Is Therapeutic Alliance Influenced by a Feminist Approach to Therapy?

Although the feminist critique of marriage and family therapy has been a significant part of the literature for many years, its impact has been blunted by two criticisms. The first suggests that the feminist critique lacks empirical support. The second suggests that the feminist critique promotes an alliance with women clients at the expense of men. The first criticism has been addressed in recent years. The present study examined the relationship between feminist principles and therapeutic alliance. Results suggest that feminist principles actually enhance therapeutic relationship for men clients but has no effect on therapeutic relationship for women clients.of the Marriage and Family Therapy Program     

Should self-defeating personality disorder be revisited in the DSM?

Self-defeating personality disorder (SDPD) was proposed for consideration in the DSM-III-R, but was eventually removed from the manual because of the lack of evidence to support its validity. Yet, after DSM-IV was published, some studies suggested that SDPD may be a viable diagnosis. The purpose of this study was to evaluate SDPD's viability as a diagnostic category. Consequently, SDPD's internal consistency, comorbidity with other Axis I and II disorders, association with psychosocial impairment, and its ability to predict overall impairment in past, current, and global levels of functioning beyond other personality disorder symptomatology was assessed in 1,200 psychiatric evaluated with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Personality (Pfohl, Blum, & Zimmerman, 1997). Cronbach's alpha for SDPD criteria was 0.61, and item-total correlations ranged between 0.22-0.38. There was substantial comorbidity of SDPD with depressive, avoidant, and borderline personality disorders, as well as major depression and anxiety disorders. The SDPD group did not significantly differ from psychiatric controls on multiple measures of psychosocial impairment, global functioning, and suicidality. SDPD did not meaningfully add to the prediction of impairment above and beyond other measures of Axis II pathology. It is concluded that the data do not support the reliability, validity, and utility of the SDPD diagnosis.     

The Application of Family Systems Theory to Organizational Consultation: A Content Analysis

A content analysis was performed on 43 articles published between 1970 and 1998 discerned as relating family systems theory (FST) frameworks and constructs to organizational consultation. Frameworks and constructs were coded and then investigated in relation to four independent variables: type of organization, decade of article publication, gender, and educational training of author. Results indicate that the use of FST frameworks and constructs vary depending upon the characteristics of the organization, time period, and consultant. Results highlight specific FST frameworks and constructs most common in organizational consultation.     

Implicit Attitudes as Potential Protection From Risky Sex: Predicting Condom Use With the IAT

The Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) has become a popular tool for measuring implicit attitudes toward 2 contrasting concepts. In this study, we suggest including a neutral category (trees) to capture implicit evaluations of a single target attitude object. Using such a technique to measure implicit attitudes toward condoms, we predicted and found that explicit attitudes were related to intended condom use in situations that allow for controlled and deliberative processing, but implicit attitudes were related to intended condom use when automatic processing presides. Implications for such implicit and explicit attitude-behavior relations are discussed in the context of sexual risk-taking.     

A test of the survival processing advantage in implicit and explicit memory tests

The present study was designed to investigate the survival processing effect (Nairne, Thompson, & Pandeirada, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33, 263–273, 2007) in cued implicit and explicit memory tests. The survival effect has been well established in explicit free recall and recognition tests, but has not been evident in implicit memory tests or in cued explicit tests. In Experiment 1 of the present study, we tested implicit and explicit memory for words studied in survival, moving, or pleasantness contexts in stem completion tests. In Experiment 2, we further tested these effects in implicit and explicit category production tests. Across the two experiments, with four separate memory tasks that included a total of 525 subjects, no survival processing advantage was found, replicating the results from implicit tests reported by Tse and Altarriba (Memory & Cognition, 38, 1110–1121, 2010). Thus, although the survival effect appears to be quite robust in free recall and recognition tests, it has not been replicated in cued implicit and explicit memory tests. The similar results found for the implicit and explicit tests in the present study do not support encoding elaboration explanations of the survival processing effect.     

Neighborhood Context and Perceptions of Stress Over Time: An Ecological Model of Neighborhood Stressors and Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Resources

We examine the association between neighborhood socio-economic disadvantage and perceived stress during middle and late adolescence among African American youth (N = 665; 51 % female; M = 15.9 years at baseline). In addition, we explored the ways through which neighborhood stressors interacted with an individual’s intra- and interpersonal resources (e.g., coping, social support and substance use), to affect their perceived stress trajectories during adolescence. First, we tested a neighborhood stressors model and found that youth who lived in neighborhoods with greater socioeconomic disadvantage had higher baseline stress and a steeper increase in stress over time. When we included individual-level risk and promotive factors in the model, however, the effect of neighborhood disadvantage on perceived stress was no longer significant, and the stress trajectory was explained by adolescent substance use, social support and perceptions of the neighborhood. Our results support theories of stress and coping, and the importance of proximal intra- and interpersonal factors in either amplifying or mitigating perceptions of stress. We discuss implications of the neighborhood context and how our findings may inform future prevention and intervention related to adolescent stress and development.     

On the independence of judged frequencies for items presented in successive lists*

In an experiment examining retroactive interference effects in a frequency-judging task, all Ss were presented with a list of words occurring varying numbers of times according to either a massed- or distributed-practive (MP or DP) schedule. They were then asked to judge how often each word had occurred. Following this, Ss were given one of four types of second tasks a second list with different items followed by a frequency-judging task for that list (Condition New): a second list with items repeated from the first list but with different frequencies for each item, while either maintaining items as either MP or DP items (Condition Same) or switching MP items to DP, and vice versa (Condition Reverse): followed by a frequency-judging task for the second-list frequencies only: or a puzzle task for the amount of time required for second-list presentation and judgment in the other conditions (Condition None). Finally, all Ss were asked to recall List 1 frequencies, List 2 frequencies were less discriminable in Conditions Same and Reverse than in Condition New. Recall of List 1 frequencies, however, was not different for these three groups, but was poorer than in List 2 frequency judgments were not independent of List 1 frequencies.