Ethical Guidelines for Counselors Working With Older Adults

Counselors working with older adults may encounter situations that are not directly addressed by the ethical standards of the American Counseling Association (1995). After an extensive review of the literature, the Standards Committee of the Association for Adult Development and Aging (1998) identified 3 areas of concern: older adults with cognitive impairments, older adults who are the victims of abuse, and older adults with a terminal illness. This article examines the unique needs of older adults with these concerns and proposes guidelines for counselors working with such clients.     

Ethnicity-Related Sources of Stress and Their Effects on Well-Being

Early research on ethnicity focused on the stereotyped thinking, prejudiced attitudes, and discriminatory actions of Euro-Americans. Minority-group members were viewed largely as passive targets of these negative reactions, with low self-esteem studied as the main psychological outcome. By contrast, recent research has increasingly made explicit use of stress theory in emphasizing the perspectives and experiences of minority-group members. Several ethnicity-related stressors have been identified, and it has been found that individuals cope with these threats in an active, purposeful manner. In this article, we focus on ethnicity-related stress stemming from discrimination, from stereotypes, and from conformity pressure arising from one's own ethnic group. We discuss theory and review research in which examination of ethnicity-related outcomes has extended beyond self-esteem to include psychological and physical well-being.     

“Digging in” or “Giving in”: Attachment-related threat moderates the association between attachment orientation and reactions to conflict

Prior research suggests that individuals higher in attachment anxiety react to conflict in a more hostile manner than those lower in attachment anxiety. Although less pronounced, there is also evidence that attachment anxiety is associated with submissive behavior in conflict. Thus, the literature presents a paradox, as attachment anxiety is associated with both domineering and submissive responses to relationship conflict. We proposed that attachment-related threat moderates the effects of attachment orientations on conflict behavior, such that under conditions of low threat attachment anxiety would be associated with dominance, whereas under conditions of high threat attachment anxiety would be associated with submission. Further, we expected that this interaction between attachment anxiety and threat condition would be stronger for individuals lower in attachment avoidance, relative to those higher in avoidance. We found support for our hypotheses, such that attachment anxiety, attachment avoidance, and threat interacted to predict responses to relationship conflict.     

Commitment in romantic relationships as a function of partners’ encoding of important couple-related memories

The purpose of the present study was to investigate how significant couple-related events are encoded in the episodic memory of each partner of a romantic relationship and how they relate to each of these partners’ level of commitment in an independent and additive fashion. Each partner of a couple reported a significant couple-related memory and rated their level of need satisfaction experienced during the event of the memory. In addition, each partner was shown his/her partner’s memory and also rated their own level of need satisfaction for this event. Results showed that partners need satisfaction ratings of their own memory positively predicted their own commitment to the relationship directly (for women) as well as through their need satisfaction generally experienced in the relationship (for men). In addition, men’s need satisfaction ratings of their own memory were associated with women’s commitment while controlling for women’s need satisfaction ratings of men’s memory, but no such cross-partner effects were found for women. Overall, the findings shed light on an initial understanding of how a person’s own memory of an event can impact another person’s attitudes even when taking into account this other person’s memory encoding of that same event.     

Iraqi refugee men’s experiences of psychotherapy: clinical implications and the proposal of a pluralistic model

The psychotherapy experiences of a sample of Iraqi refugee men, in later stages of exile, were explored with the aim of shedding some light on how this client group can experience therapy. Ten adult male Iraqi refugees – who had lived in Sweden for at least five years and had been psychotherapy clients at some point during that time – were recruited for this study. Using individual semi-structured interviews (in Arabic), three main areas were explored with each participant: (1) reasons for seeking psychotherapy; (2) perceptions of the psychotherapy professional; and (3) experiences of the psychotherapy process and outcome. The interviews were then translated into English, transcribed, and then analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Most participants/clients described exile-related stressors as their main reason for seeking psychotherapy, but some described distress due to a combination of pre-migration trauma and post-migration stress. They also found some aspects of therapy to be positive (mainly verbalising ones thoughts and feelings, and feeling less marginalised) and some negative (mainly experiencing racist or culturally insensitive treatment by therapists, and experiencing a lack of competence and transparency in therapists). The findings were explored in terms of clinical implications and a pluralistic model was proposed to address the identified needs.     

Filling in the Gaps: Listening Through Dialogue

Over the past 30 years, technology has been introduced into higher education shifting the ways in which learning and student engagement occurs. While the literature suggests that technology offers benefits for improving educational outcomes, few studies have examined how benefits are achieved. This case study presents how the students and instructor of a course on postmodern theory and family therapy developed a praxis-based approach using a digital platform to improve pedagogy. Specifically, using a reflective approach based on ethnomethodology, this paper presents how the members of this course achieved a transformative generative dialogue using an online, simultaneous multi-user document, file-sharing and editing platform. This paper stresses the importance of all members of a course participating in the use of an interactive technological platform to facilitate open dialogue and collaboration.     

Eye movements reveal no immediate "WOW" ("which one's weird") effect in autism spectrum disorder

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developed (TD) adult participants viewed pairs of scenes for a simple "spot the difference" (STD) and a complex "which one's weird" (WOW) task. There were no group differences in the STD task. In the WOW task, the ASD group took longer to respond manually and to begin fixating the target "weird" region. Additionally, as indexed by the first-fixation duration into the target region, the ASD group failed to "pick up" immediately on what was "weird". The findings are discussed with reference to the complex information processing theory of ASD (Minshew & Goldstein, 1998 ).