Increasing Client Employability Through Skill Development

This article presents a three-part model for counseling in an employment setting. Three stages of the job cycle are identified: job preparation, search, and survival. The specific skills relevant to each stage represent potential content for individual and group employment counseling, but do not necessarily apply to all clients in all situations. The skills when learned have broad applicability to nonjob aspects of clients' lives, contributing to an overall improvement in personal effectiveness.     

Toward a Metacommunicational Framework of Couple Interactions

A multi-level, metacommunicational framework to understand couple interactions is presented. Five interactional levels are defined following a mode of abstraction that parallels the theory of logical types; case examples are offered of couples interacting at each of the levels. The clinical implications of the framework, as a metaphor for understanding transactional processes, are discussed with an emphasis on the pragmatics of working with punctuational diffferences, developing therapeutic strategies, measuring progress, and setting goals for therapy with couples.     

Paradoxical Communication as Interpersonal Influence

This paper is concerned with the strategic uses of paradoxical communication in therapy. Eight more or less distinct uses of paradoxical communication are described, and the proposition is put forward that the paradoxical interventions associated with the Milan group differ from those described by Haley and the Palo Alto group only in that they appear to be designed to influence simultaneously the behavior of several family members. The currently popular idea that such interventions should, or even can, be based on a systemic hypothesis, if “hypothesis” is understood in its usual sense as a statement amenable to empirical testing, is explicitly questioned.     

Nonverbal Interactional Behavior in the Families of Persons with Schizophrenic and Bipolar Disorders

Whereas verbal interactional behaviors have been repeatedly found to distinguish the families of persons with and without major psychiatric disorders, there has been comparatively little examination of the discriminative value of nonverbal interactional behaviors. We developed the Nonverbal Interactional Coding System to measure “affiliative” and “distancing” nonverbal behaviors in 18 schizophrenic and 18 bipolar patients and their parents during 10-minute interactions conducted during a posthospital period. Bipolar patients and their parents displayed affiliative nonverbal behaviors (“illustrator gestures” or “prosocial behaviors”) for longer durations than schizophrenic patients and their parents. In contrast, parents of schizophrenic patients displayed distancing nonverbal behaviors (looking away) for longer durations than those of bipolar patients. The nonverbal interactional data added to the statistical strength of patients’ and parents’ verbal interactional data in distinguishing between these diagnostic groups. Nonverbal interactional behaviors are important variables to consider in interventions aimed at improving the communication skills of families coping with psychiatric disorders.     

AN EXPLORATORY EXAMINATION OF PERSON-ORGANIZATION FIT: ORGANIZATIONAL GOAL CONGRUENCE

Relationships between organization members'agreement on organizational goats and their attitudes and intentions regarding the organization were investigated in this study. A constituency approach was used to operationalize the organization into meaningful units as the basis for comparison between organizational members. Specifically, the congruence between hierarchical levels (supervisor-subordinate) and within a level (member-constituency) was examined. Both types of congruence were hypothesized to relate positively to job satisfaction and organizational commitment and negatively to intention to quit. The hypotheses were tested using data from 356 principals and 14,721 teachers, each rating the importance of goals for their school. The results confirmed the hypotheses regarding goal congruence among members of a constituency (teachers) and between hierarchical levels (principals and teachers), with member-constituency congruence having the greater impact on teachers'attitudes and intention to quit.     

Religious Orientation and Multidimensional Perfectionism: Relationships and Implications

To investigate relationships between religiosity and multidimensional perfectionism, the researchers administered measures of religious orientation and multidimensional perfectionism to 242 undergraduate students. The researchers found that more religious students had higher scores on an adaptive dimension of perfectionism (personal standards) but not on any of the measures of maladaptive perfectionism, suggesting that religious persons may be perfectionistic in adaptive, but not in maladaptive, ways.     

ON NATURALIZING THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF MATHEMATICS

In this paper, I consider an argument for the claim that any satisfactory epistemology of mathematics will violate core tenets of naturalism, i.e. that mathematics cannot be naturalized. I find little reason for optimism that the argument can be effectively answered.     

NATURAL RHETORIC AND THE PRAXIS OF UNDERSTANDING

Although rhetoric might be thought of as nothing more than an archaic art of manipulation, its ability to bring about action—particularly as the intellect and will engage in acts of persuasion amid the operations of the practical intellect—is a possibility that has gone largely unnoticed among philosophers of human nature. In this paper I explore the possibility that natural rhetoric, much as it serves the practical intellect in precipitating action, serves the speculative intellect as it stimulates acts of cognizing and understanding, thus leading to the acquisition of knowledge.