Toward a Better Understanding of Psychological Well‐Being in Dementia Caregivers: The Link Between Marital Communication and Depression

To read this article's abstract in both Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, please visit the article's full‐text page on Wiley InterScience ( http://interscience.wiley.com/journal/famp ). Dementia research has frequently documented high rates of caregiver depression and distress in spouses providing care for a partner suffering from dementia. However, the role of marital communication in understanding caregiver distress has not been examined sufficiently. Studies with healthy couples demonstrated an association between marital communication and the partners' psychological well‐being, depressiveness, respectively (e.g., Heene, Buysee, & Van Oost, 2005 ). The current study investigates the relationship between caregiver depression and communication in 37 couples in which the wives care for their partners with dementia. Nonsequential and sequential analyses revealed significant correlations between caregiver depression and marital communication quality. Caregivers whose husbands used more positive communication reported less depression and distress. Additionally, caregiver depression was negatively correlated with rates of positive reciprocal communication indicating dependence between the couples' interaction patterns. This study is one of the first to illustrate the relevance of spousal communication in understanding caregiver distress and depression.     

Avoiding Colonizer Positions in the Therapy Room: Some Ideas About the Challenges of Dealing with the Dialectic of Misery and Resources in Families

Some authors have argued that certain acts of family therapists—despite their best intentions—may represent a form of colonizing the family. When acting as a colonizer, a therapist is understood as becoming overly responsible for the family and focusing too strongly on change. In so doing, the therapist disrespects the family's pace, and neglects their own resources for change. This paper aims to highlight the need for therapists to be hypersensitive both to the resources of families entering therapy as well as to the impact of prevailing ideologies on their own positioning in the session. The kind of sensitivity advocated here is dialectical in the sense that every family is understood as having potentials promoting dynamism, happiness, and well-being as well as potentials contributing to stagnation, unhappiness, and misery. In this article, using illustrations from clinical practice, we present some ideas for resisting the tendency by the therapist to assume a colonizing position as a professional solver of problems for families. Our main aim here is to redirect the therapist toward connecting with the family's suffering, as well as with the resource repertoire it has developed for navigating and negotiating its way through life.     

Effective Christian Education: A Synthesis of Recent Denominational Studies

In 1987, Search Institute launched an ambitious effort to research the educational effectiveness of seven Protestant denominations. The results identified a variety of factors related to mature faith and denominational loyalty.     

Minimizing Arbitrariness: Toward a Metaphysics of Infinitely Many Isolated Concrete Worlds

A particular fact or event often appears arbitrary and puzzling, until it is exhibited as the outcome of certain causal processes. Usually, though not always, such a causal explanation helps to relieve the feeling of arbitariness, at least for a while. But it is easy and natural for our feeling to reassert itself: We are moved to ask why just those causal processes governed the situation of that fact or event, rather than some others. To deal with this further, larger question, often we can exhibit those causal processes as being, themselves, the results of, or certain specific instances of, prior or more general causalities. Or, much the same, we can redescribe the initial particular fact, and perhaps the cited cause as well, and display the items thus described as an instance of some very general, fundamental law or phenomenon. But any of this will only push the question back one step more. For we can always press on and ask: Why is it that just that very general phenomenon, or law, should be so fundamental, or indeed obtain at all, in the world in which we have our being? Within the usual framework of explanation, law and causation, there seems no place for such curiosity to come to rest. There seems no way for us to deal adequately with the brute and ultimate specificity of the ways in which almost everything appears to happen. And what seems worse, the specific character of certain of these laws or ways, even of quite fundamental ones, often seems so quirky, the very height of arbitrariness.     

INVOLVEMENT IN COMMUNICATION NETWORKS AS A PREDICTOR OF ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT

This study examines the relationship between involvement in a job-related communication network and organizational commitment. The findings indicate a complex relationship that is moderated by the degree of job involvement. For employees who are not involved in their jobs, involvement in the job-related communication network functions to foster commitment to the organization. Two major conclusions are drawn: (1) the impact of involvement in communication networks on employee attitudes and behaviors may occur only for individuals with certain characteristics; and (2) previous studies that have reported main effects for individual variables on organizational commitment may need reinterpretation in light of the disordinal interaction obtained here. The possibility that different commitment processes operate for different kinds of employees is explored, with special emphasis on those employees for whom communication is a potent factor in determining attitudes. Implications for future research on the relationship between communication network involvement and other employee responses are discussed.