Family therapist authenticity as a key factor in outcome

The authors explore various arguments for and against therapist self disclosure and relate these to theoretical school and therapist style and personality. Several case vignettes are used to highlight the appropriate and efficacious revelation of therapist's thoughts, feelings and reactions to the patients and their behavior. A review of the recent literature on this controversial topic is included. The theme is that in almost all therapies, except in psychoanalysis where it is counterindicated, the therapist's selective dynamic use of his own perceptions, experiences and values in a genuine and committed fashion contributes positively to the therapeutic outcomes.To thine ownself be true And it must follow as the night the day Thou canst not then be false to any man. (Hamlet, Act I)     

Lightness of an object under two illumination levels

Anchoring theory (Gilchrist et al, 1999 Psychological Review 106 795-834) predicts a wide range of lightness errors, including failures of constancy in multi-illumination scenes and a long list of well-known lightness illusions seen under homogeneous illumination. Lightness values are computed both locally and globally and then averaged together. Local values are computed within a given region of homogeneous illumination. Thus, for an object that extends through two different illumination levels, anchoring theory produces two values, one for the patch in brighter illumination and one for the patch in dimmer illumination. Observers can give matches for these patches separately, but they can also give a single match for the whole object. Anchoring theory in its current form is unable to predict these object matches. We report eight experiments in which we studied the relationship between patch matches and object matches. The results show that the object match represents a compromise between the match for the patch in the field of highest illumination and the patch in the largest field of illumination. These two principles are parallel to the rules found for anchoring lightness: highest luminance rule and area rule.     

Gender discrimination may be worse than you think: testing ordinal interactions in power research

The authors reanalyze the data of a study by S. M. Elias and R. J. Loomis (2004), which aimed to determine how an instructor's gender may influence his or her ability to gain student compliance. S. M. Elias and R. J. Loomis observed few significant gender effects using traditional multivariate analyses of variance. The authors reanalyze this data using the more appropriate statistical techniques for detecting ordinal interactions recommended by M. J. Strube and P. Bobko (1989) and S. M. Elias (2004). An ordinal interaction occurs when 1 cell of a 2 x 2 design is responsible for a significant interaction (e.g., female instructors suffering only when rated by male students). Reanalysis of the data resulted in more robust findings.     

Cultural Dimensions,Gender, and the Nature of Self-concept: A Fourteen-country Study

Ratings of the importance of and satisfaction with 20 areas of the self were obtained from 3604 first or second year social science undergraduates from 14 countries (15 cultures). Factor analysis at the culture by gender level supported four factors for both sets of ratings. The resulting factor scores were analyzed for mean differences according to the cultural dimension of Individualism-Collectivism by Gender and by correlations with other cultural dimenions and economic indicators. It was found that participants from the 10 collectivist cultures placed greater salience for their self-concepts on “family values” than did those from the individualist cultures. However, this cultural difference was not found for “social relationships”. The expected gender differences, with females valuing “family values” and “social relationships” more highly, were found only for the individualist countries. The findings indicate that there may be a strong cultural level interaction effect between gender and Individualism-Collectivism on the nature of self-conceptions, and that the “family” and “social” aspects of self-concept in collectivist countries need to be considered separately.     

Annotations of research and clinical perspectives on cluttering since 1964

In 1964, Deso Weiss published his landmark text Cluttering, after much persuasion by Charles Van Riper to put his thoughts in writing regarding this enigmatic speech and language disorder (Van Riper, personal communication, 1992). To our knowledge, Weiss's book was the only book in English devoted entirely to cluttering. Nearly 30 years later, a second text entitled Cluttering: A Clinical Perspective was published (Myers & St. Louis, 1992). The following annotations summarize nearly all that has been written on cluttering since Weiss's classic publication in 1964.     

A method to analyze the spatial distribution of behavior

This article presents a method comprising an experimental environment, infrared detection system, data collection and processing software, behavior categories, and suggested quantitative analysis methods for studying some spatial properties of behavior. In the chamber, the location of a rat is determined at regular intervals by a 24 × 24 grid of infrared beams; the status of each line used interactively to determine changes in the environment are stored on disk for later analysis. From the status of the receptors, the computer decodes the location of objects in the chamber, and a binary 576-cell matrix is obtained for each sample. The series of matrices allows a number of behavior categories to be defined includingexploration, activity, andtime allocation. Exploration curves and time allocation surfaces are compared using a goodness-of-fit test; activity is assessed with time-series methods. Potential applications to psychological, pharmacological, and ethological research are considered.