The Nature of Client Agency Prior to Therapy: A Qualitative Study on Clients’ Narratives

Client agency is considered a crucial contributor to good treatment outcome. Recent studies, however, differ strongly in how they conceptualise and investigate agency. The current study explores the nature of client agency in ten clients’ pre-treatment interviews. Applying Consensual Qualitative Research, we constructed three overarching categories, subdivided into 14 sub-categories capturing both between- and within-person differences in agency before therapy. We found that all participants oscillated between the experience of a lack of grip on problems on the one hand and noticing their involvement in the problem and taking action on the other. These results present a dynamic conceptualisation of client agency. This allows us to ask pertinent questions for both future research and clinical practice.     

Is future self-relevance necessary to increase saving for retirement? A replication study

Insufficient saving for retirement is one consequence of excessive discounting of the future but attempts to mitigate it often involve costly or time-intensive personalized interventions. Marques, Mariano, Lima, and Abrams, by contrast, found that using a generic Future Time Perspective questionnaire to increase future “self-relevance” was an effective method to increase money allocation to retirement when the salience of future aging was also higher. Originally conducted in Portugal, the present study aimed to replicate Marques et al’s findings in the UK context. In the present study (n = 219), participants were shown a website advertising a financial product. The results support Marques and colleagues’ assertion that, alone, a website priming future aging was insufficient to increase retirement savings in a money allocation task. However, in contrast to Marques et al’s original findings, we find no evidence that future self-relevance moderates the effect such that priming future aging becomes effective when individuals have higher future self-relevance. Instead, we find that aging primes are ineffective at increasing retirement saving regardless of whether individuals are high or low in future self-relevance. Possible explanations for this discrepancy in findings, including methodological and cultural differences, are explored as well as directions for future research.     

A Two-way Street: Mentor Stress and Depression Influence Relational Satisfaction and Attachment in Youth Mentoring Relationships

Over the past two decades, youth mentoring programs have increased in popularity as an intervention for children exposed to a range of stressful life circumstances. Such programs have been shown to promote positive youth development and reduce risk for emotional and behavioral problems; yet, the effect size of youth gains remains small. The current study examined the influence of college student mentors’ history of early life stress and baseline depressive symptoms on their effectiveness in youth mentoring relationships using 340 randomized mentor–youth pairs from College Mentors for Kids, a well-established mentoring program with chapters across the United States. Hierarchical linear models revealed that mentors with higher levels of depressive symptoms reported lower relationship satisfaction and increased avoidance in the mentoring relationship. In contrast, mentors who experienced higher levels of early life stress had youth who reported greater satisfaction in the mentoring relationship and decreased relational anxiety. These findings are some of the first to examine the impact of mentor characteristics on mentor–youth relationships and highlight the importance of considering factors relevant to psychosocial functioning and emotional distress when recruiting, training, and supporting college student mentors.     

Proactive Vitality Management,Work Engagement,and Creativity: The Role of Goal Orientation

This study tested the hypothesis that individuals can proactively manage their own energetic, affective, and cognitive resources in order to be creative at work. Building on proactivity and creativity literatures, we propose a theoretical model in which employees who proactively manage their vitality are more engaged in their work and show improved creative performance. We also tested the boundary conditions of this process. Participants were Dutch employees from various occupations who filled out a background questionnaire and five weekly surveys. The results of multilevel modelling analyses offered support for our model. Weekly proactive vitality management was positively related to changes in weekly creativity through changes in weekly work engagement. As predicted, learning goal orientation strengthened and performance goal orientation weakened the links between proactive vitality management and engagement, and between engagement and creativity. We discuss the theoretical contributions, and indicate how these findings can be used in daily working life.     

Four Dimensions of Criticism Against Gender-Fair Language

Sex Roles - The gender-neutral third-person pronoun singular hen was recently introduced in Swedish as a complement to she (hon) and he (han). The initiative to add hen initially received strong...     

Do dogs rescue their owners from a stressful situation? A behavioral and physiological assessment

Animal Cognition - Rescue behavior is considered a type of pro-social response, defined as a voluntary action directed to benefit another individual who is in a stressful or dangerous situation. In...     

Social citizenship and social psychology

This paper outlines the concept of social citizenship, which was first theorized in the late 1940s alongside the creation of the UK welfare state and concerns citizens' rights to a basic income and standard of living. It suggests that social citizenship—particularly welfare provision—is a useful and important topic for social psychological research, albeit one that has been largely overlooked. We provide an overview of key developments in social citizenship and consider the impact of 30‐plus years of neoliberal governance in Western democracies, which has resulted in ongoing changes to how welfare rights and responsibilities are configured, such as policies that make social citizenship rights contingent on conduct. We outline social scientific work that examines these shifting ideas of citizenship, personhood, welfare, and conditionality and make the case for a critical discursive psychological approach, which we illustrate with a brief empirical example. We suggest that critical discursive social psychology is particularly well‐placed to examine how psychological assumptions are built into both policy and lay discourse and how these can legitimate interventions designed to work on the conduct of the unemployed, such as therapeutic and behavior change initiatives. Finally, we argue that psychology is faced with a choice; while there are opportunities for the discipline to contribute to the design and implementation of such initiatives, to do so requires accepting the basic values of the underpinning neoliberal agenda. Instead, it is vital to place these assumptions under the critical microscope and explore how they work to obscure structural disadvantage.     

Stress for families today

Rapid changes in family life have created enormous challenges and pressures on developing families - divorce, two working parents, disappearance of the extended family, unclear cultural values for our children's future, poorly defined support systems for stressed families, inadequate substitute care when both parents work-all contribute to an anxious atmosphere for young families. Parents who must return to work „too early”︁ (and we have no established standards yet for what this means to either child or adult development) seem to grieve about the loss of the relationship with the developing child. They may even set up defenses against making a strong and painful attachment. They may not become involved in the child's development in a way that will foster their own development as nurturing adults. The grieving and the necessary defenses against it are predictable and must be mitigated in order to foster nurturing adults within the family. Children must be provided with caring, intensely involved adults in order to assure their optimal future development. We must provide them and their parents with adequate substitute care. This paper suggests adjustments at the industrial level that must be made to foster parental involvement and to assure positive outcomes for future generations.     

The Fisher-Pitman permutation test: an attractive alternative to the F test

The Fisher-Pitman permutation test is shown to possess significant advantages over conventional alternatives when analyzing differences among independent samples with unequal variances.     

The Terpstra-Jonckheere test for ordered alternatives: randomized probability values

An algorithm and FORTRAN program are presented for the Terpstra-Jonckheere test statistic and associated probability value based on a randomization routine.