Pastoral Counseling of Older Adults: Toward a Short-term Integrative Approach

A rapidly aging population with its mental health care needs presents an enormous challenge in the current mental health field. In light of this, pastoral counselors will have an increasingly important role to play in the care of older adults because of their strategic position in the community and their competence in dealing with religious/spiritual issues particularly salient in old age. This article proposes a short-term integrative approach to enable pastoral counselors to effectively and efficiently meet the mental health care needs of the elderly.

Transcending a Differend: Studying Therapeutic Processes Conversationally

Studies of actual conversational behaviours used to generate positive change in family therapy are relatively rare. In this study such conversational details were examined as they occurred in a single session of family therapy. With passages identified by family members as helpful, discursive methods of analysis (conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis) were used to examine an actual conversation between a renowned family therapist (Karl Tomm) and a family formerly at a conversational impasse. Conversational practices and sequences in talk used by the therapist and family members to bridge these differences in their ways of relating are discussed.     

从人际关系看人格--认知-情感系统理论的视角

人格的认知—情感系统理论(cognitive-affective system theory of personality,简称CAPS)被视为是与大五人格理论齐名的一种人格理论。该文拟从个体外部的人际关系层面来阐述该理论,以加深对理论的理解。然后,又从CAPS与其它人际关系理论的契合说明该理论是一种整合性的人格理论。最后,指出了CAPS的优点和局限性,并由此对人格研究的未来发展方向进行了探讨。     

Defining relationships: Comparing Canadians, Chinese and Indians

To examine whether cultural differences exist in defining family, friend, relative, colleague and neighbour, non-student samples were drawn from Canada, China and India. The data generated several unexpected findings. (i) The means of the relationship definitions between the Chinese and Canadians were not significantly different. The means between the Chinese and Indians were significantly different. The means between the Canadians and Indians were significantly different. (ii) Females defined their relationships more interdependently than males in the Indian and Canadian samples but not in the Chinese sample. (iii) Definitions were target specific and the order of closeness differed from group to group. (iv) In the Indian and Chinese samples, participants' age was negatively correlated with closeness in defining friends, indicating that a person's perceived closeness with friends changes over the life span. Results of past research using student samples need to be interpreted with caution.     

Dimensions of control: Mediational analyses of the stress–health relationship

Multiple dimensions of control are examined in relations with stress and physical health outcomes. Factor analysis of six measures of control from 187 elderly individuals yielded two factors: Self-Efficacy, people’s beliefs about their ability to exercise control over themselves and their environment, and Need for Power and Autonomy, the desire to control others and exercise self-determination. Various hypotheses regarding the process by which control impacts the relationship between stress and health were then tested. Self-Efficacy partially mediated and moderated the relationship between stress and physical health, whereas the Need for Power and Autonomy served neither function. Self-efficacy appears to be a lens through which older adults view stress, affecting the way it is interpreted and managed, ultimately impacting health outcomes.     

Interactivism: A manifesto

The interactivist model has grown over the last several decades from a narrower initial beginning into an evolving systematic theory and underlying philosophy. It has been induced to do so because the underlying assumptions that framed the beginnings of the model were fundamentally different from those that are dominant throughout psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy. Consequently, the model faced multiple instances of attempting to integrate with literature in neighboring fields, discovering that such integration was not possible because the basic assumptions were not compatible, and having to either give up on the model thus far constructed, or else extend it in a way consistent with those assumptions into those neighboring (and foundational) domains. This manifesto outlines the resultant interactivist framework, presents some of the arguments for its underlying assumptions, and argues that these avoid problems that are fatal for many standard approaches in the literature.     

The search for an effective clinical behavior analysis: the nonlinear thinking of Israel goldiamond

This paper has two purposes; the first is to reintroduce Goldiamond's constructional approach to clinical behavior analysis and to the field of behavior analysis as a whole, which, unfortunately, remains largely unaware of his nonlinear functional analysis and its implications. The approach is not simply a set of clinical techniques; instead it describes how basic, applied, and formal analyses may intersect to provide behavior-analytic solutions where the emphasis is on consequential selection. The paper takes the reader through a cumulative series of explorations, discoveries, and insights that hopefully brings the reader into contact with the power and comprehensiveness of Goldiamond's approach, and leads to an investigation of the original works cited. The second purpose is to provide the context of a life of scientific discovery that attempts to elucidate the variables and events that informed one of the most extraordinary scientific journeys in the history of behavior analysis, and expose the reader (especially young ones) to the exciting process of discovery followed by one of the field's most brilliant thinkers. One may perhaps consider this article a tribute to Goldiamond and his work, but the tribute is really to the process of scientific discovery over a professional lifetime.     

Clients’ in-session acceptance and cognitive defusion behaviors in acceptance-based treatment of tinnitus distress

Cognitive-behavioral treatment (CBT) is considered to be an effective treatment of distress associated with tinnitus (perception of internal noises without any outer auditory stimulation), but the processes by which the therapy works remain unclear. Mindfulness and acceptance is receiving increased attention in the treatment literature for chronic medical conditions. However, few studies have examined these and related processes with behavioral or observer measures. In the present study 57 videotapes (a total of 1710 min) from 19 clients who participated in a controlled trial of an acceptance-based treatment for tinnitus distress, were coded for frequency and peak level of verbal behaviors expressing either acceptance or cognitive defusion. Frequency of cognitive defusion behaviors and peak level of cognitive defusion as well as peak level of acceptance rated in Session 2, predicted symptom reduction 6 month following treatment. These relationships were not accounted for by the improvement that had occurred prior to the measurement point of the process variables. Moreover, prior symptom changes could not predict process variables rated later in therapy (after most of the improvement in therapy had occurred). Thus, clients’ in-session acceptance and cognitive defusion behaviors appear to play an important role in the reduction of negative impact of tinnitus.     

A process-based model for an interactive ontology

The paper proposes a process-based model for an ontology that encompasses the emergence of process systems generated by increasingly complex levels of organization. Starting with a division of processes into those that are persistent and those that are fleeting, the model builds through a series of exclusive and exhaustive disjunctions. The crucial distinction is between those persistent and cohesive systems that are energy wells, and those that are far-from-equilibrium. The latter are necessarily open; they can persist only by interaction with their environments. Further distinctions, developed by means of the notions of self-maintenance and error detection, lead to the identification of complex biological organisms that are flexible learners, some of which are self-conscious and form themselves into social institutions. This model provides a non-reductive model for understanding human beings as both embodied and yet emergent. In particular, it provides a way of characterizing action as ‘metaphysically deep’, not an ontological embarrassment within an otherwise physicalist world.     

The Search for a Politically Reflective Clinical-Community Approach

The following paper explores how working in Venezuela, a country that has gone through 20 years of economic and political problems, has highlighted the gap between clinical and community approaches in dealing with the sufferings of our consultants. Our efforts to develop theoretical and practical tools that can address the historical and political dimensions of people’s lives are reviewed. These efforts illustrate how the community paradigm can help expand clinical perspectives, thus allowing a practise which can address the needs of people who have neither the time nor the economic means to engage in a traditional therapeutic relationship. The shift in perspective, the revision of our “therapeutic” stance and the use of de-naturalisation and problematization are illustrated.