Beliefs about stories: Parents' and therapists' explanations of childhood difficulties

Therapists and parents were given vignettes describing the behavioural and emotional difficulties of two nine-year-old children and were asked to rate the importance of a number of possible explanations for such difficulties. Broad agreement was found between parents and therapists, but also there were a number of significant differences. Parents endorsed more child centered explanations and put greater emphasis on physical and developmental factors, while therapists endorsed relationships factors and saw the beliefs of other family members as important. Therapists who were parents showed a pattern of responses that lay between those of parents and non-parent therapists.     

MFT trainee adjustment to program lifestyle stress: The TAPS scale

The 30-item Trainee Adjustment to Program Stress (TAPS) scale was developed to measure lifestyle stress of family therapy trainees. Initially, 70 items were generated from propositional statements based on four constructs. Following pilot testing, 329 out of 900 (37%) student members of the American Association for Mariage and Family Therapy (AAMFT) returned TAPS questionnaires. Internal consistency reliability analyses and principal components and factor analyses produced a final 30 item TAPS scale appropriate for use in family therapy training programs. Reliability and validity measures are reported.     

Boundary regulation in family and personal systems: Perceptions of late adolescents

Examination of boundary regulation can provide family therapists with a framework to describe both the functioning of family systems and personal systems (i.e., the intrapsychic functioning of individual family members). In the present study, late adolescents' perceptions of boundary regulation within their family systems (i.e., ratings of family health, communication, leadership, expressiveness, cohesion, and family conflict) were related to regulation of their personal boundaries (i.e., self-reported personal competence, distress, and patterns of defense mechanism use). In addition, personal system variables reliably discriminated between adolescents who described their families as psychologically healthy versus psychologically unhealthy.     

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.     

体操运动员比赛时尿内儿茶酚胺的排出量

测量了37名体操运动员在比赛前和训练前的血压和脉率,并测了25名运动员赛前、赛后和训练后尿内儿茶酚胺的排出量。结果发现男子组赛前舒张压比训练前为高。比赛后尿内去甲肾上腺素排出量男女组均显著高于比赛前,男子组训练后尿内去甲肾上腺素排出量比比赛后略低,而女子组则比比赛后有明显降低。说明男子组去甲肾上腺素的排出增加与情绪的关系较少,而女子组则与情绪关系较密切。赛后肾上腺素排出量男女组均有明显增加,训练后排出量均比比赛后排出量低。女子组在赛前、赛后、训练后肾上腺素排出量均比男子组为低,但差异未达显著水平。比赛中发挥好的肾上腺素排出量倾向较低。