terms of reaction times (RTs) or error rates, thereby indicating that selection is achieved in part by the ignoring of distractors. In two experiments, we observed significant RT costs when a previously ignored vibrotactile stimulus constituted the target in the next trial. This result shows that tactile selection is in part achieved by active ignoring of distractor representations, as has been shown previously in both the visual and auditory modalities.     

Case and Reanalysis

In this paper we discuss an asymmetry in the Case system of German and its implications for human sentence processing: the asymmetry between nominative/accusative and dative case. Starting from the assumption that dative case has a distinct grammatical representation--dative DPs are embedded into an extra structural layer KP--the results of two experiments will be presented, which show that dative assignment during reanalysis is accompanied by additional processing operations that are not needed when accusative or nominative are assigned. In particular, we show that dative assignment during reanalysis triggers reaccess to the mental lexicon, giving rise to greater processing difficulty. We conclude with a discussion of empirical and theoretical consequences of our findings.