Tools for Many Trades: Reaffirming the Use of Grief Counselling by Health, Welfare and Pastoral Workers

The use of counselling is increasingly questioned as an appropriate and viable activity for professionals in statutory and general settings whose work roles and tasks are varied. This paper looks specifically at grief counselling and examines some of the reasons why applications of grief theories and grief counselling by such workers have been narrow and limited. It then suggests a framework for teaching the subject, offering relevant applications. Finally, it points to developing areas of grief counselling in multi-disciplinary contexts and argues that working with grief and loss must be recognised and fostered as core, generic skills for the non-specialist.     

Valuational semantics of rule derivability

If a certain semantic relation (which we call local consequence) is allowed to guide expectations about which rules are derivable from other rules, these expectations will not always be fulfilled, as we illustrate. An alternative semantic criterion (based on a relation we call global consequence), suggested by work of J.W. Garson, turns out to provide a much better — indeed a perfectly accurate — guide to derivability.     

Philosophy and religion in the face of death and bereavement

While the ways in which people deal with dying and bereavement have been comprehensively researched, there is little which integrates psychological, emotional, philosophical, and religious perspectives. The role of religion is generally considered in terms of a simple linear relationship between presence or absence of religious belief and coping capacity. This article uses qualitative material from a small-scale study concerned with individuals' philosophical and religious frameworks to point towards multi-factor analysis. Comment is offered around the themes of theodicy; meaning; death-transcendence modes, and psychological and emotional adjustment.     

Gender and response effects in telephone interviews about gender characteristics

This study investigates the effect of gender on responses to questions about sex role orientations. Literature on gender effects in survey interviews, job interviews and counseling studies, and experiments leads to hypotheses that male interviewers will elicit more response effects than female interviewers, especially from females; that female respondents will show desirability effects more than males; and that respondents, especially female respondents, will disclose liberal orientations more to female than to male interviewers. Findings show that male interviewers do not elicit more response effects, especially among females, and there seem to be desirability effects operating instead of conformity effects, especially for female interviewers. Females, and low-power, highly educated males exhibit more liberal responses to female interviewers. This study demonstrates that in areas where interviewer—respondent question content is related to salient dimensions, response effects are observed and constitute potentially damaging sources of error.     

Sex and sociability in rats

Three experiments explored the effects of sexual motivation and the opportunity for sexual contact on social attraction in rats. Rats were no more gregarious in cross-sex than in same-sex pairings. Increased male sexual experience and hormonally induced female receptivity both led to increased sexual activity but had no effect on social behavior. Males housed with continuously receptive females showed signs of sexual exhaustion but were as gregarious as males housed alone or with males. It appears that social attraction in rats is not motivated primarily by sexual desires, either direct or sublimated.