Queer Youth in Family Therapy

Trends in popular belief about same‐sex relationships have undergone noteworthy change in the United States over the last decade. Yet this change has been marked by stark polarizations and has occurred at varying rates depending upon regional, community, racial, religious, and individual family context. For queer youth and their families, this cultural transformation has broadened opportunities and created a new set of risks and vulnerabilities. At the same time, youth's increasingly open and playful gender fluidity and sexual identity is complicated by unique intersections of class, race, religion, and immigration. Effective family therapy with queer youth requires practitioner's and treatment models that are sensitive to those who bear the burden of multiple oppressions and the hidden resilience embedded in their layered identities. We present case examples of our model of family therapy which addresses refuge, supports difficult dialogs, and nurtures queerness by looking for hidden resilience in the unique intersections of queer youths' lives. These intersections provide transformational potential for youth, their families and even for family therapists as we are all nurtured and challenged to think more complexly about intersectionality, sexuality, and gender.     

Private-Sector Research Ethics: Marketing or Good Conflicts Management? The 2005 John J. Conley Lecture on Medical Ethics

Pharmaceutical companies are major sponsors of biomedical research. Most scholars and policymakers focus their attention on government and academic oversight activities, however. In this article, I consider the role of pharmaceutical companies’ internal ethics statements in guiding decisions about corporate research and development (R&D). I review materials from drug company websites and contributions from the business and medical ethics literature that address ethical responsibilities of businesses in general and pharmaceutical companies in particular. I discuss positive and negative uses of pharmaceutical companies’ ethics materials and describe shortcomings in the companies’ existing ethics programs. To guide employees and reassure outsiders, companies must add rigor, independence, and transparency to their R&D ethics programs.     

Human and Animal Subjects of Research: The Moral Significance of Respect versus Welfare

Human beings with diminished decision-making capacities are usually thought to require greater protections from the potential harms of research than fully autonomous persons. Animal subjects of research receive lesser protections than any human beings regardless of decision-making capacity. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely animals’ lack of some characteristic human capacities that is commonly invoked to justify using them for human purposes. In other words, for humans lesser capacities correspond to greater protections but for animals the opposite is true. Without explicit justification, it is not clear why or whether this should be the case. Ethics regulations guiding human subject research include principles such as respect for persons—and related duties—that are required as a matter of justice while regulations guiding animal subject research attend only to highly circumscribed considerations of welfare. Further, the regulations guiding research on animals discount any consideration of animal welfare relative to comparable human welfare. This paper explores two of the most promising justifications for these differences␣between the two sets of regulations. The first potential justification points to lesser moral status for animals on the basis of their lesser capacities. The second potential justification relies on a claim about the permissibility of moral partiality as␣found in common morality. While neither potential justification is sufficient to justify the regulatory difference as it stands, there is possible common ground between supporters of some regulatory difference and those rejecting the current difference.     

Romantic love and sexual desire in close relationships

Drawing on recent claims in the study of relationships, attachment, and emotion, the authors hypothesized that romantic love serves a commitment-related function and sexual desire a reproduction-related function. Consistent with these claims, in Study 1, brief experiences of romantic love and sexual desire observed in a 3-min interaction between romantic partners were related to distinct feeling states, distinct nonverbal displays, and commitment- and reproductive-related relationship outcomes, respectively. In Study 2, the nonverbal display of romantic love was related to the release of oxytocin. Discussion focuses on the place of romantic love and sexual desire in the literature on emotion.     

Culture, ethnicity, and children's facial expressions: a study of European American, Mainland Chinese, Chinese American, and adopted Chinese girls

This investigation extends previous research documenting differences in Chinese and European American infants' facial expressivity. Chinese girls adopted by European American families, nonadopted Mainland Chinese girls, nonadopted Chinese American girls, and nonadopted European American girls responded to emotionally evocative slides and an odor stimulus. European American girls smiled more than Mainland Chinese and Chinese American girls and scored higher than Mainland Chinese girls for disgust-related expressions and overall expressivity. Adopted Chinese girls produced more disgust-related expressions than Mainland Chinese girls. Self-reported maternal strictness, aggravation, positive expressiveness, and cultural identification correlated with children's facial responses, as did number of siblings and adults in the home. Results suggest that culture and family environment influences facial expressivity, creating differences among children of the same ethnicity.     

The role of cognitive factors in the pathogenesis of obsessive-compulsive symptoms: a prospective study

Cognitive models of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) posit that specific kinds of dysfunctional beliefs (e.g., pertaining to responsibility and the significance of intrusive thoughts) underlie the development of this disorder. The present study was designed to prospectively evaluate whether dysfunctional beliefs thought to underlie OCD act as a specific vulnerability factor in the pathogenesis of obsessive-compulsive symptomatology. Eighty-five individuals were prospectively followed over a period of time thought to be associated with an increased onset of OCD symptoms -- childbirth and the postpartum. The majority of these new mothers and fathers experienced intrusive infant-related thoughts and performed neutralizing behaviors similar to, but less severe than, those observed in OCD. Scores on a measure of dysfunctional beliefs thought to underlie OCD predicted the development of obsessive-compulsive symptoms after controlling for pre-existing OCD symptoms, anxiety, and depression. Dysfunctional beliefs also predicted the severity of checking, washing, and obsessional OCD symptom dimensions, but not neutralizing, ordering, or hoarding symptom dimensions. These data provide evidence for specific dysfunctional beliefs as risk factors in the development of some types of OCD symptoms.     

Infants' ability to use luminance information to individuate objects

Recent research indicates that infants first use form and then surface features as the basis for individuating objects. However, very little is known about the underlying basis for infants' differential sensitivity to form than surface features. The present research assessed infants' sensitivity to luminance differences. Like other surface properties, luminance information typically reveals little about an object. Unlike other surface properties (e.g. pattern, color), the visual system can detect luminance differences at birth. The outcome of two experiments indicated that 11.5-month-olds, but not 7.5-month-olds, used luminance differences to individuate objects. These results suggest that it is not the age at which infants can detect a feature, but the nature of the information carried by the feature, that determines infants' capacity to individuate objects.