Clinical and demographic features of the online counselling client population

The purpose of this research was to determine the demographics and characteristics of clients seeking online counselling over an eight‐month period of clinical online practice. Two hundred and seventeen clients seeking Internet counselling completed a Counselling Application and a Life History Questionnaire. The characteristics of the relatively new client population include the following categories: gender, age groups, martial status, education, primary reason for seeking online therapy, secondary issues, frequency of email exchanges, and online vs. face‐to‐face counselling preferences. Implications for online counselling practice are discussed.     

Reciprocal influences between stress and internalizing problems in Korean adolescents: A cross‐lagged,longitudinal study

In the current four‐wave, longitudinal study, adolescent stress, internalizing problems, and the reciprocal influences of these variables were examined. Data were obtained from the Korea Youth Panel Study, which included 3188 (1594 male and 1594 female) middle‐ and high‐school students who enrolled in the study from 2004 to 2007. The mean participant age was 14.79 years in 2004. By using a cross‐lagged, autoregressive model, it was shown that stress levels and internalizing problems had reciprocal influences on one another over time (all four time points). At each of the time points, the effect sizes of stress on internalizing problems were significantly greater than those of internalizing problems on stress.     

Culture-sensitive functional analytic psychotherapy

Functional analytic psychotherapy (FAP) is defined as behavior-analytically conceptualized talk therapy. In contrast to the technique-oriented educational format of cognitive behavior therapy and the use of structural mediational models, FAP depends on the functional analysis of the moment-to-moment stream of interactions between client and therapist. This distinctive feature makes FAP particularly sensitive to the challenges posed by cultural differences between client and therapist. Core elements of FAP philosophy are invoked to argue that this vulnerability paradoxically implies an increased ability to capture and use relevant issues in the therapy process with culturally different clients. This argument focuses FAP's preference for concrete behavior over theoretical modeling, its emphasis on functional principles rather than topographically defined techniques, and its inclusion of the therapist's behavior in the assessment of clients' clinically relevant behavior. Suggestions are given concerning how academic and practical training and personal experience may be used to foster sound multicultural practice.     

Well-being and Spirituality from a Korean Perspective: Based on the Study of Culture and Subjective Well-being

Criteria for well-being and spirituality are culturally bound. In this article, therefore, the notions of well-being and spirituality were reconsidered from a Korean perspective. Two major conceptual approaches that pertain to “subjective well-being” research in social psychology provide the methodological framework for this study. While “bottom-up” approaches focus on how external events and situations influence happiness, “top-down” approaches center on diverse variables within an individual and his or her culture. Noting the cultural differences between American and Korean self-construals (i.e., independence vs. interdependence), the author argues that Koreans need to construct “top-down” approaches to both well-being and spirituality. Reviewing Robert Emmon’s concept of “spiritual intelligence,” the author also suggests an integrative model for spirituality and well-being in Korea.     

Family Functioning and Self-Differentiation: A Cross-Cultural Examination

This study examined the degree to which self-differentiation as related to family functioning is valued differently by Korean and European-American university students. The main findings confirm that the level of family functioning reported by European Americans is greater than for their Korean counterpart; family functioning is associated with differentiation measures (total score, emotional reactivity, and emotional cutoff) to a different extent across the two groups; and controlling for the effect of family functioning, the added contribution of a country variable explained further variance in self-differentiation. The importance of addressing the issue of similarities and differences between cultures in the assessment and treatment of individuals with problems related to their families of origin is discussed.     

Processing of the Korean Eojoel Ambiguity

Korean writing is a syllabary where spaces occur between phrases rather than between words. This characteristic of Korean allows different types of information in Korean sentences to be dissociated in ways that are not possible in the languages that have been the focus of most psycholinguistic research, thereby providing new opportunities to investigate mechanisms of ambiguity resolution during sentence comprehension. In experiments using eye-tracking and self-paced reading, we examined how readers resolve the Eojoel ambiguity, where the grouping of syllables is ambiguous with respect to whether a phrase-final syllable is a case marker or a part of a word. This Eojoel ambiguity offers an opportunity to test how relative frequency of the lexical entries and complexity of morphological decomposition affect ambiguity resolution. Overall, the results of the experiments presented here showed that readers noticed and processed the Eojoel ambiguity very rapidly using information about the relative frequency of alternative interpretations, while the complexity of the morphological decomposition had little effect. These results are discussed in terms of constraint-based accounts (MacDonald et al. Psychol Rev 101:676–703, 1994) of ambiguity resolution.     

Constituent Length Affects Prosody and Processing for a Dative NP Ambiguity in Korean

Two sentence processing experiments on a dative NP ambiguity in Korean demonstrate effects of phrase length on overt and implicit prosody. Both experiments controlled non-prosodic length factors by using long versus short proper names that occurred before the syntactically critical material. Experiment 1 found that long phrases induce different prosodic phrasing than short phrases in a read-aloud task and change the preferred interpretation of globally ambiguous sentences. It also showed that speakers who have been told of the ambiguity can provide significantly different prosody for the two interpretations, for both lengths. Experiment 2 verified that prosodic patterns found in first-pass pronunciations predict self-paced reading patterns for silent reading. The results extend the coverage of the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis [Fodor, J Psycholinguist Res 27:285–319, 1998; Prosodic disambiguation in silent reading. In M. Hirotani (Ed.), NELS 32 (pp. 113–132). Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications, 2002] to another construction and to Korean. They further indicate that strong syntactic biases can have rapid effects on the formulation of implicit prosody.     

On the Right Track: Client Experience of Narrative Therapy

This article presents an ethnographic research on eight families' experience of narrative therapy and discusses six major themes found in the interviews including externalizing conversation, developing the alternate story, personal agency, reflecting/consulting teams, building a wider audience, and the helpful and unhelpful aspects of the therapy. The findings and the notation that families found the therapy to be very effective are also included.     

Clients Helping Therapists Find Solutions to their Therapy

This paper is offered as a beginning toward including client perspectives on treatment and client participation in supervision. Rather than see therapists as technical experts who do things to people, many of us now see therapists as nonexperts who create conversations with people (Goolishian & Anderson, 1992). This new shift challenges the traditional training positions of supervisor and supervisee, respectively. Including clients' voices the supervisor participate from a nonexpert position.