Improvisational therapy: Evolving one's own clinical style

This article offers an invitation to develop one's own unique clinical style, relying less on institutionalized schools of therapy and more on the therapist's own natural resources. An emphasis is placed upon understanding therapy as art, trusting one's imagination, and maintaining a healthy irreverence for professional politics.     

Safety locus of control and employees' accidents

This study further established the criterion-related validity of the Safety Locus of Control Scale. The safety scale was designed to predict employment applicants' propensity for on-the-job accidents. In this study, 283 hospital employees with moreexternal safety locus of control orientations reported significantly more occupational accidents, as well as more severe and costly injuries, than workers with moreinternal safety attitudes (p<.05 in all cases). Implications of these results are discussed.Research study presented at the 1988 Annual Conference of the Association of Human Resources Management and Organizational Behavior, Long Beach, California, October 26–29.     

Family coping strategies and the rural Appalachian working poor

Naturalistic research methods were used in this study to collect the voices, ideas, and opinions of rural, working poor, Appalachian families from Southeast Ohio about the stress of poverty in family life and family coping in the face of poverty. This data should be of interest to the professional family therapist who practices with the working poor.     

Live supervision in the postmodern era of family therapy: Issues,reflections, and questions

This article asserts that the family therapy field is approaching an epistemological shift from structuralism and positivism to postmodernism and relativism. The confluence of these movements: feminism, constructivism/constructionism, and cultural relativism is cited as a major impetus for the shift. Live supervision is examined within the context of this transformation, with a discussion of implications for the future.     

Supervising the person of the therapist: Issues,challenges and dilemmas

A major critical issue in marriage and family therapy today is the professionalization of the discipline. Thus the focus on training individuals for a career in marriage and family therapy necessitates the revisitation of the debate over personal growth versus skill development. The trend toward training the person of the therapist, however, would suggest that the field is moving toward the integration of self awareness and skill in the therapeutic system. With the popularization of training the person of the therapist comes other issues, challenges, and dilemmas for the field, including the crucial issue of training gender and culturally sensitive therapists. The potential for creating dual relationships when training the person of the therapist is both a dilemma and a challenge.     

Sado-masochism as a defense against merging: Six case studies

This paper reports on several patients who use sado-masochism as a defense against an unconscious wish for and fear of merging. The sado-masochism can be expressed as a sexual perversion or in a difficult ungratifying interpersonal relationship. These relationships have some of the quality of addictions in that the patients have a compulsive need to continue them and find it extremely difficult to leave them. Therapy must focus on helping the patient become more separate, rather than on other problems which may also be present. Initially, the therapist needs to take an educational stance in regard to the process the patient must complete, rather than the more traditional analytic stance.     

The differential validity of hyperactivity/attention deficits and conduct problems among mentally retarded children

The independence of hyperactivity, attention deficits, and conduct problems among mentally retarded children was addressed using factors of the Conners' Teacher Rating Scale-39 (CTRS-39) and the more recently developed IOWA Conners' inattention/overactivity (IO) and aggression (A) subscales. CTRS-39 ratings were obtained for children of normal intelligence and for mentally retarded children. Differences between the groups were examined as were intercorrelations of the Conners' factors and IOWA subscales. Conduct problems proved to be less strongly associated with hyperactivity and attention deficits among mentally retarded children compared to children of normal intelligence. However, attention problems and conduct problems may be associated with mental retardation in general. Implications of these data and CTRS scoring system recommendations for mentally retarded children are discussed.     

Social reactions to depictions of casual and steady acquaintance rape: The impact of AIDS exposure and stereotypic beliefs about women

While much of the early research on the social perception of sexual assault focused on instances of stranger rape, recent work has indicated that acquaintance rape occurs much more frequently. The purpose of the present investigation was to examine a gender role socialization analysis of acquaintance rape. The subjects in the present investigation, predominately Caucasian-American females (i.e., over 90% were nonminority), were first preclassified as either traditional or nontraditional in their gender role views about women. We then examined their perception of rape victims and rape perpetrators as a function of whether the rape occurred between casual dating partners vs. long-term steady daters, and also as a function of whether the assailant exposed the rape victim to the disease AIDS (vs. no exposure to AIDS). The results indicated that individuals who varied in their stereotypic views about women differed in their reactions, with more traditional subjects being more likely to negatively evaluate the rape victim and less likely to evaluate the rapist in an unfavorable manner. In addition, it was found that when rape victims were exposed to AIDS, the social perceptions of others were strongly influenced, with casual-dating rape acquaintances being more likely to bear the onus of a negative reaction from others.