Reflections on the Work of Professor Selma Fraiberg

This paper reviews the work of Professor Selma Fraiberg who became a leading figure in the field of infant mental health. Born in 1918 she first received an MSW in Social Work and then undertook her Analytic Training in Detroit Michigan. While she maintained her identity as a social worker throughout her life, she integrated insights from the fields of social work, psychoanalysis and developmental and ego psychology in her research and practice. This paper traces her development as a clinician, researcher, and educator. Three cases describe her ability to integrate social work methodologies with analytic insights. The cases describe the treatment of a latency age child at a time of social change, a clinical research study of the developmental risk of children blind from birth, and a groundbreaking study in the field of infant mental health. Her study of infants at developmental risk focused on the parent /infant relationship and parents were included in the treatment process so that they could become more attuned to their young child. Her work highlighted the intergenerational issues that shaped the parental capacity for empathic nurturance between parent and child. The article Ghosts in the Nursery incorporated the major theoretical concepts of the new theoretical approach to treatment and is still much read in graduate programs today. Although extensive new research has added to the field of infant mental health, her contributions are still relevant to research and practice today.     

Seducing Leadership: Stories of Leadership Development

This article argues that leadership development is a process of seduction. Drawing on some stories of leadership development from my experience as participant, observer and teacher I show the ways in which certain sorts of highly valued leadership teaching contain seductive elements, including sweeping audiences off their feet and, in some contexts, forestalling critique about the content that is offered. The article also considers the extent to which seduction is a gendered performance. I conclude that, while gender and power are defining elements and constraints in how seductive pedagogical relations are constructed, there are opportunities for experimentation and display that potentially subvert gendered stereotypes. Seeing the seduction in leadership can help us understand leadership and leadership teaching better, and can open the way to doing it differently — to experimentation and innovation.     

Ambivalence and Control: State Action Against the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan

Models that purport to explain the interplay between dissidents and the state generally assert, either explicitly or implicitly, that the path from state interests to action to outcomes is a linear one. Using the case of the United Klans of America (UKA) in North Carolina, I argue that state efforts to exert social control upon a perceived threat are shaped by a range of internal and external contingencies. In particular, I undertake a comparative analysis of two state agencies to demonstrate how a particular mechanism—ambivalence, here conceptualized as the relational consequence of a mismatch between organizational culture and organizational goals—leads to distinct, and sometimes heterogeneous, actions and outcomes not directly traceable to organizational mandates. Findings lend insight into how endogenous organizational processes shape contentious political outcomes in potentially divergent ways.     

Neighborhood context and racial differences in early adolescent sexual activity

Evidence suggests that African American youths initiate sexual activity at earlier ages than do European American or Latino youths. Using data from a multilevel study in Chicago, we developed and tested a neighborhood-based model of the timing of first adolescent intercourse that emphasizes the impact of neighborhood structural disadvantage and collective efficacy on early sexual activity (at ages 11 to 16). In turn, we explored the extent to which neighborhood factors account for racial differences in the timing of first intercourse. The findings indicate that demographic background, family processes, peer influences, and developmental risk factors account for about 30% of the baseline increased likelihood of early sexual onset for African American youths compared with European American youths. However, a significant residual racial difference remained even after we considered a host of micro-level factors. Neighborhood-level concentrated poverty largely explained this residual racial difference. Collective efficacy also independently contributed to the delay of sexual onset. No significant baseline difference in age of sexual initiation was found between Latino and European American youths.     

Effect of family structure on life satisfaction: australian evidence

How do family arrangements affect subjective well-being? We investigate this issue using data pooled from the IsssA and HILDA, both large, representative national samples of Australia (pooled n=38 447). Our regression analysis of cross-sectional and panel data examines how large are the differences in life satisfaction according to marital status and cohabitation. We find that women and men in formal marriages experience higher levels of life satisfaction than do people in other family arrangements. Moreover, both multiple tests in the cross-section, and tests controlling for prior happiness in the panel analysis, suggest that this is a causal relationship. Aggregating up the levels of life satisfaction generated by different marriage and cohabitation arrangements across a lifetime, suggests that a life-long marriage is the most satisfying. Early divorce followed by an enduring second marriage is little worse (because little time is spent outside the married state). But divorce without remarriage, or long lasting cohabitation without formal marriage, reduce the lifetime sum of subjective well-being by 4–12% for both women and men.     

When caregiving ends: the course of depressive symptoms after bereavement

This study describes depressive symptoms among caregivers following bereavement and connects these trajectories to earlier features of caregiving using life course and stress process theory. Data are from a six-wave longitudinal survey (five years) of spouses and adult children caring for someone with Alzheimer's Disease. The analytic subsample (N = 291) is defined by death of the care-recipient after the baseline interview. A latent class mixture model is used to identify distinctive clusters of depressive symptoms over time. Of the four trajectories identified, three represent stable symptom levels over time, with two-thirds being repeatedly symptomatic (medium symptom levels), compared to two smaller groups of repeatedly asymptomatic (effectively absent of symptoms) and repeatedly distressed (severe symptoms). In contrast, about one in five caregivers experiences improved emotional well-being over time, the temporarily distressed, who progress from severe to moderate symptom levels. Caregivers with few symptoms before bereavement tend to maintain these states afterwards, but emotionally distressed caregivers tend to become more distressed. Role overload before bereavement substantially increases the odds of following an unfavorable trajectory afterwards, whereas self-esteem and socioemotional support play protective roles. These results demonstrate that caregivers are not uniform in their emotional responses to bereavement, but follow several distinct trajectories. These trajectories are linked to their previous experiences as caregivers, in particular exposure to stressors and access to resources. These findings suggest that intervention during caregiving may facilitate adaptation following death of a loved one.     

Inequality and welfare evaluation of heterogeneous income distributions

This paper establishes the principles that should govern the welfare and inequality analysis of heterogeneous income distributions. Two basic criteria – the equity preference condition and the compensation principle – are shown to be fundamentally incompatible. The paper favours the latter, thereby vindicating the traditional method of dealing with heterogeneous samples. However, inequality and welfare comparisons will usually be well defined only if equivalent incomes are obtained using constant scale factors; and researchers will need to distinguish clearly between inequality of nominal incomes and inequality of living standards. Furthermore, household observations must always be weighted according to family size.     

An efficient polynomial space and polynomial delay algorithm for enumeration of maximal motifs in a sequence

In this paper, we consider the problem of enumerating all maximal motifs in an input string for the class of repeated motifs with wild cards. A maximal motif is such a representative motif that is not properly contained in any larger motifs with the same location lists. Although the enumeration problem for maximal motifs with wild cards has been studied in Parida et al. (2001), Pisanti et al. (2003) and Pelfrêne et al. (2003), its output-polynomial time computability has been still open. The main result of this paper is a polynomial space polynomial delay algorithm for the maximal motif enumeration problem for the repeated motifs with wild cards. This algorithm enumerates all maximal motifs in an input string of length n in O(n ³) time per motif with O(n) space, in particular O(n ³) delay. The key of the algorithm is depth-first search on a tree-shaped search route over all maximal motifs based on a technique called prefix-preserving closure extension. We also show an exponential lower bound and a succinctness result on the number of maximal motifs, which indicate the limit of a straightforward approach. The results of the computational experiments show that our algorithm can be applicable to huge string data such as genome data in practice, and does not take large additional computational cost compared to usual frequent motif mining algorithms. This work is done during the Hiroki Arimura’s visit in LIRIS, University Claude-Bernard Lyon 1, France.