The Unbearable Lightness of Being White

In this article I explore the relationship between feelings of superiority, White privilege, White guilt, and a denied White racial identity and how these dynamics are enacted in therapy between White therapist and client. I discuss the concepts of White privilege, White guilt, color-blind racial ideology, and the invisibility of Whiteness and their importance in understanding problems in White identity development. Throughout this discussion I draw implications for clinical practice and training. I conclude by suggesting a process for identifying the dynamics of privilege and power in cross-cultural interactions through the use of self-reflection.     

Sexual Harassment,Racial Harassment,and Well-Being among Asian American Women: An Intersectional Approach

ABSTRACT

Harassment of Asian American (AA) women has received little attention in popular culture and academic research despite their long legacy of sexualized racial stereotyping (e.g., Geisha, sexually submissive; Shimizu, 2007) and additional risk of mistreatment due to their membership in both marginalized gender and racial groups (Beale, 1970 Beale, F. (1970). Double jeopardy: To be Black and female. In T. C. Bambara (Ed.), The Black woman: An anthology (pp. 90–100). New York: New American Library. [Google Scholar]; Settles & Buchanan, 2014 Settles, I. H., & Buchanan, N. T. (2014). Intersectionality: Multiple categories of identity and difference. In V. Benet-Martinez and Y. Hong (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Multicultural Identity (pp. 160–180). New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc. [Google Scholar]). This study addresses this dearth of research using an intersectional theoretical framework to comprehensively examine sexual and racial harassment with a sample of AA women. Results validated the underlying factor structure of the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire (Fitzgerald, Gelfand, & Drasgow, 1995 Fitzgerald, L. F., Gelfand, M. J., & Drasgow, F. (1995). Measuring sexual harassment: Theoretical and psychometric advances. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 17, 425–445. doi:10.1207/s15324834basp1704_2[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and the Racial Acts, Crimes, and Experiences Scale (RACES; Bergman & Buchanan, 2008 Bergman, M., & Buchanan, N. T. (2008). Development of the Racial Acts, Crimes, and Experiences Survey (RACES). Unpublished instrument. [Google Scholar]) for AA women. Additionally, our results replicated previous research indicating that participants often reported experiencing behaviors that constitute harassment, but did not label them as such. This supports the use of behavioral measures over items that require individuals to label their experiences as harassment. Finally, we examined the associations between these forms of harassment and two indicators of psychological well-being, depression, and posttraumatic stress (PTS). Our results found that gender harassment was associated with more depression, whereas unwanted sexual attention, sexual coercion, and racial harassment were associated with increased PTS. This supports the utility of including both sexual and racial harassment in providing a more nuanced understanding of AA women’s harassment experiences overall and the relationship of harassment to psychological well-being. We discuss theoretical and clinical implications of these findings.     

The hoarding dimension of OCD: psychological comorbidity and the five-factor personality model

Although hoarding has been associated with several psychological disorders, it is most frequently linked to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The present study assessed hoarding obsessions and compulsions in 204 individuals with OCD, and evaluated how hoarding was related to obsessive-compulsive symptom severity, psychological comorbidity, and personality as measured by the five-factor model. Results indicated that hoarding in OCD is a dimensional variable that is positively associated with dysphoria, total number of lifetime Axis I disorders, and lifetime histories of bipolar I, PTSD, and body dysmorphic disorder. Hoarding was negatively correlated with the NEO-Personality Inventory-Revised (NEO-PI-R) factor of Conscientiousness and positively associated with the NEO-PI-R factor of Neuroticism. When all personality and psychopathology variables were entered into a regression equation, dysphoria, bipolar II disorder, Conscientiousness, age, and Extraversion emerged as significant predictors of hoarding severity. Recommendations are made for clinicians and for future research.     

Parents' ethnic-racial socialization practices: a review of research and directions for future study

Recently, there has been an emergence of literature on the mechanisms through which parents transmit information, values, and perspectives about ethnicity and race to their children, commonly referred to as racial or ethnic socialization. This literature has sought to document the nature of such socialization, its antecedents in parents' and children's characteristics and experiences, and its consequences for children's well-being and development. In this article, the authors integrate and synthesize what is known about racial and ethnic socialization on the basis of current empirical research, examining studies concerning its nature and frequency; its child, parent, and ecological predictors; and its consequences for children's development, including ethnic identity, self-esteem, coping with discrimination, academic achievement, and psychosocial well-being. The authors also discuss conceptual and methodological limitations of the literature and suggest directions for future research.     

Orthographic directionality and thematic role illustration in English and Arabic

This study tested the hypotheses that people had a bias for drawing agents on the left of a picture when given a verb stimulus targeting an active or passive event (e.g., "kicked" or "is kicked") and that orthographic directionality would influence the way events were illustrated. Monolingual English speakers, who read and write left-to-right, and Arabic speakers, who read and write right-to-left, drew agents and patients in response to verb stimuli. We found no significant orthographic directionality effects and no preference for positioning agents on the left of pictures in either group or sentence type. Instead, participants drew agents on the right regardless of language or sentence type, and this was exaggerated in English speakers illustrating passive verbs. These findings support the existence of a preference for placing agents in the right hemispace that may result from asymmetrical hemispheric (i.e., left>right) activation induced by language processing. Our results are consistent with findings that people prefer pictures in which focus is on the right, a preference strongest in pictures with no implicit directionality of movement. This suggests that the methodology of the current study encouraged a static rather than dynamic interpretation of the verb in most participants.     

Matrix training of preliteracy skills with preschoolers with autism

Matrix training is a generative approach to instruction in which words are arranged in a matrix so that some multiword phrases are taught and others emerge without direct teaching. We taught 4 preschoolers with autism to follow instructions to perform action-picture combinations (e.g., circle the pepper, underline the deer). Each matrix contained 6 actions on 1 axis and 6 pictures on the other axis. We used most-to-least prompting to train the instructions along the diagonal of each matrix and probed the untrained combinations. For 2 participants, untrained responding emerged after the minimum amount of training. The other 2 participants required further training before untrained combinations emerged. At the end of the study, 3 of the 4 participants performed the trained actions with previously known pictures, letters, and numbers. This study demonstrated that matrix training is an efficient approach to teaching language and literacy skills to children with autism.     

Do Guns in the Home Predict Gender and Relationship Attitudes? An Exploratory Study

This study explores the potential relationship of guns in students’ homes with attitudes indicative of tolerance of violence, negative attitudes toward women and their roles, and attitudes suggestive of myths regarding sexual assault. Seniors in Kentucky high schools whose families possessed guns (n = 1,749) produced higher scores on scales measuring these variables as well as on scales of relationship dependency and religious involvement than seniors whose families did not own guns (n = 912). Students whose families owned more than 10 guns tended to score highest on these measures compared with students whose families owned no guns or a few guns. Because of lower effect sizes, these significant associations require further investigation.     

An Exploratory Study of the Relationship Between Mood States and Creativity Self-Perceptions

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between noninduced mood state and self-perceptions of creativity. Undergraduate teacher education students (N = 287) completed 2 mood state inventories (Teasdale 100-Point Thermometer and Perception of Mood States) and a creative self-perception inventory (What Kind of Person Are You? [Khatena &; Torrance, 1976]). The group expressed overall indications of happiness and normally distributed creativity perceptions. Findings were mixed when the 5 scales of the creativity measure (i.e., Acceptance of Authority, Self-confidence, Inquisitiveness, Awareness of Others, and Disciplined Imagination) were correlated to the 6 dimensions of mood (i.e., Tension/Anxiety, Depression/Dejection, Anger/Hostility, Vigor/Activity, Fatigue/Inertia, and Confusion/Bewilderment). There was, however, some indication that positive mood was related to creative self-perception. Results are discussed and future research is suggested.