Relational Family Therapy as an Aid Toward Resolving the Trauma of Sexual Abuse in Childhood in the Process of Separation in the Couple Relationship

Relational family therapy (RFT) is a psycho‐organic therapeutic approach that combines intrapsychic dynamics with interpersonal mechanisms and a systemic perspective. This integrative model is based on the assumption that the repetitive patterns of relationships in early childhood repeat in adulthood. It often happens that a sexually abused individual will later unconsciously be attracted to someone with whom they will relive the abusive atmosphere and dynamics from childhood. The purpose of this contribution is to present the RFT approach for dealing with sexual abuse. We will present a case study with individual segments from therapy with a woman, who previously had been sexually abused and was separated from her partner.     

Perceptions of Caucasian users about avian resources and beach restoration following hurricane <Emphasis Type="Italic">Sandy</Emphasis>

Hurricane Sandy resulted in massive destruction of many coastal ecological and human communities in the Northeastern United States in 2012. Beach-nesting and migrating birds are vulnerable to loss of essential habitat as a result of storms. In this paper we report the perceptions of beach users about avian use of the beaches, conservation measures to protect birds, and recent restoration efforts at Stone Harbor Point (New Jersey) to provide beach habitat for birds. Nearly all the visitors to the beach were Caucasian (N = 555), and reported their activity as walking (93 %), birding (19 %), biking (7 %), and lounging, boating, fishing or photographing (5 % or less for each). Visitors mainly came to this beach because of aesthetics, exercise, and vacation or to visit friends. Subjects rated protecting endangered species and the environment, restoring the beach, and designating off-limit areas to protect birds the highest. They rated conservation measures for birds the highest, and allowing dogs on the beach and providing more opportunities for jogging the lowest. The results suggest that protecting endangered species and habitat for nesting birds is a slightly higher goal than restoring dunes and marshes for flood control, which provides evidence for public support of restoration projects that protect both ecological and human communities. Providing more space for their own recreational activities was rated much lower, again supporting community good over personal uses. This information supports the restoration efforts following Sandy, and the importance of restoration projects that integrate ecological and human health goals in urban environments.     

Energy transition on the rise: discourses on energy future in the German parliament

In this paper we describe energy policy discourses and their story-lines in German parliamentary debates, and trace their evolution over the past decades. Through content analysis and coding with MAXQDA, changes in the discourses and in the use of story-lines by different political parties are analyzed. Our study shows that while the concept of a transition towards a nuclear-free, renewables-based energy system became hegemonic within three decades, the discourse itself underwent major changes. Energy Transition was de-radicalized and became part of a discourse of Ecological Modernization, thus aligning with mainstream economic logic. There are still considerable differences in the story-lines narrated by parliamentarians about pathways to Energy Transition and its effects. Discursive struggles into the meaning and the means of the transition project continue, suggesting that discourse structuration is far from complete.     

Stuck with ‘electronic brochures’? How boundary management strategies shape politicians’ social media use

Social media provide new opportunities for politicians, such as personalized communication directed at specific communities of interest. Yet despite potential benefits, empirical analyses show that politicians tend to shy away from an active engagement of online audiences. This study explores the effect of politicians’ online boundary management on their use of social media. Ties maintained through social media profiles can be embedded in diverse social contexts (‘context collapse’). Professional communicators, especially, are faced with the challenge of managing boundaries between professional and private online self-presentations. Based on a survey of 106 German members of parliament, we distinguish four types of boundary management strategies. We analyze the effects of these strategies on politicians’ social media use practices – and find that considering boundary management strategies allows for a better understanding of politicians’ online engagement (or lack thereof).     

Random projections for Bayesian regression

This article deals with random projections applied as a data reduction technique for Bayesian regression analysis. We show sufficient conditions under which the entire d-dimensional distribution is approximately preserved under random projections by reducing the number of data points from n to \(k\in O({\text {poly}}(d/\varepsilon ))\) in the case \(n\gg d\). Under mild assumptions, we prove that evaluating a Gaussian likelihood function based on the projected data instead of the original data yields a \((1+O(\varepsilon ))\)-approximation in terms of the \(\ell _2\) Wasserstein distance. Our main result shows that the posterior distribution of Bayesian linear regression is approximated up to a small error depending on only an \(\varepsilon \)-fraction of its defining parameters. This holds when using arbitrary Gaussian priors or the degenerate case of uniform distributions over \(\mathbb {R}^d\) for \(\beta \). Our empirical evaluations involve different simulated settings of Bayesian linear regression. Our experiments underline that the proposed method is able to recover the regression model up to small error while considerably reducing the total running time.     

Agency,Values, and Well-Being: A Human Development Model

This paper argues that feelings of agency are linked to human well-being through a sequence of adaptive mechanisms that promote human development, once existential conditions become permissive. In the first part, we elaborate on the evolutionary logic of this model and outline why an evolutionary perspective is helpful to understand changes in values that give feelings of agency greater weight in shaping human well-being. In the second part, we test the key links in this model with data from the World Values Surveys using ecological regressions and multi-level models, covering some 80 societies worldwide. Empirically, we demonstrate evidence for the following sequence: (1) in response to widening opportunities of life, people place stronger emphasis on emancipative values, (2) in response to a stronger emphasis on emancipative values, feelings of agency gain greater weight in shaping people’s life satisfaction, (3) in response to a greater impact of agency feelings on life satisfaction, the level of life satisfaction itself rises. Further analyses show that this model is culturally universal because taking into account the strength of a society’s western tradition does not render insignificant these adaptive linkages. Precisely because of its universality, this is indeed a ‘human’ development model in a most general sense.     

Estimating correlation from dichotomized normal variables

Given dichotomized data from a bivariate normal distribution, the tetrachoric correlation coefficient provides a reasonable estimate of Pearson's correlation between the underlying variables. Greer et al. [2003. A Monte Carlo evaluation of the tetrachoric correlation coefficient. Educ. Psychol. Meas. 63, 931–950] suggested that this may be the case also under suitable transformations of the margins. As a complement to their work, this paper considers the estimation of Pearson's correlation between variables that are normal, but not jointly. A small Monte Carlo study is used to assess whether various approximations of the tetrachoric correlation coefficient could be helpful in this context. The results are encouraging, in terms of both bias and mean-square error.     

Analytical proofs of classical inequalities between Spearman's and Kendall's

Short analytical proofs are given for classical inequalities due to Daniels [1950. Rank correlation and population models. J. Roy. Statist. Soc. Ser. B 12, 171–181; 1951. Note on Durbin and Stuart's formula for E(r_s). J. Roy. Statist. Soc. Ser. B 13, 310] and Durbin and Stuart [1951. Inversions and rank correlation coefficients. J. Roy. Statist. Soc. Ser. B 13, 303–309] relating Spearman's ρ and Kendall's τ.     

Consistent and rate-optimal density estimation from heteroscedastic data groups

We consider the problem of estimating a density function based on aggregated data where the data group sizes may differ from each other. The reconstruction of the target density can be regarded as a nonlinear statistical inverse problem. We introduce some estimation procedures which are capable to use the observations from all groups by some nonstandard deconvolution techniques. General consistency and rate-optimality under common smoothness constraints are developed. We give some numerical simulations and a data-driven bandwidth selector.