Extended mutual imagery in work with anxious and phobic clients

Imagery and metaphor have a long history as tools for helping and healing. This article traces that history to the present and defines and explains the author's variation of using imagery called Extended Mutual Imagery (EMI). The emphasis on mutuality is, from the social work perspective, an essential ingredient for the effectiveness of EMI. EMI has been found to be effective with anxious and phobic clients who use metaphoric and imaging language. A case example using EMI with a 47 year old anxious female client is provided followed by discussion.     

RATIONALITY, EVOLUTION, AND ACQUISITIVENESS

The first part of this paper discusses Alchian's classic 1950 article "Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory" and argues against the notion that it is easy to eliminate rationality from economic behavior by appealing to evolution as a substitute. The second section discusses rationality and develops a specc meaning for this term that distinguishes it from the axioms of choice found in economic theory. In the final section, I use this definition and link rationality to a behavioral propensity almost unique to the human species—acquisitiveness, concluding from this linkage that acquisitiveness can speed up the evolution of intelligence.     

Antisocial Behavior of Adoptees and Nonadoptees: Prediction from Early History and Adolescent Relationships

This study examined the contribution of demographic characteristics, early maltreatment, and peer and family relationships during adolescence to the prediction of aggressive and nonaggressive antisocial behavior (AASB and NAASB, respectively) during young adulthood; and determined whether adoption status has additional ability to predict ASB, once background, early experience, peer, and family variables were controlled. Data from adolescent and parent interviews were used from Waves 1 (predictors) and 3 (outcomes) of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). The sample included 337 adopted and 10,339 nonadopted adolescents whose mean ages were 15.8 at W1 and 21.7 at W3. Although AASB and NAASB were predicted by background characteristics, early maltreatment, peer relations, and family relationships, adoption status had little to no additional predictive power once the other variables were controlled.     

Fitting and comparing seed germination models with a focus on the inverse normal distribution

This paper reviews current methods for fitting a range of models to censored seed germination data and recommends adoption of a probability‐based model for the time to germination. It shows that, provided the probability of a seed eventually germinating is not on the boundary, maximum likelihood estimates, their standard errors and the resultant deviances are identical whether only those seeds which have germinated are used or all seeds (including seeds ungerminated at the end of the experiment). The paper recommends analysis of deviance when exploring whether replicate data are consistent with a hypothesis that the underlying distributions are identical, and when assessing whether data from different treatments have underlying distributions with common parameters. The inverse normal distribution, otherwise known as the inverse Gaussian distribution, is discussed, as a natural distribution for the time to germination (including a parameter to measure the lag time to germination). The paper explores some of the properties of this distribution, evaluates the standard errors of the maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters and suggests an accurate approximation to the cumulative distribution function and the median time to germination. Additional material is on the web, at http://www.agric.usyd.edu.au/staff/oneill/ .     

Minimum wages and the wessels effect in a monopsony model

The Wessels model suggests that firms respond to increases in the minimum wage rate by decreasing the level of fringe benefits — an action which produces an inefficiency effect that lowers workers’ utility and the supply of labor. Standard models of monopsony, however, argue that wage floors prevent the exercise of market power and increase employment. I show that wage floors, even with fringe benefit curtailment, may increase employment by lowering the marginal expense of labor. Employee utility and employment will rise somewhat but not as much had the firm acted competitively in setting both wages and fringes.     

Risking the qualitative study of risk

The topic of risk has received extensive coverage in recent years. Hundreds of articles and numerous books have dealt with risk in occupations, safety, medicine, public health, and environmental pollution. However, in qualitative studies the subjective assessment of risk in everyday life have been badly neglected. Some of the reasons for this neglect, and its consequences for risk research, have been outlined in this paper.