The Role of Creativity in Marriage and Family Therapy Practice: A National Online Study

The purpose of this study, using an online methodology, was to investigate therapists' perceptions of the role of creativity in couples' and family therapy. Along with completing a quantitative measure assessing creativity in their work, participants responded to four open-ended questions which addressed the meaning of creativity, characteristics of a creative family therapist, some creative interventions they have used with couples and families, and barriers to their own creativity as a family therapist. A total of 142 marriage and family therapists in 36 states in the United States participated. The findings shed light on the unique importance of creativity in couples and family treatment.     

Personality and stress

Recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest in how personality affects the stress process. This paper reports on a broad spectrum of findings on the relationships between personality and stress, taking transactional stress theory as the point of departure. A first part outlines the different approaches stress research has taken within personality psychology as opposed to research based on transactional stress theory and discusses the debate between these two paradigms. The second part gives an overview of empirical findings, with a focus on the Big Five personality factors, in order to demonstrate that personality affects the stress process in every aspect. The discussion suggests that we address unresolved problems of transactional stress research in the framework of interactionist personality psychology. Special attention ought to be given to developing a better understanding of situational characteristics, stress-producing mechanisms, and the functions of situational choices and coping strategies for personality.     

Living with Contradictions: The Taken-for-Granted in Israeli Political Discourse

Two apparently contradictory ideas are closely linked in Israeli political discourse: Israel is powerful and independent and Israel is vulnerable and dependent. This study used content analysis and focus groups, as well as existing survey data analyzed by others, to explore how this paradox has been reflected in newspapers and conversations during six different time periods from 1948 to 1996. The goal was not to explain the paradox but to examine its consequences for Israeli perceptions of U.S. policy in the Middle East—and, in the process, to explore Israeli self-images. The nature of U.S. strategic interests was originally treated as problematic and in need of political discussion, but in the past 25 years these interests have become taken for granted. Surprisingly, even after the end of the Cold War, a critical discourse moment in which a reexamination of U.S. interests in the Middle East would seem inevitable, the U.S. role remains taken for granted and largely unexamined. The strong/vulnerable paradox explains this absence of discussion: Examining U.S. interests too closely upsets the delicate balance that keeps the sense of vulnerability in check.     

The Role of Schools in Outcomes for Youth: Implications for Children's Mental Health Services Research

We explore the role of schools in children's mental health services research. Recent literature has suggested that schools play an important role in delivering services to children and adolescents with emotional and behavioral problems. Research in services research, though, has taken a fairly narrow view of which dimensions of school environments are relevant for inclusion in studies. We suggest that a broader view of school environments is appropriate and potentially beneficial to the field. Using Bronfenbrenner's ecological model as a guide, we conceptualize schools as microsystems. Such an approach suggests that all aspects of school environments (treatment as well as non-treatment) are likely to influence many of the outcomes that children's mental health services research frequently targets (e.g., behavioral problems, problematic peer relationships, academic achievement, school attendance). We review literature from a variety of disciplines to suggest relevant features of schools, with particular attention to the role of peer dynamics within schools. We conclude with implications of this expanded conceptualization of schools for children's mental health services research.     

A Comparison of Three Methods of Teaching Skin Self-Examinations

Skin self-examinations are essential for the early identification and treatment of skin cancers. However, little is known about the most effective methods for teaching skin cancer detection and skin self-examination. This study compared three skin cancer education methods that are commonly used in the primary care setting: viewing a videotape, reading brochures, and one-on-one instruction from a nurse practitioner. One hundred forty-three young adults were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions (educational intervention or wait list) and completed measures of skin cancer knowledge, ability to visually discriminate cancerous versus noncancerous skin growths, and behavioral ability to perform a skin self-examination immediately (Time 1) and 3 weeks (Time 2) after the educational intervention. Results showed that participants across all educational interventions had significantly higher skin cancer knowledge compared to those in the wait-list control group, and these knowledge scores were maintained for 3 weeks. Participants in the brochure condition scored significantly higher than participants in all other conditions on an observational measure of skin self-examination. Demographic variables, such as gender and ethnicity, were not found to be related to performance on any of the dependent measures. These findings provide preliminary evidence that knowledge of skin cancer may be enhanced through a variety of educational techniques and that written materials (e.g., brochures) may represent the minimal intervention level necessary for teaching adults how to perform thorough skin self-examinations.     

A History of the Association of Medical School Psychologists

While psychologists have been active faculty members in medical schools for over 85 years, they lacked organization on the national level until 1981. This history traces the background of psychology's involvement in medical schools, landmark events that affected the discipline, and progress since formal organization has occurred. Office of the Senior Vice President and Provost     

Longitudinal trajectories of bicultural identity integration in recently immigrated Hispanic adolescents: Links with mental health and family functioning

This study examined, in a sample of recently immigrated Hispanic adolescents in Miami and Los Angeles, the extent to which bicultural identity integration (BII; involving the ability to synthesise one's heritage and receiving cultural streams and to identify as a member of both cultures) is best understood as a developmental construct that changes over time or as an individual‐difference construct that is largely stable over time. We were also interested in the extent to which these trajectories predicted mental health and family functioning. Recent‐immigrant 9th graders (N = 302) were assessed 6 times from 9th to 12th grade. Latent class growth analyses using the first 5 timepoints identified 2 trajectory classes—one with lower BII scores over time and another with higher BII scores over time. Higher heritage and US identity at baseline predicted membership in the higher BII class. At the 6th study timepoint, lower BII adolescents reported significantly poorer self‐esteem, optimism, prosocial behaviour and family relationships compared with their higher BII counterparts. These findings are discussed in terms of further research on the over‐time trajectory of biculturalism, and on the need to develop interventions to promote BII as a way of facilitating well‐being and positive family functioning.     

Inequalities in Health and Intergenerational Equity

In the popular folklore three-score-years-and-ten is treated as a fair innings for people, and thereby serves as an informal reference point for judgements about distributive justice within a community. But length of life alone is an insufficient basis for such judgements - a person's health-related quality-of-life also needs to be taken into account. If one of the objectives of public policy is to reduce inequalities in lifetime health, it will be demonstrated that this is very likely to require systematic discrimination against the older members of a community. The notion of community solidatity will also be tested, because a decision will need to be made as to whether the same fair innings applies to all members of the community, or whether some are entitled to more than others. The strength of the fair innings principle is that it brings these issues to the fore in a systematic way which should ais their resolition in a practical context.     

Religiousness, Health, and Health Behavior in Public-Use Data of the National Center for Health Statistics

Studies of religiousness and health-related variables in large, population-based cross-sectional or, preferably, longitudinal studies, which are often prohibitively expensive, are important to complement findings from the more commonly performed studies. Inadequately known among social science researchers, the national health surveys of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) offer large, high-quality data sets to the public at no or nominal cost and hence offer important opportunities for research in the area of religion and health, religion and reproductive behavior, sociology of religion and psychology of religion. This report provides an overview of the data sets and a bibliography of prior research using these data, which is intended to suggest how the data of NCHS may be further exploited by researchers of religiousness and health.

Who uses community mental health centres? A study of one health district

A caseload analysis was undertaken to investigate those clients seen by five community mental health centre teams within one healthcare district. The 985 clients are described in terms of demographic and clinical features and questions relating to service provision are discussed.