Family Therapy in France: A Brief Overview

The major issues in contemporary family therapy in France are described: Difficult beginnings, the practice of family therapy today, training and professionalisation, organization for family therapy, journals and publishing, and perspectives for family therapy in France.A psychiatrist, Head of Hospital Psychiatric and Mental Health Center near Paris (Ville Evrard. France 93330) and a family therapist     

Average faces are average faces

Photographs of faces of young adult male and female Scots were measured on nineteen frontal dimensions. Measures in each dimension were converted to z-scores and summed for each face. For each sex, the ten faces closest to the average summed z-score and the ten most distant from it were rated for attractiveness by white male and female New Zealand undergraduates. Raters agreed significantly in ordering the faces in attractiveness, but did not rate faces close to the “population” average differently from those distant from it. Tested for the first time with actual rather than contrived faces, the commonly reported hypothesis that faces representing the average of a population are attractive is not supported.     

Lexical access of resyllabified words: Evidence from phoneme monitoring

Resyllabification is a phonological process in which consonants are attached to syllables other than those from which they originally came. In four experiments, we investigated whether resyllabified words, such as "my bike is" pronounced as "mai.bai.kis," are more difficult to recognize than nonresyllabified words. Using a phoneme-monitoring task, we found that phonemes in resyllabified words were detected more slowly than those in nonresyllabified words. This difference increased when recognition of the carrier word was made more difficult. Acoustic differences between the target words themselves could not account for the results, because cross-splicing the resyllabified and nonresyllabified carrier words did not change the pattern. However, when nonwords were used as carriers, the effect disappeared. It is concluded that resyllabification increases the lexical-processing demands, which then interfere with phoneme monitoring.     

The EARLY ALLIANCE Prevention Trial: An Integrated Set of Interventions to Promote Competence and Reduce Risk for Conduct Disorder, Substance Abuse, and School Failure

Describes the EARLY ALLIANCE interventions, an integrated set of four programs designed to promote competence and reduce risk for early-onset conduct disorder, substance abuse, and school failure. These interventions are evaluated as part of a prevention trial that begins at school entry and targets child functioning and socializing practices across multiple contexts (school, peer group, family) and multiple domains (affective, social, and achievement coping-competence). The paper presents the conceptual foundation of the four interventions, including a synopsis of the risk and protective factors associated with conduct disorder and related outcomes, and of the coping-competence model driving EARLY ALLIANCE. The developmental rationale, intended impact, and procedures are described for each intervention: a universally administered classroom program and indicated, peer, reading-mentoring, and family programs. Interventions are currently being tested in a prevention trial, which is briefly summarized.     

The influence of word function in the missing-letter effect: Further evidence from French

When asked to detect target letters while reading continuous text, subjects miss more letters in highly common function words than in less common content words. This is known as themissing-letter effect. According to the structural account, the higher omission rates for frequent function words are attributable to their role in supporting the extraction of phrase structure, after which they become lost in the transition from structure to meaning. This implies that word function in and of itself should affect letter detection accuracy. This issue was examined in four experiments while controlling for a number of confounded factors associated with another influential model: the unitization account. The first experiment extended the missing-letter effect to the French language. The second showed that letter detection is influenced by slight variations in the function assumed by the same word, such as when it is used as a definite article as opposed to a pronoun. This effect was observed even when the frequency of the orthographic pattern and the syllable stress patterns were controlled. In the last two experiments, a control was added for another factor: frequency of word meaning. The results indicate that word function contributes to the missing-letter effect over and above what is contributed by frequency of word meaning.     

Changes in masculine and feminine traits over time: A meta-analysis

Sixty-three samples providing single-sex means on the Bem Sex-Role Inventory [BSRI; S. L. Bem (1974) “The Measurement of Psychological Androgyny,”Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 42, pp. 155–162] and 40 reporting similar data on the Personal Attributes Questionnaire [PAQ; J. T. Spence and R. L. Helmreich (1978)Masculinity and Feminity, Austin University of Texas Press] for American undergraduates were located and analyzed. Women’s scores on the BSRI-M and PAQ-M (masculine) scales have increased steadily over time (r’s = .74 and .43, respectively). Women’s BSRI-F and PAQ-F (feminine) scale scores do not correlate with year. Men’s BSRI-M scores show a weaker positive relationship with year of administration (r = .47). The effect size for sex differences on the BSRI-M has also changed over time, showing a significant decrease over the twenty-year period. The results suggest that cultural change and environment may affect individual personalities; these changes in BSRI and PAQ means demonstrate women’s increased endorsement of masculine-stereotyped traits and men’s continued nonendorsement of feminine-steretyped traits. A version of this paper was presented at the 1995 annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, August 11–15, New York. I. would like to thank Abigail J. Stewart and Randy J. Larsen for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.     

Interparental Conflict and Youth Problem Behaviors: A Meta-Analysis

We examined the proposition that interparental conflict is associated with internalizing and externalizing problems in youth ages 5 to 18. This examination was done by conducting a meta-analysis of 348 statistical effects from 68 studies. The average effect size (d-value) was .32. There was considerable variability among effect sizes and this variability was associated with the average time since separation for separated/divorced parents, the socioeconomic status composition of the sample, and average parental education in the sample. The variability among effect sizes also was associated with the source of the informant used to assess interparental conflict and youth problem behaviors. Surprisingly, many of the other study characteristics we coded were not associated with variability in the effect sizes.