Using found poetry to illuminate the existential and posttraumatic growth of women with breast cancer engaging in art therapy

Arts-based research (ABR) is an expanding methodological genre, which adapts the tenets of the creative arts to make social science research accessible, evocative, and engaging. It crosses the boundaries of both art and science, but has made few inroads within the discipline of psychology. This article describes a pilot project examining how art-making shaped the trajectories of women diagnosed and treated for breast cancer. Using ABR as a way of distilling the findings, we demonstrate how experiences of existential and posttraumatic growth can be understood more intensely and profoundly through found poetry. Found poems (excerpts from interviews reframed as poetry) offer a richer, more meaningful, and potent evocation of themes than traditional coding categories. Poetry permits the voice of the participant to be more clearly heard and allows the reader to access deeper insights and understandings of the complexities of growth through adversity.     

Discussion of “On Deconstructive Interventions” by R. M. Billow

This discussion challenges the importation of ideas from other disciplines such as philosophy to group psychotherapy. I do not suggest that there should be no engagement with these other domains; inevitably, it does occur. Rather, I am suggesting that such theoretical support may not necessarily add to our practical as well as our theoretical knowledge and should therefore be used only when ideas from within our own field do not suffice.     

The burden of online friends: the effects of giving up Facebook on stress and well-being

People occasionally choose to cut themselves off from their online social network by taking extended breaks from Facebook. This study investigated whether abstaining from Facebook reduces stress but also reduces subjective well-being because of the resulting social disconnection. Participants (138 active Facebook users) were assigned to either a condition in which they were instructed to give up Facebook for 5 days or continue to use Facebook as normal. Perceived stress and well-being, as well as salivary cortisol, were measured before and after the test period. Relative to those in the Facebook Normal condition, those in the No Facebook condition experienced lower levels of cortisol and life satisfaction. Our results suggest that the typical Facebook user may occasionally find the large amount of social information available to be taxing, and Facebook vacations could ameliorate this stress—at least in the short term.     

Social Networks and Forgiveness: The Role of Trust and Efficacy

We examine the link between social network size and forgiveness, as well as mediating effects of self-efficacy and trust. Data are from the Detroit Community Study, which include three racial/ethnic groups: African Americans, Arab Americans, and White Americans (N=907). Results indicated that larger network size is associated with more forgiveness, but is mediated by trust. Patterns varied within racial/ethnic group: among Arab Americans self-efficacy mediated the effect of network size on forgiveness; among African Americans there were no direct or mediating effects; among White Americans an indirect effect of trust on forgiveness was identified. Findings suggest complex associations with forgiveness.     

Family/media approach to HIV prevention: results with a home-based, parent-teen video program.

We describe the first study with a home-based HIV prevention video program for parents and young teenagers. The objectives of the program are to inform parents and teenagers about the causes and prevention of HIV infection and other sexually transmitted diseases, to increase family problem-solving skills, and to increase teen problem-solving and assertiveness skills. The objectives pertain to the goals of increasing skills needed to help teenagers avoid or manage high-risk behaviors and situations. Forty-five families with at least one 12- to 14-year-old were randomly assigned to either experimental (receive video program) or control (no video) conditions in a pretest-posttest design. After 6 months (Follow-Up 1), the experimental and control families were reassessed. The control families next received the video program, and the control families were assessed again (Follow-Up 2). The results indicate increases in parent and teen knowledge and skills only with video viewing. Approaches to improving the video program, particularly with teenagers, are discussed.     

Tradition,Authority, and Immanent Critique in Comparative Ethics

Drawing on resources from pragmatist thought allows religious ethicists to take account of the central role traditions play in the formation and development of moral concepts without thereby espousing moral relativism or becoming traditionalists. After giving an account of this understanding of the concept of tradition, I examine the ways in which understandings of tradition play out in two contemporary examples of tradition‐based ethics: works in comparative ethics of war by James Turner Johnson and John Kelsay. I argue that a pragmatist approach to tradition‐based ethics allows for a nuanced and flexible understanding of moral traditions, and one that holds great promise for international consensus‐building around shared ethical norms for the use of armed force.     

Whining as mother‐directed speech

Although little studied, whining is a vocal pattern that is both familiar and irritating to parents of preschool‐ and early school‐age children. The current study employed multidimensional scaling to identify the crucial acoustic characteristics of whining speech by analysing participants' perceptions of its similarity to other types of speech (question, neutral speech, angry statement, demand, and boasting). We discovered not only that participants find whining speech more annoying than other forms of speech, but that it shares the salient acoustic characteristics found in motherese, namely increased pitch, slowed production, and exaggerated pitch contours. We think that this relationship is not random but may reflect the fact that the two forms of vocalization are the result of a similar accommodation to a universal human auditory sensitivity to the prosody of both forms of speech. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.