Beliefs about stories: Parents' and therapists' explanations of childhood difficulties

Therapists and parents were given vignettes describing the behavioural and emotional difficulties of two nine-year-old children and were asked to rate the importance of a number of possible explanations for such difficulties. Broad agreement was found between parents and therapists, but also there were a number of significant differences. Parents endorsed more child centered explanations and put greater emphasis on physical and developmental factors, while therapists endorsed relationships factors and saw the beliefs of other family members as important. Therapists who were parents showed a pattern of responses that lay between those of parents and non-parent therapists.     

MFT trainee adjustment to program lifestyle stress: The TAPS scale

The 30-item Trainee Adjustment to Program Stress (TAPS) scale was developed to measure lifestyle stress of family therapy trainees. Initially, 70 items were generated from propositional statements based on four constructs. Following pilot testing, 329 out of 900 (37%) student members of the American Association for Mariage and Family Therapy (AAMFT) returned TAPS questionnaires. Internal consistency reliability analyses and principal components and factor analyses produced a final 30 item TAPS scale appropriate for use in family therapy training programs. Reliability and validity measures are reported.     

Boundary regulation in family and personal systems: Perceptions of late adolescents

Examination of boundary regulation can provide family therapists with a framework to describe both the functioning of family systems and personal systems (i.e., the intrapsychic functioning of individual family members). In the present study, late adolescents' perceptions of boundary regulation within their family systems (i.e., ratings of family health, communication, leadership, expressiveness, cohesion, and family conflict) were related to regulation of their personal boundaries (i.e., self-reported personal competence, distress, and patterns of defense mechanism use). In addition, personal system variables reliably discriminated between adolescents who described their families as psychologically healthy versus psychologically unhealthy.     

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.     

Varieties of positive and negative priming

Numerous recent investigations have focused on a particular relation between the roles a stimulus plays in successive displays: when a stimulus ignored by a subject on one occasion is to be attended on a succeeding occasion, reaction time to that stimulus is slowed relative to a control condition. But this is but one possible case ofnegative priming. There are other ways in which negative priming might occur, and there are several varieties of positive priming as well. All these possibilities were explored in the present experiment.     

Family-centered intensive case management: A step toward understanding individualized care

New York State's initial attempt at individualizing services occurred within the context of an experiment. We randomly assigned children 5–12 years old who were referred for out-of-home placement in treatment foster care to either treatment foster care, Family-Based Treatment (n=15), or to Family-Centered Intensive Case Management (FCICM) (n=27). FCICM used teams of case managers and parent advocates to provide in-home services. Flexible service dollars, respite care, and behavior management skills training were available to assist teams in individualizing care. Preliminary outcomes indicate that children in FCICM are doing as well or better than children assigned to FBT in their functioning and symptom reduction. Parents of children in FCICM have made gains, although not at a statistically significant level, in behavior management skills and family strengths that allow them to provide care for their children at home.     

Gravitational acceleration as a cue for absolute size and distance?

When an object’s motion is influenced by gravity, as in the rise and fall of a thrown ball, the vertical component of acceleration is roughly constant at 9.8 m/sec². In principle, an observer could use this information to estimate the absolute size and distance of the object (Saxberg, 1987a; Watson, Banks, von Hofsten, & Royden, 1992). In five experiments, we examined people’s ability to utilize the size and distance information provided by gravitational acceleration. Observers viewed computer simulations of an object rising and falling on a trajectory aligned with the gravitational vector. The simulated objects were balls of different diameters presented across a wide range of simulated distances. Observers were asked to identify the ball that was presented and to estimate its distance. The results showed that observers were much more sensitive to average velocity than to the gravitational acceleration pattern. Likewise, verticality of the motion and visibility of the trajectory’s apex had negligible effects on the accuracy of size and distance judgments.