AN INTERNATIONAL LOOK AT SELECTION PRACTICES: NATION AND CULTURE AS EXPLANATIONS FOR VARIABILITY IN PRACTICE

A survey of 959 organizations in 20 countries was undertaken to assess whether differences in staffing practices are due in part to nation and culture. Cultural differences in uncertainty avoidance and, to a lesser extent, power distance, explained some of the national differences observed in the extensiveness of method use. Implications for understanding the best approaches to selection on a global basis are discussed.     

Romantic and dating behaviors among single parents in the United States

Little research has focused on the dating attitudes and behaviors of singles with dependent‐age children. Using data collected from a nationally representative U.S. probability sample of single adults, we provide findings on dating attitudes and behaviors among 747 single parents in the United States, aged 21 years and older, who had one or more children under the age of 18 years. Findings show gender differences between single men and single women concerning how they balance being a single parent and make time for dating. Both single fathers and single mothers considered their child's opinion about their dating life, and most parents involved their child(ren) once they knew they wanted or had established a committed romantic relationship with a new partner.     

Parent-Adolescent Conflict and Stress When Parents Are Living with Aids

Parental perceptions of conflict and stress with their adolescent children are described, and their associations with demographic factors, physical health, and lifestyle are examined. Adolescent-parent conflicts, parenting stress, and parents' health, substance use, and sexual lifestyle were assessed among 151 parents living with AIDS. Parents living with AIDS reported a mean of 3.3 (SD = 1.3) areas of conflict with their adolescents and 1.5 (SD = 1.7) stressful parenting events over the previous 3 months. The parents were very ill, with many physical symptoms and diseases. Simultaneously, substance use was common (17% used daily), but not injection drug use (3.3%). Half had a sexual partner (63% protected their partners by using condoms consistently). Regression analysis revealed that parent-adolescent conflict was significantly associated with high parental drug use; stressful parenting events were significantly related to the lifestyle (high drug use and frequent sex acts) of Latino and African American parents, but not of white parents. Results of the analysis indicate that, in contrast to parents with other illnesses, parent-adolescent conflict and stressful parenting events were not influenced by parents' health status, but were significantly influenced by substance use and sexual lifestyles.     

Psychologists' perceptions of legal and ethical requirements for breaching confidentiality

This paper outlines the legal and ethical duties of psychologists in relation to preserving as well as breaching confidentiality in therapeutic relationships. It analyses the results of a questionnaire examining psychologists’ perceptions of the legal and ethical constraints on confidentiality and their likelihood of breaching confidentiality in different situations. The vast majority of participants indicated that the law permits them to disclose confidential information and that there is an ethical duty to disclose information to a third party when the patient is perceived to be dangerous. The results suggest that there is some uncertainty as to when confidentiality should be breached in practice and it is argued that the law is overly complex in this area and that guidelines are needed to assist psychologists in their clinical practice.     

Mental Imagery in Career Counseling and Life Planning: A Review of Research and Intervention Methods

The use of imagery in career counseling and life planning continues to increase just as the use of imagery in counseling and psychotherapy increases. The rationale for using imagery in career counseling and life planning is the same as in counseling and psychotherapy: It allows the client and counselor to bring into awareness unconscious material that is already influencing choices and makes this material usable in future planning. Imagey also allows the client to try on alternative roles. Several studies are cited that indicate that the imagery components of daydreams and fantasies are useful tools for career exploration and life planning when they are accessible to clients and properly processed. Relevant counseling applications and research studies are cited. Some recent tools for eliciting and processing these daydreams and fantasies are presented, and limits as well as benefits of techniques are discussed.     

How One Family Perceives Another: The Relationship Between Social Constructions and Problem-Solving Competence

This paper delineates a rarely studied but important family process: how a family perceives and understands the relationships in other families it knows. We hypothesize that these perceptions of other families are fundamental components of a family's shared construing of its social world. Families differ in how they perceive other families, specifically, and in their approach to construing or apprehending their social world, generally. We have hypothesized that these general differences also play a crucial role in shaping the style and competence of family problem-solving. A family's approach to any problem depends upon how it construes or interprets the social context of that problem. Using these general concepts of family life, we construct specific hypotheses linking family problem-solving and interfamily perception. We describe methods for measuring both family problem-solving and how a family perceives other families. Findings confirm our major hypothesis: A family that searches for underlying and subtle patterns in a problem-solving situation will develop a more differentiated and organized conception of other families.     

Science as Structured Imagination

This paper offers an analysis of scientific creativity based on theoretical models and experimental results of the cognitive sciences. Its core idea is that scientific creativity — like other forms of creativity — is structured and constrained by prior ontological expectations. Analogies provide scientists with a powerful epistemic tool to overcome these constraints. While current research on analogies in scientific understanding focuses on near analogies, where target and source domain are close, we argue that distant analogies — where target and source domain differ widely — are especially useful in periods of intense conceptual change. To argue this point, we discuss three case studies from the history of science: early physiologists like Harvey, early evolutionary biologists like Darwin, and recent theorists on the evolution of the human mind like Mithen.     

Body Poly-texts: Discourses of the Anorexic Body

It is now increasingly acknowledged that anorexia nervosa is a ‘culture-bound syndrome’ which must be understood within the context of an increasing idealization of female thinness and a high prevalence of dieting and body dissatisfaction, particularly amongst women and girls. Whilst this socioculturally-oriented perspective is important, it is also simplistic to conceptualize anorexia simply as a ‘slimmer's disease’. The ways in which contemporary Western culture is imbricated in anorexia are both complex and multiple. This paper uses a discourse-analytic approach, informed by feminist Foucauldian theory, to examine some of the multiple and often conflicting meanings and discursive constructions of the (female) anorexic body. The paper is based on a series of interviews conducted with 23 women (21 diagnosed as anorexic and 2 self-diagnosed). The analysis focuses on the explication of two discourses: a romantic discourse and a discourse of Cartesian dualism evidenced in the interviews. By contrasting the very different ways in which these two discourses constitute the anorexic body, this paper aims to provide thereby a socioculturally contextualized and gender-oriented account of the multiple discursive constructions of ‘anorexia nervosa’ and ‘anorexic’ bodies. Implications for psychotherapeutic interventions are discussed.