Broaching the Subjects of Race,Ethnicity, and Culture During the Counseling Process

The authors define broaching as the counselor's ability to consider how sociopolitical factors such as race influence the client's counseling concerns. The counselor must learn to recognize the cultural meaning clients attach to phenomena and to subsequently translate that cultural knowledge into meaningful practice that facilitates client empowerment, strengthens the therapeutic alliance, and enhances counseling outcomes. A continuum of broaching behavior is described, and parallels are drawn between the progression of broaching behavior and the counselor's level of racial identity functioning.     

The Preservation and Transmission of Cultural Values and Ideals: Challenges Facing Immigrant Families

At this time in the history of psychoanalysis, few would question the influence of cultural factors on one’s psychic life. This influence is most obviously present in the lives of immigrant families. This article focuses on some of the issues related to the efforts immigrant parents make to transmit cultural values they had acquired in the old country while their adolescent children are exposed to a very different cultural value system in the United States. Following the theoretical discussion that cultural factors (values and ideals) have in psychic life, two clinical examples draw attention to the way cultural issues may play a role in the treatment of symptomatic adolescents in immigrant families.     

Taming the Brain Weasels: Reducing Self-Criticism Through Externalization and Compassion

ABSTRACT

Self-criticism is a natural process occurring across mental health disorders. When self-criticism is excessive, vulnerability to mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety increases. Compassion-focused approaches can effectively address a variety of concerns; however, highly self-critical individuals might balk at the idea of self-directed compassion due to shame, self-blame, or discomfort with positive emotions, resulting in treatment resistance. The brain weasel is an intervention strategy that uses the Narrative Therapy technique of externalization as an intermediate step toward compassion-oriented work. Through creative externalization and therapeutic humor, self-critical individuals can decenter and explore their self-critical dialogue. This article contains several ways to introduce and use the brain weasel personification in counseling.     

Re-Examining the Effect of Top-Down Linguistic Information on Speaker-Voice Discrimination

The current study replicated and extended the results from a study conducted by Narayan, Mak, and Bialystok (2017) that found effects of top-down linguistic information on a speaker discrimination task by examining four conditions: rhymes (day-bay), compounds (day-dream), reverse compounds (dream-day), and unrelated words (day-bee). The original study found that participants were more likely to judge two words to be spoken by the same speaker if the words cohered lexically (created lexical compounds such as day-dream) or were phonologically related (rhymes, such as day-bay), but their study contained two limitations: (a) Same- and different-speaker trials were analyzed separately, which obscures effects of response bias, and (b) cross-gender pairs were used in the different-speaker trials, potentially inflating performance. The current study addresses these limitations by including only within-gender trials and by examining sensitivity and bias using signal detection theory. Our results not only provide support of the original study but also provide clear evidence that listeners are biased to judge two words as being produced by the same person when they share either phonological information (rhymes) or lexical-semantic coherence (compounds). Thus, the current study provides an important modified replication of previous research.