Treatment of alcoholic couples in outpatient group therapy

This paper summarizes special issues that group leaders are likely to encounter when adapting their skills to outpatient group therapy with alcoholic couples. More specifically, the paper: (a) discusses the advantages of treating alcoholic couples in a group as opposed to individual couple's therapy; (b) outlines the parameters of a couples group with alcoholic members that differentiate it from working with other kinds of couples in group; and (c) provides guidelines and techniques for tackling some of the specific kinds of problems and situations that arise.This paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Group Psychotherapy Association, New York City, February, 1985.The author wishes to acknowledge the contribution of Geraldine Alpert, Ph.D., whose thoughtful comments and discussion helped to crystallize the concepts presented.     

The linkage of work achievement to self-esteem,career maturity,and college achievement

This study tested whether self-esteem and mature career attitudes related to one another and complemented one another in predicting academic and work achievement for 174 college students. Analysis showed both constructs related to achievement and supported the thesis that self-esteem facilitates development of mature career attitudes, which in turn promote academic and work achievement. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for theory and practice.     

Can subjects maintain a constant criterion in a memory task?

In two recognition memory experiments, subjects rated how certain they were that a given test item had been shown previously. Subjects either received standard instructions about their rating criteria or were explicitly instructed to maintain criteria defined in the manner of Healy and Jones (1973) or along the lines of signal detection theory. When a priori probability varied, subjects in all instruction groups held constant the criteria defined by signal detection theory at the expense of shifting the criteria proposed by Healy and Jones. The results were taken as evidence for the psychological validity of recognition memory analyses based on signal detection theory.     

The relation of esteem and social class to self-occupational congruence

The relation of self-esteem and social class to congruence with chosen occupation (the incorporation score) was analyzed by ANOVA and a priori contrasts. Fifty-four accounting majors were differentiated from 58 non-accounting, business majors on the basis of their ideal-self-accounting congruence (p < .01) and their self-accountant congruence (p < .05). Both high- and low-esteem accounting majors' congruence scores for accountant were higher than other S's accountant congruence, and high-esteem accounting majors had the highest congruence (p <.05). Working class accounting majors had higher congruence than middle class accounting students (p <.05). The implications of the findings for theory development and counseling were discussed.     

The Peter Pan Syndrome: Inpatient treatment of adolescent anorexia nervosa

Specific strategies designed for intervening in family, hospital, community, and school systems are discussed as crucial components in the treatment of adolescent anorexia nervosa. It is suggested that all these systems inadvertently collude in the “Peter Pan Syndrome”: maintaining the adolescent-identified patient in a latency age role in order to protect mother from depression and the family in its entirety from an “empty nest” developmental crisis. When strategic and structural alterations occurred within the above mentioned systems while the child was hospitalized and after discharge, the anorectic symptom was alleviated.     

The influence of gender and gender-pairings on clergy's identification of sexually ambiguous behavior as sexual harassment

A sample of 371 United Methodist clergy indicated how strongly they believed a sexually ambiguous scenario between a senior pastor and associate pastor constituted sexual harassment when senior/associate pastor genders were varied. Participants also completed the Tolerance of Sexual Harassment Inventory (TSHI). Male clergy were less likely than females to perceive the interaction between a senior pastor and associate (in any of four gender-pairings) as sexual harassment. There were no significant differences in perception of sexual harassment based on senior/associate pastor gender pairings. Males and those 46 and older were significantly more tolerant of sexual harassment than females and those 45 and under.She is also a United Methodist minister. Additional information may be requested by writing her at the University of Colorado at Denver, Campus Box 106, P.O. Box 173364, Denver, CO 80217-3364 or by calling 303-556-6032.     

Cognitive strategies in discourse processing: A comparison of Chinese and English speakers

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that, when processing a normative language, individuals tend to adopt the discourse processing strategies that they use in their native language. In a natural language processing task, native speakers of English and Chinese read English passages that were heavily loaded with zero anaphora. Native Chinese speakers found the passages more comprehensible than did native English speakers, presumably because zero anaphora occurs much more often in Chinese than in English. However, in an artificial laboratory task, native Chinese speakers did not find it easier to recover the missing referents than did native English speakers, suggesting that the two groups were equally capable of reference retrieval although they differed in their natural language discourse-processing strategies. These results suggest that the strategies used for processing foreign-language discourse are influenced by those used to process native-language discourse.This research was supported in part by Dean's Small Grants from the Graduate School of the University of Colorado to Liang Tao and United States Army Research Institute Contracts MDA903-90-K-0066 and MDA903-93-K-0010 to the University of Colorado (Alice Healy, Principal Investigator).We thank Barbara Fox, Lise Menn, and Nanfang Jiang for stimulating discussions about this research.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the First International Conference on Chinese Linguistics held in Singapore, 1992.