Parenting After a Natural Disaster: A Qualitative Study of Norwegian Families Surviving the 2004 Tsunami in Southeast Asia

How do parents support their children after a high-impact disaster? To answer this question, face-to-face interviews were conducted with 51 Norwegian parents. These parents and children were all severely exposed to the trauma of the tsunami disaster. The analyses show how parents interpret their children’s signs of distress, as well as their own strategies of support in the aftermath. The main strategies described by the parents were watchful waiting, careful monitoring of the children’s reactions and a sensitive timing when providing support. Such monitoring, and interpretation of signs of distress, served as an aid for the parents in determining what needs their children had and what support they therefore needed to provide. A range of support strategies were employed, including re-establishing a sense of safety, resuming normal roles and routines, and talking to their children. Parents who were themselves severely impacted by the disaster reported a reduced ability to assess their children’s reactions and thereby were unable to provide optimal care in the aftermath. Interestingly, the parents’ support strategies mirror the early intervention recommendations put forward in the NICE guidelines and in the Psychological First Aid guidelines which is a well accepted and promising practice for helping children after disasters.     

Coming to an end: A case study of an ambiguous process of ending psychotherapy

Aim: When the duration of therapy is not preset and the outcome is a matter for negotiation, the decision to end psychotherapy will be an experiential concern for the two participants. This case study draws attention to how ambiguities may be settled in a process where ending is initiated by the therapist and resisted by the client. Method and analysis: The actual case was strategically selected as exceptional owing to a combination of circumstances. The client and the therapist had developed a ‘good enough’ alliance (WAI) and reached a ‘good enough’ outcome (OQ‐45), and still the client felt she was far from finished. A close inspection of interactional data in sessions together with both clients' and therapists' reflections in post‐therapy interviews elicited information about both substantial content and structural aspects of this complicated process of ending. Findings and discussion: The discrepancy between therapist and client was not addressed, but rather postponed and revisited again later. Structural elements like preparations for a break for vacations and reducing the frequency of sessions were used to test experiential qualities, such as how the client managed life without therapy. Carefully preserving a ‘good enough’ emotional bond through the negotiations seemed important to both parties. Significantly, the client's autonomy was interpreted as the final proof of improvement and the client came to a point where she could affirm that she had got better only by accepting that treatment was coming to an end.     

Emotions on the move: Mobile emotions among train commuters in the South East of Denmark

The overall aim of this paper is to discuss how including, and stressing, emotions in research enables us to understand the experience of commuting as an everyday practice that has more meaning than a journey from A to B. The paper shows how emotions are practiced and produced while commuting, and how these emotions are crucial for the production of social space onboard trains. In doing so it draws on ethnographical research conducted while following various commuting communities and individual commuters. The paper concludes that the emotional practice of commuting produces an ever changing space where the practices of commuting with all their variations fill and add to lives on board and outside of the train.     

Expression of negative affect during face‐to‐face interaction: a double video study of young infants' sensitivity to social contingency

The purpose was to assess infants' sensitivity to social contingency, taking affective state into account, during face‐to‐face interaction with the mother in a double video set‐up. Infants' behaviour during three sequences of live face‐to‐face interaction were compared to two sequences where the interaction between the infant and the mother was set out of phase, by presenting either the infant or the mother with a replay of their partners' behaviour during earlier live interaction. We found a significant negative correlation between the infant's degree of negative affect and the average time of looking at the mother during the live sequences. A median split was calculated to separate the infants into a high‐negative‐affect group and a low‐negative‐affect group on the basis of their emotional responses during the experiment. The low‐negative‐affect infants looked significantly more at their mothers than other foci during the live but not the replay sequences, while the high‐negative‐affect infants did not show this difference. The results suggest that 2–4‐month old infants are able to distinguish between experimental distortion of contingent aspects in live and replay sequences, but that this effect of the replay condition may not be shown by moderate to highly distressed infants. Our findings underline the importance of taking infants' emotional state into account in experiments intended to assess their capacity for intersubjective communication. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Effects of Social Identity and Perceived Autonomy Support on Health Behaviour Within the Theory of Planned Behaviour

The present study employed constructs from self-determination theory, social-identity theory, and the theory of planned behaviour to examine the combined effects that social identity and perceived autonomy support exerted on attitudes, intentions and health behaviour. A prospective design was employed measuring constructs from the theory of planned behaviour, group norms, group identification, and perceived autonomy support at baseline and physical activity behaviour 5 weeks later. Self-report questionnaires were administered to 231 pupils (male = 113, female = 118, M = 14.21 years, SD = .90). Hierarchical regression analysis demonstrated that group norms predicted participation in physical activities and attitudes, but only for participants who identified strongly with their group. Perceived autonomy support predicted attitudes, intentions and behaviour. The effects of perceived autonomy support and social-identity constructs were independent. It was concluded that both social identity and perceived autonomy support should be included in the theory of planned behaviour.     

Self–other contingencies: Enacting social perception

Can we see the expressiveness of other people's gestures, hear the intentions in their voice, see the emotions in their posture? Traditional theories of social cognition still say we cannot because intentions and emotions for them are hidden away inside and we do not have direct access to them. Enactive theories still have no idea because they have so far mainly focused on perception of our physical world. We surmise, however, that the latter hold promise since, in trying to understand cognition, enactive theory focuses on the embodied engagements of a cognizer with his world. In this paper, we attempt an answer for the question What is social perception in an enactive account? In enaction, perception is conceived as a skill, crucially involving action (perception is action and action is perception), an ability to work successfully within the set of regularities, or contingencies that characterize a given domain. If this is the case, then social perception should be a social skill. Having thus transformed the question of what social perception is into that of what social skill is, we examine the concept of social contingencies and the manner in which social skills structure—both constrain and empower—social interaction. Some of the implications of our account for how social and physical perception differ, the role of embodiment in social interaction and the distinction between our approach and other social contingency theories are also addressed.     

A Dangerous Subject: The Fashion Model and the Beauty/Narcissism Double Bind

In the wake of modernity, women's sexuality was positioned in a way that created a beauty/narcissism double bind that is still with us today. My concern in this article is that the subject position of “fashion model” serves as a constant reminder of this split, which is directed at all women and weakens the generalized woman's political agency. Fashion models themselves experience harassment and humiliation as well as pleasure and desire in their work as fashion models. However, the small portion of feminist work that has engaged explicitly with the fashion‐model business sees it mainly as an enterprise that is alienating and hostile to women. Although I do not entirely disagree with this analysis, it neglects the meaning of beauty and what beauty does to us with regard to creativity and pleasure. I wish to explore how some of the work experience of fashion models intersects with and challenges the beauty/narcissism double bind. I suggest that rather than grounding our understanding of the subject position “fashion model” and the fashion business solely in their reinforcement of the beauty/narcissism double bind, we should pay attention to the importance of what beauty and aspects of narcissism may mean.     

Child-rearing in an indigenous Sami population in Norway: a cross-cultural comparison of parental attitudes and expectations

Semi-structured interviews of 76 Sami mothers and 58 Sami fathers, and 86 Norwegian mothers and 58 Norwegian fathers of four-year olds, revealed consistent cross-cultural differences in parenting. ANCOVA results showed that parental permissiveness was higher in the Sami group. Moreover, the effect of ethnicity was different for boys and girls (mothers' reports). Co-sleeping and self-regulation of food and sleep were commonly practiced in the Sami, but not in the Norwegian families. Sami children were more socially independent than their Norwegian peers. Indirect or internal types of control were used more by Sami parents, and they were less tolerant of child aggression, in the form of temper tantrums and displays of jealousy. These patterns are similar to those found in other indigenous cultures in the circumpolar region. The results are discussed with reference to the Individualism-Collectivism dimension. The study challenges the Individualism-Collectivism construct for apparently confounding the individualism common in European liberalism with the individual autonomy commonly encountered among hunting-gathering peoples.