Group Work with Aggressive Men: Group Within a Group Within a Group

Psychodynamic group therapy offers many opportunities for members to identify, understand, and change the underlying problems, which lead to their aggressive behavior. In addition, group therapy can help to improve the members’ interpersonal relationships. The “Coping with Aggression” is comprised of three groups. A psychodynamic group of assaultive men made up the first group. The second group consisted of two leaders and a consultant whom the group members knew about but never actually met. The observers who sat outside the group made up the third group. Therapy contracts, boundaries, and leadership, and group process are discussed.     

Watching people talk about their emotions: Inferences in response to full-face vs. profile expressions

Young adults talked to an experimenter about their emotional reactions to video episodes intended to evoke either negative or positive affect. Facial behavior was simultaneously videotaped from three perspectives (full-face, a 90° right profile, and a 90° left profile) without their awareness. Judges viewed a subset of dynamic expressions in one of the three facial perspectives in either normal or mirror-reversed orientation. While subjects talked about a negative affect elicitor, the left hemiface and the full-face were perceived as more expressive than the right hemiface. The left hemiface, in reversed orientation, was perceived to display more emotion than the same expression in original orientation for positive or negative affect. These results are discussed in the context of the literature exploring hemifacial differences in emotional expression and mouth asymmetry during propositional speech.     

Mapping Residents' Perceptions of Neighborhood Boundaries: A Methodological Note

Neighborhood influences on children and youth are the subjects of increasing numbers of studies, but there is concern that these investigations may be biased, because they typically rely on census-based units as proxies for neighborhoods. This pilot study tested several methods of defining neighborhood units based on maps drawn by residents, and compared the results with census definitions of neighborhoods. When residents' maps were used to create neighborhood boundary definitions, the resulting units covered different space and produced different social indicator values than did census-defined units. Residents' agreement about their neighborhoods' boundaries differed among the neighborhoods studied. This pilot study suggests that discrepancies between researcher and resident-defined neighborhoods are a possible source of bias in studies of neighborhood effects.     

Teachers' selections of boys and girls as prominent pupils

Over 300 teachers and student-teachers were asked to nominate their most noticeable pupils regarding ability, achievement, behavior, and teacher's preoccupation with them, as defined in eight eminently school-relevant categories. Frequencies of male and female names recorded were employed as measures of teachers' perception of saliency of the two sexes. Respondents recalled significantly more boys as prominent in most categories. More boys than girls were perceived as the best students in general and in mathematics in particular, and as possessing high potential. More boys than girls occupied the minds of these teachers after school. Boys appeared to cause the overwhelming majority of discipline problems. On the other hand, more girls were considered very successful in Hebrew and in social skills. Boys received more nominations in each of their five categories of salience then did girls in any of their two categories of salience. No difference was found between sex-related nominations of experienced teachers and student-teachers. Findings indicate that both teachers and future teachers of the elementary grades perceive boys as the majority of salient students. Moreover, the directions of most sex differences found are stereotypical. Such perceptions, unsupported by objective psychometric evidence, may impede sex equity in school practice, and particularly deprive girls of opportunities of full personal development.Part of this study was presented at the Third International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women, Dublin, Ireland, 1987. We would like to thank Hudda Halabi and Tamar Michaeli for their help in coding.     

Picture object recognition in an American black bear (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Ursus americanus</Emphasis>)

Many animals have been tested for conceptual discriminations using two-dimensional images as stimuli, and many of these species appear to transfer knowledge from 2D images to analogous real life objects. We tested an American black bear for picture-object recognition using a two alternative forced choice task. She was presented with four unique sets of objects and corresponding pictures. The bear showed generalization from both objects to pictures and pictures to objects; however, her transfer was superior when transferring from real objects to pictures, suggesting that bears can recognize visual features from real objects within photographic images during discriminations.     

Substance Abuse,Familial Factors,and Mental Health: Exploring Racial and Ethnic Group Differences Among African American,Caucasian, and Hispanic Juvenile Offenders

The present study examined racial, ethnic, and gender differences in family composition substance abuse, and mental health issues, such as depression and self-esteem among adjudicated juvenile offenders. Results revealed a negative relationship between depression and self-esteem among all ethnicities and family compositions. Caucasians reported greater incidence of substance abuse than did African American and Hispanic youth. Moreover, in reconstituted families, Caucasians had lower self-esteem scores than did other ethnicities. The findings illustrate the complexities of risk to substance use among high-risk populations, particularly as they relate to familial factors and the importance of intensive family therapy among this population.     

On Using a Cancer Center Cancer Registry to Identify Newly Affected Women Eligible for Hereditary Breast Cancer Syndrome Testing: Practical Considerations

The goals of this research were to describe the process of identifying and recruiting individuals registered with a cancer center's cancer registry who were eligible to participate in cancer genetic research. This study specifically focused on younger women with personal and family cancer histories strongly suggestive of hereditary breast cancer syndromes, as determined by genetic counselor review. Of special interest was to determine the proportion of women from minority backgrounds who were (a) identifiable in this manner and (b) interested in genetic testing for hereditary breast cancer through a family cancer clinical research program. An initial query of the 292 cases of women newly affected with breast cancer and contained within the registry indicated that 124 met demographic eligibility criteria. The personal and family cancer histories of each of these women were then reviewed by a genetic counselor and the remaining, eligible patients (n = 31) were subsequently contacted by mail and telephone: approximately three-fifths (18/31) of these patients were White and two-fifths (13/31) were Black or of another racial background. Of the women who were sent one or more study-related mailings, 10% (3/31) were unreachable by telephone due to incorrect contact information, 32% (10/31) were reachable by telephone but unresponsive to messages left, 26% (8/31) had already participated in the family cancer program (i.e., were positive controls), 6% (2/31) were interested in participating in the program, 23% (7/31) were uninterested in participating in the program, and 3% (1/31) were later determined to be ineligible. Comparing the racial backgrounds of women who were either positive controls or interested in participating (i.e., “tester” category) to women who were either unreachable, nonresponsive, uninterested, or ineligible (i.e., “nontester” category), there was a nonsignificant trend for more non-White women to fall into the nontester than tester category, Fisher's Exact Test = .09. This work underscores practical steps in planning and carrying-out cancer genetic testing research among women newly affected with breast cancer and members of special populations. It also underscores the role that genetic counseling professionals play in this process.     

Explaining age differences in temporal working memory

To determine the cognitive mechanisms underlying age differences in temporal working memory (WM), the authors examined the contributions of item memory, associative memory, simple order memory, and multiple item memory, using parallel versions of the delayed-matching-to-sample task. Older adults performed more poorly than younger adults on tests of temporal memory, but there were no age differences in nonassociative item memory, regardless of the amount of information to be learned. In contrast, a combination of associative and simple order memory, both of which were reduced in older adults, completely accounted for age-related declines in temporal memory. The authors conclude that 2 mechanisms may underlie age differences in temporal WM, namely, a generalized decline in associative ability and a specific difficulty with order information.     

When Gender Differences Surpass Cultural Differences in Personal Satisfaction with Body Shape in Israeli College Students

This study was designed to examine influences of gender and cultural background on participants satisfaction with body-shape. Participants were Jewish and Arab university students (104 men and 96 women), who completed the Figure Rating Scale (Fallon & Rozin, 1985). Discrepancy between current and ideal figures was used to measure body satisfaction. As in the U.S., women, in comparison with men, were significantly less satisfied with their bodies. They exaggerated the magnitude of thinness that they thought men desire. In contrast with U.S. findings, there were women as well as men, who indicated dissatisfaction with their bodies because they thought they were too thin. Contrary to our predictions, cultural background did not influence body satisfaction. However, gender and age produced significant differences in ratings.