Couple Therapy and Attachment: An Interview with Susan Johnson

Susan M. Johnson is an international expert in Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFT). She is a Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Marital and Family Therapy Clinic at Ottawa Civic Hospital. She is the author of The Practice of Emotionally Focused Marital Therapy – Creating Connection (Brunner/Mazel, 1996) and the co‐author of Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples: The Heart of the Matter. EFT is now one of the most empirically validated couples therapies and is accepted as such by the American Psychological Association. On sabbatical in 1999, she went to New Zealand and then visited Australia in April, conducting workshops in Sydney and Perth.     

Spatial modelling of gene frequencies in the presence of undetectable alleles

Bayesian hierarchical models are developed to estimate the frequencies of the alleles at the HLA-C locus in the presence of non-identifiable alleles and possible spatial correlations in a large but sparse, spatially defined database from Papua New Guinea. Bayesian model selection methods are applied to investigate the effects of altitude and language on the genetic diversity of HLA-C alleles. The general model includes fixed altitudinal effects, random language effects and random spatially structured location effects. Conditional autoregressive priors are used to incorporate the geographical structure of the map, and Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation methods are applied for estimation and inference. The results show that HLA-C allele frequencies are explained more by linguistic than altitudinal differences, indicating that genetic diversity at this locus in Papua New Guinea probably tracks population movements and is less influenced by natural selection than is variation at HLA-A and HLA-B.     

Work, employment and mental health in Europe

In May 2004 the World Health Organization (WHO European Region) called a consultation meeting of its Collaborating Centres in Occupational Health to discuss mental health in the workplace. The meeting took place in Copenhagen. This paper presents an interpretation of the discussion that took place and the thinking that developed as a result. It was argued that increased interest and research and improved practice in the area of occupational mental health are required to promote good mental health in the European population. A framework of risk management and prevention based on sound evidence and good understanding could provide the basis for the translation of existing research knowledge into effective practice.     

Recent developments in exponential random graph (p*) models for social networks

This article reviews new specifications for exponential random graph models proposed by Snijders et al. [Snijders, T.A.B., Pattison, P., Robins, G.L., Handcock, M., 2006. New specifications for exponential random graph models. Sociological Methodology] and demonstrates their improvement over homogeneous Markov random graph models in fitting empirical network data. Not only do the new specifications show improvements in goodness of fit for various data sets, but they also help to avoid the problem of near-degeneracy that often afflicts the fitting of Markov random graph models in practice, particularly to network data exhibiting high levels of transitivity. The inclusion of a new higher order transitivity statistic allows estimation of parameters of exponential graph models for many (but not all) cases where it is impossible to estimate parameters of homogeneous Markov graph models. The new specifications were used to model a large number of classical small-scale network data sets and showed a dramatically better performance than Markov graph models. We also review three current programs for obtaining maximum likelihood estimates of model parameters and we compare these Monte Carlo maximum likelihood estimates with less accurate pseudo-likelihood estimates. Finally, we discuss whether homogeneous Markov random graph models may be superseded by the new specifications, and how additional elaborations may further improve model performance.     

Measurement of the subjective work environment

This paper considers the various issues that frame the development and use of measures of the subjective work environment. It begins by questioning the role of the work environment in determining occupational health, and explores the possible mechanisms by which that environment might exert its influence. It concludes that one of the important final common pathways is psycho-physiological in nature, and is rooted in individual perception and cognition and the experience of stress. Important for this model are the concepts of mediation and moderation. The measurement of the subjective work environment has often been idiosyncratic to the study in hand, and there are few well-established measures in common use. It is argued that researchers should be careful when deciding not to use established measures and effectively 'invent' their own. In developing new measures, decisions have to be made concerning the nature of the measure along with its 'granularity' and complexity. It is also argued that it is important that researchers should follow good psychometric practice in the development of those measures. Suggestions for 'good practice' are discussed. Attention is drawn to the issues of reliability and validity, and this paper discusses the role of triangulation in the planning and execution of data collection and analysis. The paper ends by reviewing the recommendations made towards the development and use of measures of the subjective work environment.     

Violence at work: An issue for the 1990s

Violence and conflict appear to be increasingly common aspects of everyday life, to the point where people take them into consideration when planning their activities and feel anxious about their possible occurrence. It is not only actual violence which offers a contemporary source of stress but also the threat of violence, although subjective estimates of risk are not always accurate. For example, it would appear that while the elderly feel the most threatened, the greatest risk is to those in their late teens and early twenties. This discrepancy between objective and subjective risk is understandable in terms of the different factors which have been shown to drive the subjective assessment of risk: availability of information, controllability and magnitude of outcome. Often it is the media which provides us with the information that we have on violence, and it is that presentation of information which helps shape our assessment of risk. For example, attacks by young persons on the elderly may be more dramatic and newsworthy than, albeit more frequent, attacks on other young persons. Thus they are reported to a greater extent and a distorted impression of risk begins to develop, which may be reinforced by realistic feelings of potential helplessness by the elderly in the face of any such attack, and fear of the magnitude of the consequences of violence. Whatever the real basis for a fear of violence, the available statistics in most European and North American countries suggests that, even taking into account the effects of reporting bias, acts of violence are increasing.