Role of foster family belonging in recovery from child maltreatment

Research on foster care suggests that children who have experienced abuse are susceptible to a range of negative life outcomes. Such research also suggests that children removed into foster care can recover from abuse if given opportunities to develop healing relationships with caregivers. Drawing on qualitative data from a national research project on Australian foster carers, this paper explores how foster families enact forms of belonging that potentially work to ameliorate experiences of abuse among foster children. With a specific focus on experiences of family solidarity, rituals, identity, and culture among foster carers and the children in their care, the findings highlight the role that foster carers can play in contributing to national child protection agendas aimed at addressing experiences of maltreatment among children removed into care in Australia.     

SEXUAL MORES,ETHICAL THEORIES,AND THE OVERPOPULATION MYTH

Some of the causes of the ‘sexual revolution’ during the past few decades are widely known: The development of relatively safe and reliable contraceptives, especially the birth‐control pill; the ‘morning after’ pill; antibiotics to relieve or cure sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea, herpes, and syphilis; the increased social acceptance of pre‐marital sex, homosexuality, and other behaviors that formerly were considered deviant; and the legalization of abortion as the ultimate ‘contraceptive’. But little attention has been paid to two rather cerebral factors relevant to these developments – namely, ethical theories, and theories of overpopulation. In this paper I will argue that these two less well‐known and more subtle factors have been at least as powerful as the more obvious factors mentioned above, in bringing about sea‐changes in sexual mores. More specifically, I will argue that some implicit approaches to ethical theory are more conducive than others to bringing about the present status quo in sexual mores, and that the widespread belief in world overpopulation has not only changed the moral climate regarding sexuality, but has helped to redefine what is moral and what is immoral.     

Managing stress or enhancing wellbeing? Positive psychology's contributions to clinical supervision

One of the key functions of clinical supervision as practised by health professionals such as psychologists includes the restoration of wellbeing, but there are few guidelines in the supervision literature on how to go about this. Research into concepts from the field of positive psychology such as work engagement, sense of coherence, self‐efficacy, flow and resilience has begun to provide detailed understanding of workers' happiness, health and betterment. These findings provide possible directions for supervision interventions that go beyond traditional review of self‐care and stress‐management strategies and seek to extend the wellbeing of the supervisee. This article explores the application of positive psychology to enhance the wellbeing of practitioners such as psychologists, who often work in inherently difficult work environments such as the mental health field. Specifically, a narrative approach is proposed as one possible method and practical examples are offered to demonstrate how positive psychology may be applied in the practice of clinical supervision.     

Exploring perceptions of online infidelity

This study examines the similarities, differences, and potential linkages between perceptions of online infidelity and traditional infidelity using a sample of 123 individuals in committed relationships. Respondents nominated both sexually and emotionally based behaviors as unfaithful and expressed greater distress in response to hypothetical emotional, as compared to sexual, online infidelity. Unlike traditional infidelity, men generally were not more upset by sexual online infidelity than were women. Both men and women believed that emotional and sexual online infidelities were likely to co‐occur. A face‐to‐face meeting was perceived to be more likely following emotional, as compared to sexual, online infidelity and men were viewed as more likely than women to engage in sexual intercourse, given a face‐to‐face meeting with the online contact.     

SMOKING AND SELF-CONCEPT IN YOUNG ADULTS: AN IDIOGRAPHIC METHOD OF MEASUREMENT

An idiographic repertory grid method of measuring self-concept was used in a nomothetic design to study the relation between smoking behavior and four components of self-concept: real self, ideal self, social self, and ideal social self. Personal constructs were elicited from 32 smoker and 32 nonsmoker male and female college students. Differences between smokers and nonsmokers on all four components of self-concept supported the criterion-related validity of the measures. Implications were discussed for the assessment method and clinical practice.     

Intergenerational Conversations Young Adults' Retrospective Accounts

This research was conducted by combining the theoretical insights of communication accommodation theory and the communicative predicament model (CPM) of aging with methodological procedures drawn from the study of interethnic communication. Accordingly, young adult respondents were asked to describe two recent conversations with an older person, one satisfying and the other dissatisfying. Results indicated that older communicators in dissatisfying conversations were characterized as being underaccommodative and negatively expressive and as stereotyping young people. In response, young people frequently characterized themselves as reluctant accommodators. In addition, dissatisfying conversations were judged as more “intergroup” than those that were satisfying. Suggested improvements for dissatisfying conversations often were placed primarily on the shoulders of the older counterparts. In contrast, in satisfying conversations, older interactants were construed as supportive, telling interesting stories, astereotypical of older people, and positively expressive. However, these same encounters often were characterized by mixed positive and negative emotions, and few suggested improvements were proffered. The data are interpreted theoretically in relation to accommodation theory and the CPM as suggesting that both satisfying and dissatisfying intergenerational conversations sustain ageist ideologies.