Refugee families: issues of systemic supervision

Families of refugees tend to evoke many powerful responses in all who come into contact with them. Loss and trauma, helplessness and victimhood, transition and change are some of the main themes that seem to dominate. In particular, in contact with mental health professionals, refugee families are more likely to be seen as 'traumatized' and their resilience less acknowledged. In this article I will endeavour to address some issues that contribute to this skewing of our perception of refugee families, especially in the context of supervision.     

Counselling psychology in primary health care: A review

This paper reviews the development of counselling psychology within the field of primary health care. Issues discussed include liaison between counselling psychologists and other professionals, evaluation of treatment in primary care, family therapy in general practice and general practitioners’ skills in counselling. The need for training and evaluation of counselling are discussed and suggestions are made for further research.     

A verbal illusion in two languages

The study replicates Wason and Reich's (1979) investigation of the sentence No head injury is too trivial to be ignored, which is semantically and pragmatically anomalous (target sentence), in three experiments. Data from Experiment I show that sentences violating semantic and pragmatic restrictions resist correct parsing of syntax, systematically confirming Wason and Reich's results. Experiment II shows that when subjects are alerted to the violation of semantic and pragmatic restrictions displayed by the target sentence, it leads, to some extent, to correct parsing of syntax, but it also demonstrates that misconstrual of the target sentence is still a very robust phenomenon. When semantic anomaly is removed and conflict of pragmatic factor is minimized (corrected version of the target sentence), performance improves substantially (Experiment III), as Wason and Reich's data also suggest.     

Interpersonal attraction as a measure of estimation of cohesiveness in elite volleyball teams

This study examined differences in interpersonal attraction between starters and nonstarters of elite male volleyball teams and the correlation between interpersonal attraction and teams' final place. 106 players from 10 teams of the A1 Greek National Volleyball League completed by a sociometric method an especially developed questionnaire. Subjects were classified as starters and nonstarters by means of a protocol of players' starting status administered to teams' coaches. Analysis showed that the task and the social dimension of interpersonal attraction differed significantly between starters and nonstarters. Starters scored higher than nonstarters on both dimensions of interpersonal attraction. Starters' task dimension of interpersonal attraction was positively correlated with the team's task dimension. Also, the teams' task dimension was positively correlated with teams' final placing, suggesting that, when starters are attracted to each other with regard to the common competitive goal, the team's performance is enhanced and leads to higher scoring.     

Critical Notice

Book reviewed in this article:
Alister, Ian and Hauke, Christopher (eds.), Contemporary Jungian Analysis. Post-Jungian Perspectives from the Society of Analytical Psychology     

The other other: when the exotic other subjugates the familiar other

In this paper, the theme of the other will be examined and it will be argued that it is important to differentiate between two distinct types of other--the 'exotic' other which is distant and very different from the subject, and the 'familiar' other which is closer to the subject. The dynamic relationship between these two others will be investigated, and emphasis will be given to the process through which the exotic other tends to subjugate the familiar other. This relationship will then be discussed in its various applied forms, in the contexts of clinical practice and socio-political dimensions. In particular, a new reading of Jung's approach to the 'primitive' will be developed, based on the subjugation of the 'familiar' other by the 'exotic' other. A similar line of investigation will be followed to examine the concept of psychological trauma. In addition, Freud's 'narcissism of minor differences' and Bion's distinction between 'narcissism' and 'socialism' will be considered in the light of this differentiation between these two others.     

Children's understanding of human and super-natural mind

Barrett, Richert, and Driesenga [Barrett, J. L., Richert, R. A., & Driesenga, A. (2001). God's beliefs versus mother's: The development of nonhuman agents concepts. Child Development, 72(1), 50–65] have suggested that children are able to conceptualize the representational properties held by certain super-natural entities, such as God, before they achieve representational understanding of the human mind. The two experimental conditions of the present study aimed at cross-checking the above suggestion. One hundred and twenty children aged from 3 to 7 years were involved in both conditions. In the first, a modified perspective-taking and appearance-reality task, similar to that adopted in Barrett et al.'s study, was used. The task in the second addressed another aspect of representational understanding of the human mind, that is, the early emerging of the rule that knowledge is constrained by perception. The results of the study showed that younger children systematically treat God as a human protagonist regarding the representational properties they possess. Moreover, it was found that children are able to reason, accurately, about God's representational properties, only upon reaching their 5th year of age, when their representational understanding of the human mind becomes stable and robust.     

Stochastic search item selection for factor analytic models

In this paper we implement a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm based on the stochastic search variable selection method of George and McCulloch (1993) for identifying promising subsets of manifest variables (items) for factor analysis models. The suggested algorithm is constructed by embedding in the usual factor analysis model a normal mixture prior for the model loadings with latent indicators used to identify not only which manifest variables should be included in the model but also how each manifest variable is associated with each factor. We further extend the suggested algorithm to allow for factor selection. We also develop a detailed procedure for the specification of the prior parameters values based on the practical significance of factor loadings using ideas from the original work of George and McCulloch (1993). A straightforward Gibbs sampler is used to simulate from the joint posterior distribution of all unknown parameters and the subset of variables with the highest posterior probability is selected. The proposed method is illustrated using real and simulated data sets.