Council-Based Approaches to Reforming the Health Care Response to Domestic Violence: Promising Findings and Cautionary Tales

Councils are commonly formed to address social issues including intimate partner violence (IPV). Research suggests that councils may be well positioned to achieve proximal outcomes, but that their success may depend on contextual factors. The current study compared providers and health care settings at two points in time to explore the degree to which the Health Care Council achieved proximal outcomes in the health care response to IPV, including: (a) providers' reported capacity to screen for IPV, (b) providers' beliefs about IPV as a health care issue and about the IPV screening process, (c) providers' screening behaviors and (d) organizational policies and protocols to encourage screening. This study, while preliminary, provides support for council-based efforts to stimulate change in the health care response to IPV and also highlights the central role that organizational environment plays in shaping desired outcomes.     

Children's Understanding and Experience of Mixed Emotions: The Roles of Age,Gender, and Empathy

ABSTRACT. The present study examined the development of children's ability report understanding and experiencing allocentric mixed emotions, and explored the relation of gender and empathic ability to these skills. Participants (128 elementary school-aged children [63 boys, 65 girls]) were shown a movie clip with bittersweet themes to elicit mixed emotions. Findings from this study are consistent with prior research (Larsen, To, & Fireman, 2007), supporting a developmental progression in children's ability to both understand and report experiencing mixed emotions, with the two as distinct skills and children reporting understanding earlier than experiencing of emotions. Consistent with previous research, girls performed significantly better on the emotion experience task. Finally, results provided evidence that empathy partially mediates the relationship between age and reports of mixed emotion experience, but no evidence that empathy plays a role in mixed emotional understanding.     

A note on the history of the Norwegian Psychoanalytic Society from 1933 to 1945

The Norwegian analysts, who were trained in Berlin before 1933, were drawn into a struggle against fascism, informed by politically leftist analysts who worked at the Berlin Institute. The Norwegian group, including the analysts Wilhelm Reich and Otto Fenichel, were committed to Marxist or social democratic ideologies in order to fight down fascism and Nazism. They were a source of inspiration but also of conflict. After the war the leadership of the IPA was sceptical about the Norwegian group because of its former connections with Die Linke, as well as its relations with Wilhelm Reich. This paper in part considers the courageous efforts of Nic Waal, whom Ernest Jones used as a delegate and courier to solve problems for the IPA and who was unjustlytreated after the war.     

Do Actions Speak Louder Than Words? A Comparison of Three Organizational Practices for Reducing Racial/Ethnic Harassment and Discrimination

We assessed the effectiveness of three commonly suggested organizational practices for reducing racial/ethnic harassment and discrimination (REHD): training; resources for reporting REHD; and implementation actions taken by leadership to reduce REHD. In a sample of 39,475 U.S. military personnel, we conducted dominance analyses to examine the relative contributions of these practices to REHD. Implementation contributed more to the prediction of REHD than did training or resources. Moreover, implementation moderated the effect of resources and training. This suggests that active leadership effort to address REHD can be 1 of the most effective means of reducing such behavior.     

Forgetting to forget: On the duration of voluntary suppression of neutral and emotional memories

Can we control the content of our memory and forget what we do not want to think about by an act of will? If so, is forgetting temporary or permanent, and is it independent of the nature of what we wish to forget? Using Anderson and Green’s (2001) “think/no-think” paradigm with neutral and emotional nouns, we found in agreement with other studies that memory for neutral words was reduced instantly upon repeated attempts at suppression. However, the effect was temporary and vanished after a period of one week, which strongly suggests that intended memory suppression interferes with immediate retrieval but does not lead to long-term forgetting. Furthermore, the amount of training that clearly reduced immediate recall of neutral items did not at all reduce recall of emotional items. This finding is in accordance with the notion that emotional items have a higher degree of salience and tend to attract more attention than neutral items.     

Composition and consistency of the desired affective state: The role of personality and motivation

Using longitudinal and experience sampling designs, the consistency and composition, and personality and motivational predictors, of the desired affective state are explored. Findings indicate that, while the desired affect is relatively malleable throughout one semester, it is relatively stable throughout 1 week. Personality and motivations/goals were related to the content of the desired affective state. Extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness were related to the content of the desired affective state. In addition, higher-order goals predicted the content of the desired affective state. Our results suggest that the content of the desired affective state may be largely dependent on personality, motivation, and, potentially, an interaction between personality and motivation.     

Beliefs about factors affecting the Reliability of eyewitness testimony: A Comparison of judges,jurors and the general public

We surveyed 164 members of the juror pool of the Court of Appeal and a representative sample of 1000 adult Norwegians without juror experience, about their knowledge and beliefs about eyewitness testimony, and compared their answers to a prior survey of Norwegian judges. Although the judges were somewhat more knowledgeable than jurors and the general public, all groups had limited knowledge of eyewitness testimony. Juror experience, in terms of number of times serving as juror, did not correlate with eyewitness knowledge. Consistent with this finding, the knowledge scores of the jurors were similar to the scores of the general public, tested with an abridged seven‐item version of the questionnaire. Comparisons with the results of surveys conducted in the US, indicate similar levels of knowledge among law professionals and jurors in the two countries. Increasing the knowledge of eyewitness testimony among the principal participants in the judiciary system may be an important component of the solution to eyewitness error. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hope in a strengths-based group activity for individuals with chronic pain

While hope has been described as the ability to imagine a future in which one wishes to participate, individuals with chronic pain can have difficulty maintaining hope due to the pervasive impact of pain on multiple facets of their lives. This research examines client experiences of hope during a hope and strengths activity offered as part of a group treatment plan for individuals experiencing chronic pain. Entitled Being Hopeful in the Face of Chronic Pain, the group was developed in order to focus on hope and generative emotional experiences, experiences often lacking for individuals with chronic pain. The group activity being studied specifically addressed participants’ current strengths and strengths they hope-to-have-more-of. The study employed basic qualitative inquiry and utilized interpersonal process recall individual interviews to stimulate participant recall. Twelve participants (spanning three separate group offerings) individually discussed their personal experiences as they unfolded during a specific hope and strengths-focused activity. Participants described experiences during the group activity that fostered personal hope via perspective shifts, communion, comparison and connection with other group members. Findings are discussed in the context of current literature on hope, chronic pain, positive psychology and group interventions.     

The effects of risk on initial trust formation

This paper seeks to expand our understanding of initial trust by looking at how variation in risk influences the nature of trust and the process of initial trust formation. Four hypotheses were tested in two experiments involving participants with and without work experience. A first hypothesis suggested a positive relationship between a general propensity to trust and initial trust; a second hypothesis, a negative relationship between risk and initial trust; whereas a third hypothesis posited that risk would increase the importance participants place on benevolence and integrity. A fourth hypothesis suggested that risk would have a positive and moderating influence on the effect of out‐of‐role behavior when presented after role‐conformant in‐role behavior. Findings are presented and discussed and practical implications suggested.