Changes in negative attributions during couple therapy for abusive behavior: relations to changes in satisfaction and behavior

This study examined effects of cognitive-behavioral couple therapy (n = 25 couples) and a variety of systems-oriented couple therapy models (n = 30 couples) in reducing negative attributions and degrees to which decreases in negative attributions were associated with improvements in other aspects of relationship functioning. Couples seeking treatment at a university clinic and experiencing psychological and/or mild-to-moderate physical abuse completed 10 weekly sessions. Attributions, relationship satisfaction, psychological abuse, communication, and negotiation were assessed before and after treatment. Women and men in both treatments exhibited decreased negative attributions, which moderated increases in satisfaction and decreases in negative communication, as well as increases in positive communication for men. The findings reinforce the importance of modifying negative attributions when intervening to reduce abuse.     

All that Glittered

Maryna Fraser and Alan Jeeves (eds.) All That Glittered; Selected Correspondence of Lionel Phillips 1890–1924, Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1977, 428 p., R14.     

更多的改变 BROOKSROBERTSON（theUnitedStates）罗秉瑞（美国）

In July 1964, my morn, a Francophile and formerr Paris resident when she worked in the U.S. State Department nearly 70 years ago, realized a decade long dream： she took her 10 year oldson to Europe. Our first and primary stop was, of course, Paris. After the usual tourist introductions -- the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame Cathedral, Les Champs Elysees, Montmartre -- we boarded a bus one overcast July morning and headed outside Paris to the Palace of Versailles. I remember 20 or so people, mostly American but other Europeans as well, traipsing through the vaunted （and uncrowded） ＂Chateau,＂ taking in the beauty of the building, its art, furniture, layout and history. H     

Midlife Changes

Abstract

The life stage that ranges from approximately age forty to sixty-five in human development is a time of major changes for both men and women, yet this time frame is often neglected or de-emphasized in the intervention context. This article reviews the philosophical, biological, cultural, psychological, and social areas of human development in mid-life. These factors are identified and practice suggestions are made as we enter the new millennium.     

Justice that Restores

SUMMARY

Restorative justice is a movement within criminal justice that draws from a conception of justice as personal rather than impersonal. This article offers a definition of restorative justice and describes its hallmark programs: victim offender mediation, conferencing, circles, restitution, and community service. It explores the differences between restorative justice and contemporary criminal justice, including their relative strengths. Whereas criminal justice derives from an impersonal conception of justice, restorative justice draws from a personal understanding. Differences between the two views of justice are described, and a brief survey of history and cultures demonstrates that personal conceptions of justice have played, and continue to play, significant roles in shaping societies' responses to crime.     

Changes in Agriculture

Currently, there are about 13,000 persons of Doukhobor descent living in the Province of British Columbia (mainly in the West Kootenay area). Roughly 60% still speak Doukhobor Russian. Ritual activities among the Doukhobors depend largely on orally transmitted prayers, psalms, and hymns that are based on Russian Church Slavonic; home life in those homes where Russian is still used is conducted in a 19th century South Russian dialect with both Ukrainian and English admixtures. The effort at preventing a full-scale language shift to English is an example of a communal decision to maintain and revive a language in terms of given needs; there are many spokesmen in the Doukhobor community, however, who advocate an emphasis on shifting to world languages (English, Standard Russian). The percentage of Doukhobors, especially in the generation born after 1970, subscribing to this view is increasing, thus raising the much-debated question whether the decline of a language or of a functional style necessarily entails the loss of a culture and of the disappearance of ritual practices. Many First Nations communities, e.g., Cree in Alberta, are engaged in an active endeavour of reversing language shift partly as a necessary healing process. It seems that their efforts serve at least as partial support for maintaining the Doukhobor ritual style, perhaps in a “reconfigured” form allowing codeswitching between cognitive structures (in English) and contextual-mnemonic devices (in Russian/Church Slavonic).     

Interviewing Changes Attitudes--Sometimes

To examine the effects of interviewing respondents were questionedabout either cancer or burglary prevention in an interview,and later they received either relevant information or no information.Changes in attitudes were measured in a second interview, andthe results showed that asking questions about cancer changedrespondents' attitudes toward cancer, but interviewing aboutburglary prevention did not change attitudes toward crime. Theevidence suggests that interview effects will occur when therespondent's attitudes and information are unfocused or ambiguousand the topic is important. Theoretically, this can be attributedto competence motivation and a postulated desire to maintainself-esteem in the interview situation     

Vulnerable relational knowing that matters

This paper explores vulnerable relational knowing, and in it we open up our own embodied habits and experiences as feminist academics. We discuss how displaying our academic bodies as naked, both symbolically and physically, enhances and appreciates—instead of hiding—vulnerability. We also discuss how our academic bodies entangle with a range of more-than-human creatures and material surroundings to highlight the multispecies and material nature of vulnerable relational knowing. Two detailed stories, “Intimate sharing of academic knowledge: A recumbent study circle” and “Keropirtti: A place and space to work differently” provide unique examples of the enactment of alternative ways of working in academia, and their analysis demonstrates the potential of vulnerability for embodied relational knowing in academia, which has, to date, been commonly analyzed in the context of writing.