Joining with all members of a family system: The rhetoric of antilogic in family therapy dialogue

Family therapists face a significant rhetorical challenge in working with families that disagree about the problematic life-situation which brought them to therapy. Therapists must find a way to join with disagreeing family members and then find a way to engage in a therapeutically useful conversation with them. Thus, they must deal resourcefully with contradictions. This article explores the ways that the Sophistic rhetorical concept of antilogic may be employed in helping therapists join and then engage in a therapeutically useful conversation with families who hold contradictory views concerning the problem that brought them to therapy.The author wishes to thank Ronald Chenail, PhD, Douglas Flemons, PhD, and Shelly Green, PhD, for their assistance in the development of this project.     

A plea for more intervision

The author presents an argument for tolerance, mutual understanding and reconciliation in psychotherapy, instead of a continued emphasis of schools. Psychotherapists' work with clients is proposed as a likely area for mutual understanding, rather than continued emphasis on their particular theories and academic matters. Psychotherapeutic intervision groups in which a small number of therapists voluntarily discuss their cases with peers from various backgrounds have become increasingly common again in recent years.Slightly revised version of a presentation made at the Georgetown Family Center Symposium in November 1995.     

Nonstranger sexual aggression: A discriminant analysis of the psychological characteristics of undetected offenders

Sex Roles - Rape is an underreported and underconvicted crime. Therefore, many highly sexually aggressive men are missed by research employing judicial identification for sample selection. The...     

Decreased helpfulness with increased group size through lessening the effects of the needy individual's dependency1

The present experiment attempted to integrate the research on helpfulness in which subjects work for someone else in an artificial laboratory setting (Berkowitz & Daniels, 1963; Berkowitz, 1972) with the bystander-intervention-in-emergencies studies often carried out under more realistic conditions (e.g., Latané & Darley, 1970; Schwartz & Clausen, 1970; Clark & Word, 1972). Fifty-six university women in a 2 × 2 factorial design were led to think they were working for a same-sex peer who could win a cash prize, although there was “nothing in it for them.” Half were told that the other's chance of getting the prize was greatly dependent upon their effort while the remaining participants were informed that the other did not need their-work very much. Moreover, half of the subjects thought they were the only ones working for the other whereas the remaining people believed there were two other co-workers and that the output from all three would be averaged. It was expected that the participants would feel the greatest personal responsibility to help the other and would work hardest for her when she was greatly dependent upon their productivity and they were the only worker, while the subjects would feel the lowest level of personal responsibility for their peer and would be least helpful to her when she was not particularly dependent upon them and there were two other co-workers. The findings are generally in accord with these expectations.     

The relationship between frontalis muscle activity and self-reports of headache pain

The relationship between levels of frontalis muscle activity and self-reports of pain was evaluated in two studies. In Study I frontalis muscle activity and self-reports of pain collected during biofeedback treatment of muscular contraction headache clients were correlated. In Study II frontalis EMG activity was increased and decreased using biofeedback techniques while concurrent reports of headache pain were recorded. The results of Study I indicated a significant relationship between EMG activity and reported headache pain for only two of the five subjects studied. The biofeedback procedures in Study II were associated with reliable increases and decreases in EMG activity. Concordance between EMG and pain reports occurred only during the EMG increase condition. Overall correlations were significant for one of the 2 subjects. The results suggest that EMG activity may not be sufficient to account for pain reports in all chronic headache clients, and variables other than EMG activity may be influencing reports of pain in some patients.     

A test of the hypothesis that Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient is the same for two tests administered to the same sample

In measurement studies the researcher may wish to test the hypothesis that Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient is the same for two measurement procedures. A statistical test exists for independent samples of subjects. In this paper three procedures are developed for the situation in which the coefficients are determined from the same sample. All three procedures are computationally simple and give tight control of Type I error when the sample size is 50 or greater.The author is indebted to Jerry S. Gilmer for development of the computer programs used in this study.