Using Scaling to Facilitate Ethical Decision-Making in Family Therapy

Ethical decision-making in family therapy is inherently complex, as it requires therapists to balance competing needs of multiple individuals and subsystems. Scaling offers a potential means of helping facilitate such decision-making, by encouraging attendance to the likely impact of various courses of action on individuals and subsystems as related to each of the core ethical principles underlying psychotherapeutic practice. This article explores the potential use of scaling in family therapists’ ethical decision-making through case examples. Benefits and risks of such an approach are reviewed.     

Creating Mentoring Relationships Between Female Faculty and Students in Counselor Education: Guidelines for Potential Mentees and Mentors

Mentoring can support all aspects of women's professional (and often personal) lives as students, educators, researchers, practitioners, and leaders in the counseling profession. So that female mentors and mentees know what to expect from each other, the authors draw upon the mentoring literature and their own experiences in mentoring relationships to provide guidelines for mentoring relationships by defining the means and ends that can be used to establish and maintain woman‐to‐woman professional mentoring in higher education.     

The timeline of threat processing in repressors: more evidence for early vigilance and late avoidance

Evidence is mixed concerning whether individuals with a repressive coping style can actually selectively avoid threatening stimuli. Recent research (Calvo & Eysenck, 2000) on repressors’ threat processing suggests that it is necessary to take into account the timeline of this bias. A spontaneous trait inference paradigm was used here to test the hypothesis that repressors would, relative to others, be less likely to infer unfavorable and threatening traits. However, if pressured to make trait inferences quickly, it was predicted that they would be less likely than others to infer favorable and unthreatening traits. Repressors and nonrepressors were presented with passages that could have supported positive or negative trait inferences. In Study 1, they were asked to respond to trait words as quickly as possible but were not held accountable for doing so. In Study 2, time pressure was increased to capture uncorrected trait inferences. Results indicated that repressors were more likely to make positive trait inferences than others when simply asked to respond quickly. Under time pressure, this bias disappeared. Results point to the importance of taking into account an important moderator between coping style and threat, namely, the stage of processing at which differences in threat processing are being assessed.     

Leisure and health: why is leisure therapeutic?

The purpose of this article is to examine the empirical evidence and describe theoretical perspectives that address under what conditions and why leisure can be therapeutic and contribute to health and well-being. This review of the literature provides empirical evidence that leisure can contribute to physical, social, emotional and cognitive health through prevention, coping (adjustment, remediation, diversion), and transcendence. After examining this empirical evidence, the article addresses why leisure is therapeutic and concludes by presenting two concepts useful to practitioners who desire to provide leisure guidance to help people avoid risk and maximise the therapeutic possibilities of leisure.     

Building Trust in Business Schools Through Ethical Governance

This paper presents conceptual arguments to suggest that trust within organizations and trustworthiness of organizations are built through ethical governance mechanisms. We ground our analysis of trust, trustworthiness, and stewardship in the business literature and provide the context of business school governance as the focus of our paper. We present a framework that highlights the importance of knowledge, resources, performance focus, transparency, authentic caring, social capital and citizenship expectations in creating a basis for the ethical governance of organizations. A version of this paper was presented at the European Academy of Management, 2005.     

Altered Sexuality and Body Image after Gynecological Cancer Treatment: How Can Psychologists Help?

Once medical treatment for gynecological cancer is completed, what happens to patients' sexuality and body image? Due to the delicate nature of the cancer site, treating this cancer typically affects sexual functioning and body image adversely, making it critical to identify the concerns of these patients and do so in a manner less restrictive than paper-and-pencil assessment. To gain a deeper understanding of the phenomenological experiences in question, we interviewed nine gynecological cancer patients and seven cancer-free women. After implementing a relaxation protocol, we asked each woman to describe her feelings and thoughts on her sexuality and body image in one-on-one interviews. A variety of themes emerged on patients' attitudes and perspectives concerning sexuality and body image following diagnosis and treatment of the cancer. The themes that were considerably different from those of the cancer-free women included decreased sexual functioning and body image, abrupt shifts in self-identity due to loss of physical integrity, and distancing in intimate relationships. Several implications of these findings for clinical practice are discussed, as well as the need to train medical professionals to properly assess these patients' alterations in sexuality.     

Explaining intra-individual variability in social behavior through idiographic assessment: The case of humor

Much variability in social behavior is intra-individual; people vary their actions strategically across contexts. Yet most personality assessment methods are inter-individual; they chart between-person differences in average behavioral tendencies. The present research advanced novel idiographic assessment methods to predict intra-individual variability in a behavioral domain of long-standing interest to personality psychologists: humor. Individuals participated in three assessment sessions. Personal beliefs about reasons for using humor were assessed either idiographically or with respect to a nomothetic system of humor-related reasons for action. The subjective relevance of nomothetically- and idiographically-identified reasons to everyday social situations was assessed. Subsequently, participants reported their perceived likelihood of using humor in specific social contexts. As predicted, likelihood of humor use varied substantially as a function of the relevance of situations to idiographically-identified reasons, but did not vary as a function of the relevance of situations to reasons identified nomothetically. Implications for personality and assessment are discussed.     

The prevalence of perceived discrimination among African American and Caribbean Black youth

The present study examined ethnic, gender, and age differences in perceived discrimination and the association between perceived discrimination and psychological well-being in a nationally representative sample of Black adolescents. Data are from the National Survey of African Life (NSAL), which includes 810 African American and 360 Caribbean Black youth. Results indicate that the majority of Black youth perceived at least 1 discriminatory incident in the previous year. Adolescents at later stages of development perceived more discrimination than those at earlier stages, and African American and Caribbean Black males perceived more discrimination than their female counterparts. Perceptions of discrimination were positively linked to depressive symptoms and were negatively linked to self-esteem and life satisfaction, regardless of ethnicity. However, Caribbean Black youth appear to be more vulnerable when they perceive high levels of discrimination.