Carers’ beliefs about counselling: a community participatory study in Wales

This interpretivist community participatory study explores carers’ beliefs about the potential usefulness of counselling in relation to the caring role. Twenty semi-structured interviews with carers were transcribed and analysed thematically. All participants thought counselling could potentially be helpful to carers, but their ideas about the ways in which it would help varied according to whether or not they had personal experience of counselling. Only carers with counselling experience had an awareness of counselling as focussing on changing feelings, thoughts, attitudes and behaviours. The implications of the findings for the provision of counselling services are discussed.     

Measuring Sense of Community Responsibility in Community‐Based Prevention Coalitions: An Item Response Theory Analysis

Research on sense of community (SOC) has traditionally been approached from a resource perspective. Recently, however, research on the experience of SOC has evolved to include a related but distinct construct of sense of community responsibility (SOC‐R), or feelings of accountability for the well‐being of a community. This study applied item response theory to examine the psychometric properties of a SOC‐R scale used in an evaluation of community‐based substance abuse prevention coalitions. Data were collected in 2017 from coalition members (analytic sample = 309) in the northeastern United States. Findings indicate that the scale was reliable, unidimensional, and functioned well, particularly at low and moderate levels of the construct. The addition of two items intended to capture higher levels of the construct improved the scale's functioning at higher levels of SOC‐R. The adapted SOC‐R scale was also shown to have moderately strong relationships with conceptually relevant variables, including SOC, coalition participation, number of roles performed in the coalition, and engagement in community action activities. These findings provide empirical evidence to support the reliability and validity of the SOC‐R scale, and have critical implications for our conceptualization of the SOC construct, its measurement, and for the evaluation of community‐based prevention interventions.     

Religion and the Risks of Sexually Transmissible Infections: Evidence from Britain

Journal of Religion and Health - Although a growing body of literature has explored the association between religion and the prevalence of sexually transmissible infections (STIs), the focus has...     

A Review of: “Cooper,M., O'Hara,M., Schmid,P. F., & Wyatt,G. (2007). The Handbook of Person-Centered Psychotherapy and Counseling.”

Abstract

Consideration is given to our cognitive, volitional, and emotive functions as they are experienced in the I‐It and I‐Thou realms of our existence, focusing on our emotive function. Feelings in the I‐It realm are limited to the physical and psychical parts of ourselves. They are defensive and motivate our survival in the world. In the I‐Thou realm, they permeate our whole being, including that part of ourselves that is beyond phenomenological manifestation that lies at the ground of our being as potential awaiting actualization. Our ontology necessitates the experience of our primary feelings in our struggle to become what we are uniquely “created” to be. Dialogical psychotherapists consider this as crucial to our therapeutic endeavors.     

Positive emotion can protect against source memory impairment

Despite widespread belief that memory is enhanced by emotion, evidence also suggests that emotion can impair memory. Here we test predictions inspired by object-based binding theory, which states that memory enhancement or impairment depends on the nature of the information to be retrieved. We investigated emotional memory in the context of source retrieval, using images of scenes that were negative, neutral or positive in valence. At study each scene was paired with a colour and during retrieval participants reported the source colour for recognised scenes. Critically, we isolated effects of valence by equating stimulus arousal across conditions. In Experiment 1 colour borders surrounded scenes at study: memory impairment was found for both negative and positive scenes. Experiment 2 used colours superimposed over scenes at study: valence affected source retrieval, with memory impairment for negative scenes only. These findings challenge current theories of emotional memory by showing that emotion can impair memory for both intrinsic and extrinsic source information, even when arousal is equated between emotional and neutral stimuli, and by dissociating the effects of positive and negative emotion on episodic memory retrieval.     

The Heterosexual Appeal of Socially Marginal Men

Surveyed women consistently specify preferences for egalitarian dates and/or mates. A common perception is that many of these same women often select consorts who are inscrutable, assertive, and controlling, ultimately bemoaning their choices. Dominance has been experimentally shown to provide initial attraction advantages. The Byronic Hero, a venerable literary model, embraces protagonists who possess extraordinary masculine traits that include dominance but also multiple personal flaws. Byronic Heroes, easily identified and plentiful in popular fiction, appear strongly to resonate with youthful audiences and provide alluring portrayals of heterosexual relations. In a classroom survey employing slide images of paired apparel models and a blind date scenario, collegiate women slightly but significantly preferred models independently judged to project Byronic traits over equally handsome men who appeared affable and conventional. Subject comments on Byronic models uniquely included allusions to sexual and mysterious/rebellious attributes. It was concluded that projections of Byronic masculinity provide initial advantages in the securing of heterosexual liaisons.     

Primary Trauma of Female Partners in a Military Sample: Individual Symptoms and Relationship Satisfaction

Research traditionally has focused on the development of symptoms in those who experienced war trauma directly but overlooked the impact of trauma in the partners of soldiers. The current study reports data from 45 couples where the male partners were Army soldiers who recently returned from deployments to Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom) or Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom). Results from this study indicated that female partner primary trauma, particularly trauma related to PTSD re-experiencing and arousal symptoms, has an influence on levels of relationship satisfaction, both for female partners and soldiers.     

An Examination of the Relationship Between Parent Language and Child Anxiety

Research suggests that parents of anxious children behave differently when interacting with their children than do parents of nonanxious children. However, the relationship between parent language use in this context and child anxiety remains unclear. The present study investigates how parent language use relates to child anxiety during parent–child interactions using a community sample recruited to participate in a study of familial anxiety. Results indicate that parent language use varies in relation to child anxiety. Further, this idiosyncratic pattern of parent linguistic activity uniquely predicts child anxiety diagnostic status. Implications of this study and future directions for research are discussed.     

Hemispheric laterality measured in Rembrandt's portraits using pupil diameter and aesthetic verbal judgements

Eckhard Hess claimed that pupils dilate to pleasant images and constrict to unpleasant images. However, his work was confounded since his image's luminances and contrasts across conditions were inconsistent. We overcome this limitation and suggest a new, promising methodology for research in this area. We presented rightward or leftward facing male and female portraits by Rembrandt to observers in either their original or mirror-reversed position. Since emotional content may be expressed differently on each side of the face, we used Rembrandt's portraits since most of his males had their right-cheek exposed and females had their left-cheek exposed. This raises questions regarding the emotional and cognitive significance of such biased positioning. Simultaneously, we measured observers pupil size while asking observers to report how (dis)pleasing they found each image. We found that in viewing male portraits pupil diameter was a function of arousal. That is, larger pupil diameter occurred for images rated both low and high in pleasantness. We discuss these findings in regard to the perceived dominance of males and how emotional expressions may be driven by hemispheric laterality.