Family therapy with Spanish-heritage immigrant families in cultural transition

Increasing numbers of Spanish-heritage immigrant families in the United States are beginning to seek therapy for family conflicts related to their adapation to the new country/culture. This paper focuses on the difficulties experienced by these families and presents issues specific to therapy with them. Effective therapy with these families requires that therapists focus on clarification of the differential adaptation rates of family members and facilitate a resolution of the family's transitional conflicts(s). Six cases involving such families are presented.David A. Baptiste, Jr., PhD, is a Psychologist and Marital and Family therapist in the counseling center at New Mexico State University and in private practice, Las Cruce, NM.Revision of a paper presented to the International Round Table for the Advancement of Counseling, Annual Conference, Utrech, The Netherlands, July, 1985. The author expresses appreciation to Judith Landau-Stanton for her helpful review of an earlier draft of this paper.     

Creativity and Self-esteem in Adolescence: A Study of Their Domain-Specific,Multivariate Relationships

Although empirical investigations on the Creative Self have historically started with a focus on self-esteem, the literature on its relationship with creative performance remains thin and inconsistent, with estimated relationships ranging from moderate and negative, to strongly positive. Discrepancies may be explained by the domain-specificity of both creativity and self-esteem that have been widely overlooked in this line of work. Therefore, this study explores the multivariate relationships between creativity in three domains (Music, Literary-Verbal, Graphic) and self-esteem in seven domains (e.g., Academic, Emotional) among 170 adolescents. Creative productions were scored by four raters, and latent consensus in each domain captured using a multi-informant latent-consensus model in SEM. This model was further extended in a structural model reveling that (a) creativity is mainly domain-specific, and (b) the contribution of domain-specific self-esteem on domain-specific creativity greatly varies according to both the domains of creativity and self-esteem. Up to 30% of the variance in creative performance was explained by “domain-relevant” self-esteem facets, and a moderate contribution of creative self-esteem across creativity domains. Results are discussed in light of several important methodological directions for this line of work, as well as its implications for creativity-based interventions designed to support positive self-esteem development in adolescence.     

No-Futurism and Metaphysical Contingentism

According to no-futurism, past and present entities are real, but future ones are not. This view faces a skeptical challenge (Bourne in Australas J Philos 80(3):359–371 2002; A future for presentism, Clarendon Press, Oxford 2006; Braddon-Mitchell in Analysis 64(283):199–203 2004): if no-futurism is true, how do you know you are present? I shall propose a new skeptical argument based on the physical possibility of Gödelian worlds (Albert Einstein: philosopher-scientist, Open Court, La Salle, pp. 555–562, 1949). This argument shows that a no-futurist has to endorse a metaphysical contingentist reading of no-futurism, the view that no-futurism is contingently true. But then, the no-futurist has to face a new skeptical challenge: how do you know that you are in a no-futurist world?     

Of guns and snakes: testing a modern threat superiority effect*

Previous studies suggest that ancient (i.e. evolutionary-based) threats capture attention because human beings possess an inborn module shaped by evolution and dedicated to their detection. An alternative account proposes that a key feature predicting whether a stimulus will capture attention is its relevance rather than its ontology (i.e. phylogenetic or ontogenetic threat). Within this framework, the present research deals with the attentional capture by threats commonly encountered in our urban environment. In two experiments, we investigate the attentional capture by modern threats (i.e. weapons). In Experiment 1, participants responded to a target preceded by a cue, which was a weapon or a non-threatening stimulus. We found a larger cuing effect (faster reaction times to valid vs. invalid trials) with weapons as compared with non-threatening cues. In Experiment 2, modern (e.g. weapons) and ancient threats (e.g. snakes) were pitted against one another as cues to determine which ones preferentially capture attention. Crucially, participants were faster to detect a target preceded by a modern as opposed to an ancient threat, providing initial evidence for a superiority of modern threat. Overall, the present findings appear more consistent with a relevance-based explanation rather than an evolutionary-based explanation of threat detection.     

Community Counselling: Values and Practices

This article focuses on community counselling, specifically in African contexts. A community psychology approach is used as a framework for this discussion. This approach, linked to a critical perspective, highlights the importance of going beyond individualist assessments and interventions towards comprehensive approaches that locate the person in context, and that listen carefully to and engage openly with all voices in a way that highlights dynamics that oppress ourselves and others, for the purposes of building a supportive and health promoting environment for all. Perspectives and values relevant to this approach, and their implications for psychological practice, are discussed. In particular, the implications for psychological assessment and intervention are explored in some detail.     

The treatment of adolescents and their families in cultural transition: Issues and recommendations

Increasing numbers of immigrant families with adolescent children are seeking therapy because of intergenerational conflicts specific to the adolescent separation-individuation phase of the life cycle and transitional problems related to immigration and cultural transition. Three types of adolescent immigrants are identified and discussed: Immigrants (subtypes Reluctants and Optimists), Immigrant-Americans, and Americans. Therapists' issues which can negatively affect therapy with such adolescents and families are also discussed. Effective therapy with immigrant families requires that family therapists become more culturally sensitive, therapeutically flexible, and accepting of family values to which they may be diametrically opposed. Recommendations for therapy are offered.Dr. Baptiste is himself an immigrant. The experiences and observations discussed here are culled from his work with immigrant families and children over the past 19 years in the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, Indiana, and New Mexico.Portions of this article will appear in a chapter Psychotherapy with adolescent immigrants and their families in cultural transition in B. Settles and D. Hanks (Eds.),Families on the move: Emigration, immigration, migration and mobility. Sage Publications, 1990, and are used here with permission.     

Using masks as therapeutic aids in family therapy

'Man is least himself when he talks in his own person, give him a mask and he will tell the truth' (Oscar Wilde).
This paper describes an innovative technique which uses masks as therapeutic aids in treating families in conflict. Structured within the framework of interpersonal perception, this technique uses play, humour, and the power and 'magic' of masks paradoxically to 'unmask' family members and facilitate reality-testing of perceptions distorted by the emotional masks individuals create and project onto each other. Mask usage is suggested as an adjunct to other therapeutic approaches currently used with families. Caveats and contradictions for the technique are presented. A case study illustrates the use of the technique with a reconstituted family.     

The disguise of sobriety: unveiled by alcohol in persons with an aggressive personality

This investigation examined the factor structure of 8 well-validated self-report measures that assess traits that fall under the rubric of an "aggressive personality" and then determined how those factor(s) moderated the association between alcohol intoxication and aggression. Participants were 518 (252 men and 266 women) healthy social drinkers between 21 and 35 years of age. Following the consumption of an alcoholic or a placebo beverage, participants were tested on a laboratory aggression paradigm in which electric shocks were received from, and administered to, a fictitious opponent. Aggression was operationalized as the shock intensities and durations administered to the opponent. Results demonstrated a unidimensional factor structure for the aggressive personality traits, which were then combined into a latent variable. The aggressive personality variable moderated the alcohol-aggression relation. Specifically, alcohol was significantly more likely to increase aggression in persons with higher, compared with lower, aggressive personality scores.