Joining with all members of a family system: The rhetoric of antilogic in family therapy dialogue

Family therapists face a significant rhetorical challenge in working with families that disagree about the problematic life-situation which brought them to therapy. Therapists must find a way to join with disagreeing family members and then find a way to engage in a therapeutically useful conversation with them. Thus, they must deal resourcefully with contradictions. This article explores the ways that the Sophistic rhetorical concept of antilogic may be employed in helping therapists join and then engage in a therapeutically useful conversation with families who hold contradictory views concerning the problem that brought them to therapy.The author wishes to thank Ronald Chenail, PhD, Douglas Flemons, PhD, and Shelly Green, PhD, for their assistance in the development of this project.     

A plea for more intervision

The author presents an argument for tolerance, mutual understanding and reconciliation in psychotherapy, instead of a continued emphasis of schools. Psychotherapists' work with clients is proposed as a likely area for mutual understanding, rather than continued emphasis on their particular theories and academic matters. Psychotherapeutic intervision groups in which a small number of therapists voluntarily discuss their cases with peers from various backgrounds have become increasingly common again in recent years.Slightly revised version of a presentation made at the Georgetown Family Center Symposium in November 1995.     

Validation of the Children's Assertive Behavior Scale

Relationships between sociometric indices and scores of 160 elementary-school children on the Children's Assertive Behavior Scale (CABS) were examined to determine whether this instrument differentiates children of varying levels of social competence. Children who obtained either high or low scores on peer nominations of friendship and admiration were identified and compared on CABS passive, aggressive, and assertive scores. Children who scored high on positive peer nominations responded in a significantly less aggressive manner than children who received low scores on such nominations. These effects were observed for the CABS format that consisted of stimulus situations involving adults but not for the form involving peers. With regard to responses toward peers, a significant interaction between sex and sociometric status emerged. These findings suggest the importance of incorporating subject variables such as race and sex as well as assessments of behavior toward both adults and children in isolating and training components of social skill.The authors wish to express their appreciation to Jean Birbilis, Gail Hammersly, Marieta Knopf, and Donna Wadley for their assistance in data collection and analysis.     

Depth of processing: When the principle of congruity fails

Two factors, level of processing (Craik & Lockhart, 1972) and congruity (Schulman, 1974), known to have large effects on the recall of experimenter-provided responses to questions, were examined in a series of five incidental learning experiments using subject-generated responses. The data show that manipulation of level of processing has the same effect on recall of subjectgenerated responses as it does on experimenter-provided responses. However, the effect of congruity is reversed for subject-generated responses. The data suggest that the difficulty of generating unrelated responses (“incongruous“ items) may account, at least in part, for the failure of the “principle of congruity“ with subject-generated responses.     

The effect of couples training and partner co-operativeness in the behavioral treatment of obesity

To evaluate the influence of spouse co-operativeness and couples training in the treatment of obesity, 29 obese men and women were assigned to three experimental conditions: (1) Co-operative spouse-couples training: subjects attended all meetings with spouses. Spouses were trained in modeling, monitoring, and reinforcement techniques; (2) Co-operative spouse-subject alone: subjects attended meetings alone even though their partners had agreed to become involved in treatment; (3) Non-cooperative spouse: subjects had spouses refusing to participate in the program, and attended sessions alone. At the 3-month and 6-month maintenance assessments. subjects in the spouse training condition lost significantly more weight than subjects in the other two conditions. Weight losses compared favorably to those of any controlled study with subjects in the couples training group averaging nearly 30 lbs lost after 8$\text{1}\text{2}$ months of treatment. In the absence of spouse training, subjects with co-operative spouses did no better than subjects with non-co-operative spouses. The findings suggest that spouse training may have a potent facilitative effect in weight reduction, and that this effect may promote long-term maintenance of weight loss.