Practising family therapy in India: how many people are there in a marital subsystem?

Systemic therapy would appear to be a viable form of treatment for people who exist in cultures that contain complex, extended family systems, such as those found in India. The practice of family therapy in India has evolved from Western concepts. These concepts appear to offer Indian therapists relevant and practical ways of working with families. However, some of these concepts need modifying before they can be used in an Indian context. Indian families may have very different worldviews and ideas of 'self' compared to families in the West, leading to different family organization. The situation can be further complicated by the cultural norms of therapists themselves. Therapists in India are often highly educated, come from upper-middle-class families and have been exposed to different cultures. They increasingly share many of the values of their counterparts in the West. At the same time, they retain aspects of their own cultural heritage, which is also the dominant culture for a large number of the families with whom they work. Thus, not only must Indian family therapists seek to work in culturally appropriate ways; they must also tolerate their own internalized conflicts regarding differing cultural norms. With the use of clinical data, this paper describes some of the personal and professional problems experienced by an Indian family therapist working with Western constructs of family organization.     

A generalized method of image analysis from an intercorrelation matrix which may be singular

Following the works of Guttman (1953) and Kaiser (1976), we show that the image and anti-image covariance matrices can be derived from a singular correlation matrix, by making use of the orthogonal projector and a weaker generalized inverse matrix.     

Effect of Reward Contingency on Intrinsic Motivation

The effects of type of task and type of reward contingency on intrinsic motivation for subsequent task performance were investigated. The sample consisted of 50 young Indian adults. The results showed a significantly greater amount of free choice time spent on a heuristic task rather than an algorithmic task. The verbal measures of intrinsic motivation yielded a significant effect of reward contingency with greater intrinsic motivation under performance-contingent reward, followed by task-contingent and no-reward conditions, respectively. The results support self-determination and competence processes as important mediators of intrinsic motivation.     

Psychophysiological Reactions to the Response Phase of the Rorschach and 16PF

Sylvia Anthony. The Discovery of Death in Childhood and After. New York: Basic Books, 1972, $6.95. Reviewed by Louise Bates Ames

B. Klopfer, M. M. Meyer, and F. B. Brawer (Editors), Developments in the Rorschach Technique, Vol. III. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovarovich, 1970 Reviewed by A. I. Rabin

Mireille Monod, Manuel d'Application de Test du Village. (Manual for the village test). Neuchatel (Switzerland): Delachaux &; Niestle, 1970. Reviewed by S. G. Vandenberg

Florence Roswell and Gladys Natchez. Reading Disability: Diagnosis and Treatment. (2nd ed.) New York: Basic Books, 1971, 277 pages, $6.95. Reviewed by Jules C. Abrams, PhD

M. Gardiner (Ed.) The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man. New York: Basic Books, 1971, 370 pages, $10.00. Reviewed by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi

N. J. Hale, Jr. Freud and The Americans – The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–1917. New York: Oxford, 1971, 574 pages, $15.00. Reviewed by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi     

Depression and sleep quality in older adults: a meta-analysis

The literature emphasizes depression and poor sleep quality as problems that affect many elderly individuals. However, these problems have been related in few studies and there is no meta-analysis performed so far on this relationship. The present research reviewed the studies performed on the subjective sleep quality in order to understand how it relates to depression in older adults. The review was conducted in January 2016 and comprised publications between 2005 and 2015. Based on the electronic databases Web of Science and EBSCO, we used the keywords ‘sleep quality’, ‘depression’, and ‘older’ to identify the empirical studies performed. After assessing the collected studies, we selected those that presented the elderly as participants, resulting in nine papers (N = 3069). A random-effects method was used to evaluate the relationship between depression and sleep. We found that an older person’s lack of good sleep quality is significantly related with depression. The main limitation of this study was the difficulty in collecting a greater number of studies. Future research should consider the importance of additional variables (e.g. moderators) in order to understand and investigate viable interventions for prevention and health promotion in the elderly.     

The Meaning of Life in Indian Philosophy: A Contemporary Reconstruction

In this paper, I would like to discuss the meaning of life in Indian philosophy. All Indian philosophies are philosophies of life. Indian philosophy is not merely an intellectual activity but has practical application which enables men to lead an enlightened life. Any philosophy, either Indian or Western which makes no difference to human life, is not a philosophy. The human life always strives towards freedom, duty, wisdom, well-being, etc. These are the noble values in Indian philosophy that play a very vital role in shaping the meaning of life. All schools of Indian philosophy give importance to individual freedom for self-realization. Every school of Indian philosophy prescribes its way of overcoming ignorance, and thereby overcoming pain, to achieve the goal of life. Thus, every human being has to look within, understand his nature, and figure out her or his way to self-realization. The way to reach this goal includes selfless love, service to others, self-control, and self-purification. Because of their practicality, each system of Indian philosophy is as new today as it was 3000 years ago. These are the ideas which we can find in Vivekananda, Gandhi, Aurobindo, and many others. All these philosophical schools/thinkers hold that philosophy and practical life are necessarily integrated.

     

Does Feeling Happy Contributes to Flexible Thinking: Exploring the Association Between Positive Emotions and Cognitive Flexibility

This study examined the association between positive emotions and cognitive flexibility. The study comprises of two experiments which examine the influence of positive/neutral writing and watching positive movie (methods of emotion induction) on cognitive flexibility. Cognitive flexibility was observed on a shape detection task. The results do not lend support to the association between positive emotions and cognitive flexibility. The results are discussed in light of the existing literature and issues for further research are indicated.     

Anomalous agglomeration characteristics observed in iron oxide nanoclusters

Iron oxide nanoclusters, exhibiting unusual and interesting particle characteristics on thermal treatment, have been synthesized and studied. In all samples, a sharp size distribution has been obtained. Initially, the clusters exhibit agglomerated fractal morphology with low compactness but these disintegrate into smaller fragments and then grow in size as a function of the holding time of thermal treatment. The structure becomes more compact at higher holding times. The monodispersed agglomerates are basically clusters consisting of a large number of smaller grains of a few nanometres in size. The fractions of interfacial and bulk components in all samples have been estimated.     

Wittgenstein on Public Language About Personal Experiences

Philosophia - In this paper, we would like to discuss Wittgenstein’s critique of the idea that a person’s experiences are necessarily private, and these experiences can only be...