The Ten Commandments for Community Mental Health Education

Ten guidelines for effective community mental health education were presented at a mental health center as a part of the staff training and development program.     

Intervention for Multipotentiality: Effects of a Career Counseling Laboratory for Gifted High School Students

Career counseling effectively enhanced high school students' desire to engage in discussion about their career development with counselors, parents, and peers. They also were somewhat more likely to plan to go to college. A total of 59% changed or confirmed their career plans.     

Behavioral-Systems Marital Therapy: Dealing With Resistance

Recently there has been a dramatic increase in attempts to integrate certain intervention components of behavioral and systems approaches with marital and family therapy. This paper elaborates on a previously described behavioral-systems approach by focusing primarily on the issue of resistance to therapeutic progress within the behavioral framework. First, potential reasons for major resistance phenomena are suggested. Then, in the context of a social learning theory model of assessment and intervention, specific clinical indications are discussed for departing from the basic behavioral approach in order to deal with resistance. Finally, a variety of interpretive and strategic intervention techniques are described and illustrated by clinical case materials     

A Religiously Oriented Group Counseling Intervention for Self-Defeating Perfectionism: A Pilot Study

This article briefly describes a group counseling intervention we used with devout Mormon college students who were struggling with issues of perfectionism. The treatment package contained several religious and spiritual interventions including religious imagery, religious bibliotherapy assignments, and discussions about religious concepts of perfection. Group participants scored lower on depression and perfectionism, and higher on self-esteem, existential well-being, and religious well-being at the conclusion of the group. The favorable results of this pilot study will hopefully provide incentive for researchers to further evaluate religiously oriented treatment approaches for perfectionism.     

Interpersonal Forgiveness Within the Helping Professions: An Attempt to Resolve Differences of Opinion

Lakatos's (1978) philosophy of science is used as a guide for resolving published authors' differences of opinion about interpersonal forgiveness. We first review the ancient writings and current philosophical works regarding interpersonal forgiveness. With these ideas as a foundation we then critique six published papers on forgiveness, all of which have counseling implications. It is suggested that the works are not yet grounded in the foundational writings on forgiveness. The works, thus, may need some refinement in the area of definition, or proposed consequences for a forgiver, or in the processes used to bring about forgiveness in clients. A process model of interpersonal forgiveness then is described. Implications for the use of interpersonal forgiveness within counseling are drawn.     

The Nature and Correlates of Conversational Sensitivity

People differ in their sensitivity to what happens during conversations: Some individuals enjoy listening to social exchanges, pick up hidden meanings in conversations, can generate optimal ways of saying things in interactions, and are generally “savvy” about the different sorts of power and affinity relationships exhibited in conversations. In this article we explore the nature and correlates of conversational sensitivity. People high in sensitivity make more high-level inferences when listening to social exchanges, unitize conversation in smaller chunks, emphasize conversation characteristics in their memories of interactions, and make more self-referents about conversations than less sensitive individuals. In addition, conversational sensitivity is positively related to self-monitoring, private self-consciousness, perceptiveness, self-esteem, assertiveness, empathy, and social skills. It is inversely related to communication apprehension, receiver apprehension, and social anxiety. In a final study, conversational sensitivity is construed not as an individual difference but as situational response: In some settings under some conditions, people become more sensitive to what happens in conversation.     

DOES THE SUPERVENIENCE ARGUMENT GENERALIZE?

We evaluate the scope of Jaegwon Kim's “supervenience argument” for reduction. Does its conclusion apply only to psychology, or does it generalize to all the special sciences? The claim that the supervenience argument generalizes to all the special sciences if it goes through for psychology is often raised as an objection to the supervenience argument. We argue that this objection is ambiguous. We distinguish three readings of it and suggest that some of them make it a plausible claim, whereas other readings make it implausible. We suggest that this ambiguity is the result of picturing the world as being hierarchically organized in levels, with the domain of physics at the bottom and the domains of the social sciences at the top. The plausibility of the objection depends on how we think of this picture. This popular picture, we suggest, involves three different dimensions along which reduction may occur.     

What Client Behaviors Make Counselors Angry? An Exploratory Study

Counselors may feel anger when clients do not behave according to their expectations of what is a good client. Client resistance, client impositions, verbal attacks on the counselor, and overinvolvement by the counselor in client dynamics seem to be relatively common occurrences that annoy counselors. Possible counselor responses to these feelings are discussed.     

Some Challenges of Integrating Sexual Orientations Into Counselor Training and Research

The field of counseling currently lacks an integrative approach on issues of sexual orientations in training and research. Despite changes in social and political realities and calls within the field for attention to these areas, little response has been forthcoming. Some of the challenges and difficulties involved in integrating sexual orientations into counselor training curricula and research are discussed. Suggestions are presented to help professionals gain a better understanding of sexual orientation issues for research and practice.