The Profession of Family Therapy in South Korea: Current Status and Future Directions

The authors present a brief overview of the family therapy field in South Korea. Since its introduction in the late 1970s, family therapy has been developing into a professional field with education and training institutions, practice settings, credentials, and practitioners holding memberships in various professional organizations. While such issues as family values and types, filial piety, violence, interethnic marriage, and social polarization have resulted in an increased demand for family therapy, such services are not readily accessible to Korean families in need. Efforts should be made in increasing number of competent family therapists by strengthening both academic and clinical requirements for credentialing. Efforts are also needed in increasing accessibility of family therapy services by making them more available within a variety of human service contexts.     

Spirituality of Trans-Borders: A Narrative of Transformation of a Korean Sex Slave

Contemporary pastoral theology has been concerned about spirituality which would help to overcome splits and breakages of modernism. This paper intends to examine this issue through the narrative of a Korean sex slave during World War II and her subsequent conversion to Christianity. As a victim and agent of modernism, this sex slave showed spirituality of trans-borders: Christianity of trans-borders, motherhood of trans-borders, and deity of trans-borders.     

Development of a simple MR-compatible vibrotactile stimulator using a planar-coil-type actuator

For this study, we developed a magnetic resonance (MR)-compatible vibrotactile stimulator using a planar-coil-type actuator. The newly developed vibrotactile stimulator consists of three units: control unit, drive unit, and planar-coil-type actuator. The control unit controls frequency, intensity, time, and channel, and transfers the stimulation signals to the drive unit. The drive unit operates the planar-coil-type actuator in response to commands from the control unit. The planar-coil-type actuator, which uses a planar coil instead of conventional electric wire, generates vibrating stimulation through interaction of the current of the planar coil with the static magnetic field of the MR scanner. Even though the developed tactile stimulating system is small, simple, and inexpensive, it has a wide range of stimulation frequencies (20 ~ 400 Hz, at 40 levels) and stimulation intensities (0 ~ 7 V, at 256 levels). The stimulation intensity does not change due to frequency changes. Since the transient response time is a few microseconds, the stimulation time can be controlled on a scale of microseconds. In addition, this actuator has the advantages of providing highly repeatable stimulation, being durable, being able to assume various shapes, and having an adjustable contact area with the skin. The new stimulator operated stably in an MR environment without affecting the MR images. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we observed the brain activation changes resulting from stimulation frequency and intensity changes.     

Effects of Pinyin and First Language Words in Learning of Chinese Characters as a Second Language

This study examined the roles of pinyin and English words as stimulus prompts in the learning of Chinese characters. Recall for naming of English words and pronunciation was enhanced under conditions in which each character was presented first and its prompts were given as feedback, in contrast to simultaneous presentation conditions. Pronunciation was also recalled more in the written pinyin conditions than the verbal pronunciation conditions. These data were interpreted in terms of (a) interference which can occur when learners attend to multiple inputs simultaneously, and (b) the beneficial effects of attending to character prior to their prompts. It was concluded that the presentation of a character first and the provision of its associated prompts as a feedback improves learning.     

The Selection of Multiattribute Decision Making Methods for Scholarship Student Selection

Selecting scholarship students from a number of competing candidates is a complex decision making process, in which multiple selection criteria have to be considered simultaneously. Multiattribute decision making (MADM) has proven to be an effective approach for ranking or selecting one or more alternatives from a finite number of alternatives with respect to multiple, usually conflicting criteria. This paper formulates the scholarship student selection process as an MADM problem, and presents suitable compensatory methods for solving the problem. A new empirical validity procedure is developed to deal with the inconsistent ranking problem caused by different MADM methods. The procedure aims at selecting a ranking outcome which has a minimum expected value loss, when true attribute weights are not known. An empirical study of a scholarship student selection problem in an Australian university is conducted to illustrate how the selection procedure works.     

Impact of Panel Gene Testing for Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer on Patients

Recent advances in next generation sequencing have enabled panel gene testing, or simultaneous testing for mutations in multiple genes for a clinical condition. With more extensive and widespread genetic testing, there will be increased detection of genes with moderate penetrance without established clinical guidelines and of variants of uncertain significance (VUS), or genetic variants unknown to either be disease-causing or benign. This study surveyed 232 patients who underwent genetic counseling for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer to examine the impact of panel gene testing on psychological outcomes, patient understanding, and utilization of genetic information. The survey used standardized instruments including the Impact of Event Scale (IES), Multidimensional Impact of Cancer Risk Assessment (MICRA), Satisfaction with Decision Instrument (SWD), Ambiguity Tolerance Scale (AT-20), genetics knowledge, and utilization of genetic test results. Study results suggested that unaffected individuals with a family history of breast or ovarian cancer who received positive results were most significantly impacted by intrusive thoughts, avoidance, and distress. However, scores were also modestly elevated among unaffected patients with a family history of breast and ovarian cancer who received VUS, highlighting the impact of ambiguous results that are frequent among patients undergoing genetic testing with large panels of genes. Potential risk factors for increased genetic testing-specific distress in this study included younger age, black or African American race, Hispanic origin, lower education level, and lower genetic knowledge and highlight the need for developing strategies to provide effective counseling and education to these communities, particularly when genetic testing utilizes gene panels that more commonly return VUS. More detailed pre-test education and counseling may help patients appreciate the probability of various types of test results and how results would be used clinically, and allow them to make more informed decisions about the type of genetic testing to select.     

Age, time of testing, and proactive interference.

A four-list version of a release from proactive interference paradigm was used to assess the degree to which older and younger adults tested at optimal and nonoptimal times of day are vulnerable to interference effects in memory, effects that may increase at nonoptimal times. Morning type older adults and Evening type younger adults were tested either early in the morning or late in the afternoon. Standard buildup and release effects were shown for all age groups except for older adults tested in the afternoon; they failed to show release. Recall and intrusion data suggested that older adults are more vulnerable to proactive interference than younger adults and that for older adults at least, interference effects are heightened at nonoptimal times of day. The data are discussed in terms of an inhibitory model of control over the contents of working memory (Hasher, Zacks, & May, 1999).     

Extending the perception of shape from known to unknown shading

Two experiments are reported which demonstrate the effects of light-source position as an intervening variable upon the perception of relief in pictures. In the first experiment, it is shown that the pattern of light (attached shadow) falling upon forms that can be recognized as having unambiguous surface relief (concave and convex parts) influences the perception of forms with ambiguous surface relief. In the second experiment it is demonstrated that cast shadows may also determine the interpretation of ambiguous relief. These findings suggest that light-source position, implicitly or explicitly, mediates the interpretation of surface relief in pictures.     

Quasi-reinforcement: control of responding by a percentage-reinforcement schedule

When a variable-interval schedule of reinforcement was segmented into small fixed-interval components, with reinforcements following some components and brief blackouts following the others, rate of responding doubled and a positively accelerated pattern within each component was obtained. Presented according to this percentage reinforcement paradigm, the blackouts approximated the functions of a food reinforcer. These effects occurred only when the behavior sequence required to produce reinforcement was identical to that required to produce blackout. The quasi-reinforcing effects of these blackout stimuli suggest that a neutral stimulus need not occasion or accompany a primary reinforcer to acquire reinforcing properties.     

Effects of repetition and response deadline on item recognition in young and older adults

In the present study, we examined the joint effects of aging, repetition, and response deadline in a plurality discrimination task. Young and older adults studied lists of unrelated singular and plural nouns, with half presented once (weak items) and half presented five times (strong items). Test lists contained old (same) nouns, plurality-reversed nouns (changed lures), and unstudied nouns (new lures), and the participants were asked to respond old only to same items. In Experiment 1, the participants were tested with both short and long deadlines. In Experiment 2, the tests were unpaced. In both experiments, repetition increased hit rates for young and older adults. Young adults tested with a long deadline or no deadline showed invariant (Experiment 1) or reduced (Experiment 2) false alarms to changed lures when the nouns were studied more often. Young adults tested with a short deadline and older adults tested with both long and short deadlines had increased false alarm rates for strong changed lures; without time pressure to respond, older adults did not have a significant increase in false alarms for changed lures. Implications of these results for theories of cognitive aging are explored.