In Search of Common Threads: Linking Multicultural,Feminist, and Social Justice Counseling Paradigms

Multicultural, feminist, and social justice counseling theories are often viewed as disparate helping models. This article examines the complementary nature of these models and discusses the need to promote a clearer understanding of the ways in which these common threads can be used in counseling practice.     

The sensitivity of a palm-based psychomotor vigilance task to severe sleep loss

In this study, we evaluated the sensitivity of a 5-min personal digital assistant-psychomotor vigilance test (PDA-PVT) to severe sleep loss. Twenty-one participants completed a 10-min PVT-192 and a 5-min PDA-PVT at two hourly intervals during 62 h of sustained wakefulness. For both tasks, response speed and number of lapses (RTs > 500) per minute significantly increased with increasing hours of wakefulness. Overall, standardized response speed scores on the 5-min PDA-PVT closely tracked those of the PVT-192; however, the PDA-PVT was generally associated with more lapses/minute. Closer inspection of the data indicated that when the level of sleep loss and fatigue became more severe (i.e., Day 3), the 5-min PDA-PVT was not quite as sensitive as the 10-min PVT-192 when 2- to 10-sec foreperiods were used for both. It is likely, however, that the observed differences between the two devices was due to differences in task length. Thus, the findings provide further evidence of the validity of the 5-min PDA-PVT as a substitute for the 10-min PVT-192, particularly in circumstances in which a shorter test is required and/or the PVT-192 is not as practical.     

An Interview With Sunny Hansen: Pioneer and Innovator in Counseling and Career Development

During her 45‐year career, Sunny Hansen was a pioneer and innovator in counseling and career development. She has lived the holistic life about which she writes and teaches. In this interview, she discussed the major influences on her life, the evolution of her professional career from English and journalism teacher to counselor and counselor educator, and her teaching and scholarship. She also shared her insights on balancing life roles, holistic life planning, and the counselor as a change agent.     

Family Therapy, You Make Me Feel Like Dancing

In this article we use our experience with ballroom dancing to revisit three central systemic/relational ideas—summativity, pragmatics/aesthetics, and communication—in order to reaffirm our theoretical grounding in family therapy and to connect that grounding to community-mindedness in therapy. Community-mindedness consists of deliberate attention to the socially constructed grand narratives that dominate clients and therapists in the process of therapy. A detailed example is provided. Thanks to Leo Sayer     

Children as Religious Resources: The Role of Children in the Social Re-Formation of Class, Culture, and Religious Identity

Based on observations and interviews in two churches representing two different strands of American Protestantism, I assess the ways in which children contribute to the social construction of class, culture, and religious identity for adults. Evidence comes from observing how congregations incorporate children into adult worship services and talk about them in texts and programs, and from the ways in which newer and long-term congregation members describe valuing and understanding children's ministries. These styles and their meanings reflect the history, heritage, and theological distinctives of these two strands of American Protestantism. Religion, I suggest, is not just good for children; children themselves are a religious resource whose presence in worship, service, and discourse helps to create and maintain a sense of identity, place, and meaning in the lives of worshipping adults.     

Individual differences in self-initiated processing at encoding and retrieval: a latent variable analysis

The current study examined individual differences in self-initiated processing (SIP) in memory tasks. Participants performed four memory tasks that varied the amount of SIP required at encoding, retrieval, or both as well as cognitive ability measures. It was found that the correlation between recall performance and cognitive abilities changed as a function of the amount of SIP required. Additionally, it was found that although both free and cued recall measures accounted for variance in cognitive abilities, only the free recall accounted for unique variance in cognitive abilities. It is suggested that the predictive power of a task is determined in part based on the amount of SIP required.     

Asymmetrical Body Perception: A Possible Role for Neural Body Representations

ABSTRACT— Perception of one's body is related not only to the physical appearance of the body, but also to the neural representation of the body. The brain contains many body maps that systematically differ between right- and left-handed people. In general, the cortical representations of the right arm and right hand tend to be of greater area in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere for right-handed people, whereas these cortical representations tend to be symmetrical across hemispheres for left-handers. We took advantage of these naturally occurring differences and examined perceived arm length in right- and left-handed people. When looking at each arm and hand individually, right-handed participants perceived their right arms and right hands to be longer than their left arms and left hands, whereas left-handed participants perceived both arms accurately. These experiments reveal a possible relationship between implicit body maps in the brain and conscious perception of the body.     

Executive functions in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Executive dysfunction is a characteristic impairment of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). However whether such deficits are related to autism per se, or to associated intellectual disability is unclear. This paper examines executive functions in a group of children with ASD (N = 54, all IQ?70) in relation to a typically developing control group individually matched on the basis of age, gender, IQ and vocabulary. Significant impairments in the inhibition of prepotent responses (Stroop, Junior Hayling Test) and planning (Tower of London) were reported for children with ASD, with preserved performance for mental flexibility (Wisconsin Card Sorting Task) and generativity (Verbal Fluency). Atypical age-related patterns of performance were reported on tasks tapping response inhibition and self-monitoring for children with ASD compared to controls. The disparity between these and previous research findings are discussed. A multidimensional notion of executive functions is proposed, with difficulties in planning, the inhibition of prepotent responses and self-monitoring reflecting characteristic features of ASD that are independent of IQ and verbal ability, and relatively stable across the childhood years.     

ALTRUISM: TOWARD A PSYCHOBIOSPIRITUAL CONCEPTUALIZATION

Altruism, defined here as a regard for or devotion to the interest of others with whom we are interrelated, is pitted against two other dispositions in human beings: nepotism and egoism. We propose that to become fully human is to become more altruistic. We describe how altruism is mediated by our physiology, is expressed in our psychological development, is evolving in our social institutions, and becomes the moral communities that enforce our sense of right and wrong. A change in any one of these influences changes our disposition—changes who we are and what we do—potentially making altruism more possible in the world.