Forging a Collaborative Relationship Between the Black Church and the Counseling Profession

In the field of counseling, there has been a growing awareness of the important role the Black church plays in African American communities. Although counseling professionals have begun recognizing the influence the Black church has in the lives of African Americans, there seems to be little information on how counselors can collaborate with African American congregations to meet the mental health needs of African American clients. The authors examine how counselors can use the psychological and social strengths of the Black church. Strategies and implications for collaborating with this institution are also discussed.     

Women,Human Rights,and Counseling: Crossing International Boundaries

As the world becomes more globalized, psychological and counseling issues have become more pronounced. As social justice issues become illuminated on a global scale, there is increased attention to women as identified victims of social injustices and human rights violations. This article examines the role of professional counselors working with women from an international perspective with the intention to heighten awareness and understanding of the interrelationship of global women's issues and effective counseling interventions.     

Putting It on the Line: Telephone Counseling for Adolescent Smokers

Adolescent smokers need cessation help, but the question of how best to intervene remains unanswered. This article describes the empirically validated protocol of an established, well‐utilized adolescent telephone counseling program for smoking cessation, tailored to adolescent developmental needs and shown to increase clients' 6‐month prolonged abstinence rate significantly. Clinical issues addressed include client assessment, motivation, self‐efficacy, familial and social support, planning, coping, relapse‐sensitive call scheduling, and self‐image. Counselor training considerations are also discussed.     

Narrative Therapy to Prevent Illness‐Related Stress Disorder

More than 94% of cancer patients described the experience as the most traumatic event they have ever faced and 13% have posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the aftermath. Empirical evidence demonstrates that certain behaviors lead to more positive health outcomes. Although many patients automatically engage in these behaviors, many others do not. Treatments typically focus on short‐term, symptom‐focused strategies. Narrative‐Expressive Therapy is an intervention designed to address the long‐term, underlying stress and to prevent PTSD in patients with serious illness.     

Age-related trends in Stroop and conflicting motor response task findings.

Inhibition problems are reportedly at the heart of several childhood pathologies and learning disorders, but few instruments are available for their in-depth investigation. The main aim of the present study was to investigate the development of a capacity to inhibit automatic responses in young and middle childhood. For this purpose, 100 children between 6 and 11 years old were administered two tests that measure executive inhibition: an animal Stroop task (in a paper-and-pencil version of the computerized original proposed by Wright and colleagues in 2003) and a conflicting motor response task. Our results indicate that performance clearly improves in both tests during the course of a child's development and the data obtained with the paper-and-pencil animal Stroop task overlap with those obtained with the computerized version. When the task calls for a stronger inhibitory control (the incongruent situation in the Stroop task and in the opposite condition in the conflicting motor response test) the trend of the response times is less homogeneous, peaking in the youngest and oldest age brackets considered. The positivity and significance of the correlation coefficients between the two tests also suggest that the two measures are tapping cognitive abilities that are developing in a parallel fashion.     

Puerto Rican Gangs: A Historical Overview

This article presents the problem of gangs on the island of Puerto Rico from a historical, economical, and political perspective. Some Puerto Rican historians are convinced that the gang problem in Puerto Rico is due to the political ambiguity and human rights violations of prison inmates (F. Picò, 1998).     

State faith‐based education in Israel: a messianic‐nationalist model of interpretation

This article analyzes the traces and configuration of three syntagmatic interpretation models in the educational text produced by Israel’s state religious educational system: the modus, the hermetic and the gnostic models, which together add up to a fourth, and unique one: the messianic nationalist model of interpretation. This interpretive model has a concrete configuration which, as opposed to similar but secular educational models, uses transcendental motifs in order to pragmatically organize the explanation of ‘reality’. From this point of view the messianic nationalist model presents a case study in religious education, which integrates between modern (i.e., nationalist) and traditional (religious) motifs in a relatively flexible way, situating itself between a fundamentalist religious idiosyncrasy and a secular one. Theoretically and methodologically the article develops the textual analysis of educational texts. The specific analysis presented here assumes that an educational ideological text interprets, and is interpreted constantly by, its producers and its users as well.     

Religious education in state schools in German‐speaking Switzerland

There are today a variety of patterns in the different cantons of Switzerland for regulating the teaching of RE. The Swiss system is based on a cooperation between Church and state which varies in relation to the history and character of the differing cantons. This allows for diversity in modes of delivering RE. In two cantons there is complete separation between church and state whereas in the majority there is some form of cooperation. State recognized religious communities (normally the Swiss Reformed and Roman Catholic Churches, but in Basel the Old Catholic Church and Jewish community also) are in charge of the RE in schools where it is taught by their representatives visiting the schools. Where state related RE is taught this is done by teachers in the school employed by the state. The presence of Turkish immigrants is raising problems for the teaching of RE in certain areas since Islam has not been traditionally state recognized. However, the inherent diversity of patterns within the 26 cantons allows considerable room for innovation feasible because there is generally an openness between the churches and from the state which facilitates this.     

The Repeated Evaluation Technique (RET). A method to capture dynamic effects of innovativeness and attractiveness

Innovativeness is defined as ‘originality by virtue of introducing new ideas’. Thus, innovative designs often break common visual habits and are evaluated as relatively unattractive at first sight (Leder & Carbon, 2005 ). In most empirical studies, attractiveness is measured only once. These measures do not capture the dynamic aspects of innovation. This paper presents a dynamic procedure, the Repeated Evaluation Technique (RET), that improves the validity of attractiveness evaluations. RET simulates time and exposure effects of everyday life. Using RET, we investigated the appreciation of different car designs varying in innovativeness and curvature. While the mere exposure theory (Zajonc, 1968 ) would predict a general increase of liking in increasing exposure, RET revealed dissociate effects depending on innovativeness. Only innovative designs showed an increase in attractiveness. Low innovative designs were rated as being relatively attractive in the beginning, but did not profit from elaboration due to RET. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.