Common principles of psychotherapeutic change: patterns of use

ABSTRACT

Many authors have proposed the existence of common principles of counselling and psychotherapeutic change. However, little is known about how practitioners use these change principles. A sample of 373 Czech psychotherapists and counsellors participated in an online survey and rated their use of 10 psychotherapy change principles in their practice over the previous year. The frequency of the use of the 10 change principles is reported. Furthermore, three principal components of the change principles were identified: exploration, acceptance, and understanding of clients’ experience; attending to clients’ own resources; and furnishing clients with new skills and advice. The use of these components was mainly associated with the practitioner's theoretical orientation. The implications of the component structure for psychotherapist and counsellor training and practice are discussed.     

Return to Sepharad: Is it possible to heal an ancient wound? A reflection on the construction of large-group identity

Abstract

Spanish parliament recently issued a new law offering Spanish nationality to Sephardic Jews who so desired and could demonstrate a basic knowledge of the Spanish language and culture. This law attempted to redress a five-centuries-old injustice and was expected to unleash both criticism and praise. Surprisingly, reactions in the public or the press were minimal or absent. Reasons for this are explored through a qualitative study with focus groups, which showed ideas that can be grouped into four main categories: ignorance, justice, distrust, and fear. It is hypothesized that the predominantly silent response to the new law might be due to the fact that it touches on an extremely sensible issue: the historically fragmented Spanish identity. A position of negation is constructed, to avoid deep anxieties related to the fragile core of a collective identity built from many “others” forced to the refuge of an introspection that protects them from the conviction of not fulfiling the ideal identity status, known by all but reached by none. All those “others” have mixed their bloods with the Old Christians along the centuries, possibly transmitting a profound insecurity about their personal and collective identity that might contribute to understanding current social reactions.     

Continuities across continents: Assessing African American cultural themes among Black and Coloured South Africans

Much of the scholarship concerning African American culture is premised on the notion that it is a legacy of African origins but there has been essentially no attempt to document that relationship empirically. This paper briefly reviews existing evidence for cultural continuity in the Diaspora and then compares the responses of Black and Coloured South African and African Americans on measures of culture emic to African American populations. The observed patterns of psychometric performance, participants' responses, and the predictive utility of the measures employed were consistent with the thesis that despite inevitable variation, these three groups of the African Diaspora share similar orientations on the cultural themes assessed. This research hopes to initiate empirical work on the continuity thesis as it applies to connecting African American culture with a legacy of Africa and as related more broadly to the study of global Diasporas.     

Narcissism lost: On translating and being translated1

The authors present a detailed account of the experiences shared in translating and having one’s work translated. Carneiro maintains that, in order to communicate with their readers, writers should relinquish the narcissistic satisfaction they derive from their texts in the original. Beyond this, she feels that, owing to a good understanding between her and her translator, the creativity in her original text persists in the translation. Brakel introduces himself to the IJPA readership and shows how he works when translating the cultural and linguistic nuances and peculiarities of Brazilian Portuguese. He concludes with some thoughts about the affect he experiences from his original work and the work he has translated.     

Job crafting mediates how empowering leadership and employees’ core self-evaluations predict favourable and unfavourable outcomes

ABSTRACT

Based on job crafting theory and workplace resources theories, the present study develops a model of both antecedents and consequences of job crafting. We hypothesized subordinates’ perceptions of empowering leadership and core self-evaluations influence employee job crafting behaviours, which subsequently influence four outcomes: improving three employee well-being outcomes, (a) work-family enrichment, (b) flourishing, and (c) life satisfaction; and simultaneously reducing the organizational outcome of (d) deviant behaviours. Three-waves of data over nine months were collected from U.S. full-time employees (n = 276). Results showed empowering leadership and core self-evaluations positively related to expansive/approach forms of job crafting behaviours, which in turn related to the three different well-being outcomes. However, job crafting did not affect employee deviant behaviour. Instead, empowering leadership and core self-evaluations directly predicted less deviant behaviour. With the imputed data, we also found job crafting had a significant but weak relationship with deviant behaviour. These findings provide an integrated understanding of how and why employees engage in job crafting, and the important influence that job crafting has on employees’ subjective well-being. The present study advances leadership and job crafting theories, providing practical recommendations for promoting employee well-being and decreasing undesirable behaviours in the form of workplace deviance.     

Recentering Christian Ethics as Comparative Religious Ethics

The filial relationship between Christian ethics and Comparative Religious Ethics (CRE) need not be perniciously distortive and can be salutary for comparative work. I suggest that the suspicions about CRE as a disguised form of a “Christian ethical enterprise” are overstated and that we can appreciate the value of the legacy of Christian ethics for comparative work in the focal themes of emancipatory criticism and common morality. Both of these themes, even if influenced by Christian ethics, reflect more universal social‐moral problems that can be discerned in cross‐cultural contexts.     

Leaders under pressure: time pressure and state core self-evaluations as antecedents of transformational leadership behaviour

ABSTRACT

This study examines situational antecedents of transformational leadership by (a) studying the effect of time pressure on the emergence of transformational leadership behaviours, and (b) examining the mediating role of leaders’ state core self-evaluations. Twice per day for 10 consecutive working days, 42 leaders reported on their state core self-evaluations, transformational leadership behaviours and the time pressure they experienced, yielding 531 observations. Using multilevel path analysis, we found that time pressure had an indirect effect on transformational leadership through leaders’ state core self-evaluations. This mediated relationship was curvilinear; with time pressure having little to no effect on transformational leadership via state core self-evaluations when time pressure is below a leader’s average level of time pressure. However, once this characteristic average level is exceeded, time pressure has a negative effect on transformational leadership via its negative relationship with state core self-evaluations, and this relationship becomes stronger for increasing levels of time pressure.     

Catholic Social Teaching,Economic Inequality,and American Society

The essay begins with an explanation of the underlying theological vision that supports Catholic social teaching's commitment to the centrality of the common good and the role of solidarity as both a virtue and a norm. The vision of humanity as one family and the church as a sacrament of unity is the foundation for a communitarian ethic that prizes inclusion, participation, and relative equality in the quest for a truly just society. An array of social science studies is then employed to show that economic inequality “bleeds” into other realms of public life to undermine fundamental commitments of American society, namely, equal opportunity and political democracy. The essay concludes that an understanding of Catholic social teaching promotes a critical perspective that is deeply at odds with ongoing trends in the U.S. economy.