Therapist Perceptions of Intimate Partner Violence: A Replication of Harway and Hansen's Study after More than a Decade

ABSTRACT

More than a decade ago, Hansen, Harway, and Cervantes (1991) Hansen, M., Harway, M. and Cervantes, N. 1991. Therapists' perceptions of severity in cases of family violence. Violence and Victims, 6: 225–235. [PubMed] , [Google Scholar] and Harway and Hansen (1993) Harway, M. and Hansen, M. 1993. “Therapist perceptions of family violence”. In Battering and family therapy: A feminist perspective, Edited by: Hansen, M. and Hansen, M. 42–53. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.  [Google Scholar] examined mental health providers' ability to accurately perceive violence within couples presenting for therapy and to intervene in a manner that reduces risk. Alarmingly, 40% of therapists sampled failed to identify the presence of intimate partner violence (IPV) and none predicted lethality. Over a decade later, the present replication of Harway and colleagues' study was completed with the expectation that today's therapists are better prepared to identify IPV within a clinical vignette. Results show that therapists have indeed improved their ability to identify IPV. However, only one therapist accurately predicted lethality in the present study. Implications concerning IPV training for therapists are discussed.     

Challenges to Doing Sexual Violence Work

Sexual assault victims experience a number of effects as a result of their victimization. Sexual assault crisis workers are assigned the responsibility of trying to minimize the negative consequences of sexual assault. In their efforts to serve sexual assault victims, it is likely that certain problems make it difficult to adequately help victims. This study considers how 43 sexual assault crisis workers (27 directors of sexual assault crisis centers and 16 workers) define the challenges of serving sexual assault victims. Major challenges reported included a lack of awareness about sexual assault, victim blaming, and a lack of resources. Implications are provided.     

Advocates Speak Out on Adult Sexual Assault: A Unique Crime Demands a Unique Response

Research documents the challenges presented to victims of sexual assault whose cases move through the criminal justice system. One key vantage point from which to understand how survivors experience the criminal justice system is from the perspective of the crisis center advocates who work with them. Graduate student research teams conducted semistructured interviews with rape crisis advocates across one Northeastern state. The voices of crisis center advocates raise key points that might help in the development of new procedures and processes for how adult sexual assault cases are handled in the justice system.     

四川汶川大地震心理危机干预的思考

面对大地震我们如何应对？突发的灾难除了顷刻间造成大量人员伤亡和财产损失外,还会对人们的心理产生巨大影响。帮助灾区人民渡过心理创伤,减少心理疾病的发生和对心理社会功能的后遗影响。灾后心理危机同样是灾难,灾后心理疏导需专业人员,抗震救灾与灾后的心理干预同等重要。     

消亡抑或复兴：人本心理学的未来

人本心理学在20世纪末遭遇了内外两方面的危机。但其形成的社会文化与心理学基础依然存在。主流心理学,特别是积极心理学的发展还为她提供了复兴机遇。在未来,人本心理学家需要重审自身使命,明晰研究主题,完善研究方法,保持开放态度,强化组织管理,以推动人本心理学走上复兴之路。     

Social psychology circa 2016: A field on steroids

This paper considers the current state of the field in social psychology. On the one hand, we have made enormous progress in integrating our research with other disciplines, reaching out to general public and using our knowledge toward addressing major societal ills. On the other hand, social psychology has been recently mired in a crisis of confidence concerning the appropriateness of our methods and the robustness of our findings. We propose that shifting our attention to theory, method, and application, as well as away from a pervasive “outcome focus,” can extricate social psychology from its current doldrums and allow it to realize its potential as an indispensable social science.     

“Sad day for the UK”: The linking of debates about settling refugee children in the UK with Brexit on an anti-immigrant news website

This article uniquely demonstrates how UK debates about supporting child refugees during the “refugee crisis” came to be used as support for leaving the European Union (EU). The research question “how did users of a news website respond to a report about the UK government's decision to allow child refugees into the UK?” is addressed with a rigorous discursive analysis of an internet discussion forum on the anti-immigrant website MailOnline consisting of 2,014 unique posts, with a reach of 30 million viewers. Analysis demonstrated that (1) child refugees were presented as adults, (2) allowing in refugees was presented as a “burden” on taxpayers, (3) the decision was presented as opposed to the public's will, and (4) this was used as a warrant for leaving the EU. The significant implication of this analysis is that political attempts at associating the refugee crisis with the EU may have been successful in this context.     

No experimental evidence for emotion-specific gaze cueing in a threat context

We examined the utility of a gaze cueing paradigm to examine sensitivity to differences among negatively valenced expressions. Participants judged target stimuli (dangerous or safe), the location of which was cued by the gaze direction of a central face. Dawel et al. reported that gaze cueing effects (faster response times on valid vs. invalid trials) were larger when the central face displayed fear than when it displayed happiness. Our aim was to determine whether this effect was specific to fear, to all threat-related expressions (fear, anger), or to all negatively valenced expressions (fear, anger, sadness, disgust) with the aim of using this protocol to study the development of implicit discrimination of negatively valenced expressions. Across five experiments in which we varied the number of models (1 vs. 4), the number of expressions (2 vs. 5), and the country of residence of participants (Canada vs. Australia) we found no evidence that the magnitude of gaze cueing effects is modulated by expression. We discuss our failure to replicate in the context of the broader literature.     

危机应对策略对消费者矛盾态度和购买意愿的影响

采用2×2两因素被试间实验设计探讨初始矛盾态度及危机应对策略对消费者矛盾态度和购买意愿的影响。结果表明:当消费者初始矛盾态度水平较低时更可能受辩解策略的影响,从而使其负面态度和矛盾态度下降; 当消费者初始矛盾态度水平较高时更可能受和解策略的影响,从而使其负面态度和矛盾态度下降; 正面态度/负面态度可以显著正向/负向预测消费者的购买意愿,矛盾态度在其中起调节作用,即矛盾态度水平越高,正面/负面态度与购买意愿之间关系的不确定性越高。     

Reinventing ourselves

In my role as President of the European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology, I provide an introduction to the ‘Manifesto for the Future of Work and Organizational Psychology’ (this issue), positioning the manifesto within our association’s and discipline’s broader focus on renewal and improvement.