The use of a consultation team to network families with other helping systems

Families, therapists, and other service providers often find themselves uncooperative and at cross purposes when working toward solutions to family problems. Sometimes each professional is involved in one small piece of the problem and may never have encountered other providers and all family members. This paper describes a family-agencies-team consultation model intended to address the above issues. The model uses a consultation team to facilitate better understanding of family needs, helping agency roles, and service provider constraints. The approach has been successful in creating dialogue, generating a wide range of goals, engendering cooperation, empowering families, and affirming agency participation.In addition to the authors, the consultation team included staff members at the Pitt County Mental Health Center working with client families and other agencies in Pitt County, North Carolina.     

Self-Esteem, Erotophobia, and Retention of Contraceptive and AIDS Information in the Classroom

It has been well documented that people with negative emotional reactions to sex (e.g., "erotophobia,""sex guilt") have less knowledge about contraception than do people with more positive reactions. Recent research has suggested that this deficit is not related to an inability to learn the information, but is due at least in part to the fact that erotophobics actively avoid contraceptive information. The current study was designed to examine the role of erotophobia and high self-esteem in resistance to learning sexual information. More specifically it compared pretest and posttest knowledge of contraception and AIDS in high self-esteem and low self-esteem, erotophobia, and erotophilic women in a university class on human reproduction. As expected, high self-esteem erotophobic subjects were less Likely than other subjects to retain contraceptive and AIDS information presented in the class. Implications of this study for contraceptive and AIDS educational strategies are discussed.     

Acalculia: An historical review of localization

This article reviews the brain localization of calculation disorders (acalculia) beginning with Gall's claim in the early 19th century for a "center" of calculation. A renewed interest in the subject arose around the time of Henschen during the first quarter of the 20th century. A summary of the cases of acalculia since Henschen leads to the conclusion that regardless of the functional modular nature of calculation ability, there is neither a localized region nor a specific hemisphere uniquely underlying the disorder.     

Judgments of men's and women's feelings during hypothetical social interactions

We studied college students' perceptions of how good/bad and how powerful/powerless men and women feel during hypothetical social interactions. Stimuli were constructed by combining each of 16 behaviors that fell into four categories (negative, low power, sexual, and help) with each of four dyads (male-male, male-female, female-male, female-female). Subjects made judgments about the likelihood of each behavior occurring, and about how actors and recipients felt when engaging in each of 16 behaviors. Three themes pervaded the results. First, subjects perceived men to feel more powerful than women whether behaving as actors or recipients—especially during interactions with women. Second, subjects perceived behaviors to be more likely, and actors and recipients to feel better and more powerful when the interaction pattern was consistent with gender role norms. Third, subjects perceived recipients' affective responses as being more polarized in opposite-sex than in same-sex dyads. Results from this research show that subjects' perceptions about feelings are largely consistent with the literature on social interaction and sex role stereotypes, and are similar for male and female subjects. In addition, our results provide a rich set of hypotheses concerning whether perceptions of feelings reflect actual feelings and are related to interaction participants' actual behavior.     

Volition as cognitive self-regulation

Living organisms exhibit various levels of self-regulation, the highest of which is man's ability to regulate the operation of his conceptual faculty. Ayn Rand's theory of free will, the basis of this article, identifies this level of self-regulation with volition. The locus of direct volitional choice is placed in the choice “to think or not to think,” where thinking is understood as rational, purposefully directed cognition. The nature of this choice is analyzed in detail, with special emphasis on Rand's concept of mental “focus.” The epistemological status of the theory is discussed, including the role of introspective evidence in its behalf. It is argued that one's volitional control over one's own thinking has the status of an axiom, and that any attempted denial of this control is self-refuting.     

Black and white adolescent mothers' child-rearing beliefs and behaviors

A convenience sample of 99 Black and 63 White adolescent mothers participated in a study of child-rearing beliefs and behaviors. Attitudes toward child-rearing were assessed using a scale developed for low-income, Black adolescent mothers. The HOME was used by trained observers to record parenting behavior. The Black and White samples were comparable in terms of income, employment status, educa tion, and age. Black mothers were more likely than White mothers to advocate some authoritarian child-rearing techniques. Black and White mothers with desirable attitudes toward parenting and positive parenting behaviors exceeded the number expected on the basis of chance alone. Overall, Black mothers were not as punitively oriented in either words or deeds as depicted in sociological analyses. The results of this analysis point to the importance of recognizing diversity in parental attitudes and behavior both between and within racial groups in the broader context of the changing role of adolescent mothers in our society.     

When sex is more than just sex: attachment orientations, sexual experience, and relationship quality

The authors explored the contribution of individual differences in attachment orientations to the experience of sexual intercourse and its association with relationship quality. In Study 1, 500 participants completed self-report scales of attachment orientations and sexual experience. The findings indicated that whereas attachment anxiety was associated with an ambivalent construal of sexual experience, attachment avoidance was associated with more aversive sexual feelings and cognitions. In Study 2, 41 couples reported on their attachment orientations and provided daily diary measures of sexual experiences and relationship interactions for a period of 42 days. Results showed that attachment anxiety amplified the effects of positive and negative sexual experiences on relationship interactions. In contrast, attachment avoidance inhibited the positive relational effect of having sex and the detrimental relational effects of negative sexual interactions. The authors discuss the possibility that attachment orientations are associated with different sex-related strategies and goals within romantic relationships.