Wilderness family therapy: Experiential dimensions

This paper describes the process in which families participate in a wilderness experience. Metaphors such as climbing or paddling a canoe are translated into daily living patterns to deepen individual and family self-knowledge, self-esteem, and intimacy.     

“Marital trap analysis”—incompetence,complementarity, and success traps: Identifying potential future dysfunctions based on a couple's current collusive agreements

This paper describes three types of traps or collusive marital agreements-incompetence traps, complementarity traps, and success traps-in which the mates renounce or forgo competent functioning in vital areas of marital roles and experience. It is suggested that responsible clinical work with the couple should include a careful evaluation of such traps and the potential breakdown or dysfunction inherent in each one, and a decision as to whether or not to attempt therapeutic penetration into such collusive agreements even before the couple complain directly about their arrangement.     

Divorce in the kibbutz: Past and present

In the kibbutz today, there are no ideological or economic barriers to prevent a couple from deciding to divorce. Both husband and wife are assured continued economic security and equal opportunities for co-parenting, thus reducing fears of disruption in the daily contact with the children. In spite of these favorable circumstances, marital breakups in the kibbutz are less frequent than in the larger cities in Israel. In recent years, however, at a time when a stronger and more intensive family life has gained legitimacy within the kibbutz structure, there is a marked tendency toward a rise in the rate of divorce. In this article we analyze the possible causes of the variations in the frequency of divorce within the kibbutz framework.The authors express appreciation to Esther Mivtzari, a psychologist on the staff of the Kibbutz Child and Family Clinic and a member of the religious kibbutz Ein-Tzurim, for assistance in gathering data on divorce in the religious kibbitzum.     

Love preferences and ideals: A comparison of homosexual,bisexual, and heterosexual groups

Homosexuals, bisexuals, and heterosexuals were compared on self-reported love preferences and ideals. In general, the three groups tended to agree on ideal characteristics of love objects, love relationships, and love related beliefs. Nevertheless, the groups differed significantly on preferences and beliefs related to love-object sex, residential proximity, ethnic background, physical intimacy, freedom from feelings of jealousy, sexual fidelity, emotional intimacy, and the importance of religious or legal acknowledgment.An early version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Council on Family Relations, in San Francisco, October 1984, Journal Series No. 2973 of the Hawaii Institute of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources.     

Variables differentiating affective interaction in a family therapy and a control group: Father-child welfare and mother-child emergency affect

In this study of 37 pre-therapy and 23 matched control families who never sought family therapy, father-child welfare affect and mother-child emergency affect were significantly higher in the control families. Control families were found generally to express more Welfare and Emergency emotion. Affective expression between parents did not significantly differentiate the groups.This study has been supported by Grant No. MA-4510 of the Medical Research Council of Canada and was presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, September 1983. The authors wish to express their thanks to Toby Schwartz, Harriet Gold-Kaats, and Terry Tannenbaum-Dascal, who acted as coders and research assistants; Joseph Beltempo, BSc, who helped in the statistical analysis; and James Robbins, PhD, who gave much valuable advice.     

An experimental analysis of delayed posttraumatic stress

Three self-report anxiety questionnaires were administered to a sample of Lebanese undergraduates shortly before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Six months after the disengagement of forces, the investigator located 20 Ss who had remained in West Beirut throughout the siege and 35 Ss who had evacuated to safer environs. The inventories were readministered to the Ss and the results revealed that: (1) there were no significant differences between the preinvasion scores of the evacuees and nonevacuees: (2) there were no significant differences between the postinvasion scores of the evacuees and nonevacuees: and (3) the aggregate scores of both groups vis-á-vis war-related stimuli were significantly lower at postassessment.     

Bilingual frequency encoding

Two experiments are reported that examine the nature of the processing of frequency information in Spanish-English bilinguals. In the first study, subjects studied a list of English-only, Spanish-only, and mixed-language words varying in their frequency of occurrence, and under conditions of being either informed or uninformed about the later frequency test. Subjects were then shown pictures represeting the nominally presented items and had to give frequency judgments for the words depicting the objects. Frequency judgments were significantly faster when the words had been presented in a single language, suggesting a summation of access times for the mixed-language words. Instructional conditions had no effect on frequency judgments, but the latency to judge was significantly reduced for the informed subjects. In the second study, using similar acquisition procedures, subjects were shown test words in either the same or the different language from the one in which the words were originally experienced. Subjects demonstrated a clear ability to assign frequencies according to the relationship between acquisition and test language. The data were discussed in terms of supporting the hypothesis of separate bilingual language processing, and implications for the automatic nature of frequency acquisition were also addressed.This article is based on a paper originally presented at the meetings of the Southwestern Psychological Association, San Antonio, April 1983.     

Reference and comprehension: A topic-comment analysis of sentence-picture verification

A sentence often contains two components: a topic, which refers to a nonlinguistic object whose existence is presupposed; and a comment, which asserts some thought about this object. In addition, a sentence will often repeat (or refer back to) information that was expressed earlier in a text or conversation. The purpose of this article is to propose a single theoretical framework to describe the mechanisms that relate a sentence to its nonlinguistic environment as well as those that relate a sentence to its linguistic context. The theory developed in this article suggests that sentences can strongly influence the representation of visible nonlinguistic events and that this representation is sensitive to the distinction between presupposed and asserted information. To evaluate this theory, a sentence-picture verification priming task was developed. In this task, subjects were presented with pairs of sentence-picture displays, and were asked to verify whether or not the sentence in each display correctly applied to an accompanying picture. The relationship between pairs of sentence-picture displays was varied systematically. Across five experiments, three hypotheses were supported: (a) The processes which evaluate presupposed information and the processes which evaluate asserted information are differentially affected by nonlinguistic factors, (b) only those aspects of the picture which are referred to by the sentence are encoded for future use, and (c) coherence between successive sentences is in part a function of the referential continuity of the presupposed information.