Dropping Out of Marriage and Family Therapy: A Critical Review of Research

The lack of attention given to research on the premature termination by clients in marriage and family therapy is evident in research reviews of the dropout phenomenon in psychotherapy. This article is an attempt to fill that void. The research literature on dropping out of family therapy is reviewed and organized. Studies in this area tend to focus on four kinds of variables: client characteristics, therapist characteristics, therapy process variables, and interventions. Stable findings in each of these areas are pointed out. Both limitations and recommendations for future research are discussed.     

How Do Fundamental Christians Deal With Depression?

Drawing from published sources and my own experience as a pastoral counselor with more recent specialization in spousal abuse and anger management, this article gives an explanation of developmental dynamics in the experience of fundamental Christians that provoke reactive depression. Depressant retardant defenses against depression that have been observed in the Christian fundamentalist subculture are described. Four interventions conclude this article.     

Wanted: A Comprehensive Model of Healthy Development

Failure of psychologists to provide a comprehensive and valid model of healthy growth that is related to the adaptive problems with which counselors are concerned has limited the usefulness of much psychological research to practitioners. A developmental dimensional model of maturing is presented that has received some transcultural and longitudinal validation. Specific principles, induced from such research and from existing psychological research more generally, provide guidelines about how to encourage healthy growth. Recent evidence demonstrates that the psychological maturity of an adolescent is one of the most powerful predictors of his adult mental health and vocational adaptation, and that adult maturity is a powerful predictor of vocational adaptation, sexual pleasure, and marital sexual compatibility.     

An Infertility Primer for Family Therapists: II. Working with Couples Who Struggle with Infertility

The distress of infertility and its medical treatments are profound, and the effects reverberate in each partner, the couple dyad, and the couple's relationships with family, friends, and medical systems. Yet family therapists, like others in our society, are often uninformed or misinformed about the experience of infertility. While the legacies of infertility may be painful and enduring, they often remain unspoken, and hence may be overlooked in standard interviews. This article describes the experiences of couples struggling with infertility, most of whom have sought medical intervention, and it provides treatment interventions for guiding couples through this difficult and often uncharted terrain. Case vignettes derived from 2 years of this clinical research study are included.     

SELF-ESTEEM AND JOB PERFORMANCE: THE MODERATING ROLE OF SELF-ESTEEM CONTINGENCIES

Although theoretical perspectives suggest self-esteem level (i.e., high/low) should have main and moderating effects on job performance, empirical and narrative reviews of the literature suggest such effects are either nonexistent or highly variable. To account for these mixed findings, we hypothesized that self-esteem level should only have main and moderating effects on job performance when one's self-esteem is not contingent upon workplace performance. Using multisource ratings across 2 samples of working adults, we found that the importance of performance to self-esteem (IPSE) moderated the effect of self-esteem level on job performance and moderated the buffering interaction between self-esteem level and role conflict in the prediction of job performance. Our results thus support IPSE as an important moderator of both main and moderating effects of self-esteem level.     

COMBINING TELEOLOGICAL ETHICS WITH EVALUATOR RELATIVISM: A PROMISING RESULT

Abstract: Consequentialism is an agent‐neutral teleological theory, and deontology is an agent‐relative non‐teleological theory. I argue that a certain hybrid of the two – namely, non‐egoistic agent‐relative teleological ethics (NATE) – is quite promising. This hybrid takes what is best from both consequentialism and deontology while leaving behind the problems associated with each. Like consequentialism and unlike deontology, NATE can accommodate the compelling idea that it is always permissible to bring about the best available state of affairs. Yet unlike consequentialism and like deontology, NATE accords well with our commonsense moral intuitions.