Unlocking Diane Arbus

In these five short reviews, the photographic work of Diane Arbus is illuminated from different personal and professional perspectives, ranging from interpreting her photographs as a sort of theft—taking something away from the individuals she photographed—to an intense desire to partake in a world of human beings living on the edge of society. The question occupying all reviewers is how Arbus's personality and style allowed her to enter into the worlds of demimondes, nudist camps, and dominatrixes without necessarily exploiting the privileged position she earned to occupy vis-á-vis her subjects.     

Discussion of Paper by Warman and Rousseau

The story of trauma, in contemporary culture, has shifted, from one of painful, formative experience, to one of injustice and the imperative to rectify an untoward event. Journalists, politicians, and memoirists have become adept at making a narrative of trauma, at finding the story that focuses away from the experience of the wounds to the injustice of having been wounded. As a result, people tend to seek stories of suffering that have a beginning, middle, and, most important, an end, rather than stories of suffering that are not dramatic, that are not moral, but that have a lasting impact. People coming for therapy or analysis, too, look for the dramatic explanation for their suffering, to be the hero in their own narrative. And those of us who treat the sufferers too often protect ourselves from the universality of pain by looking for the trauma story. In recent therapeutic culture, the trauma story has been of a formulaic kind, which is in keeping with our culturally preferred relationship to trauma.

In this article, I draw from two treatments to illustrate the power of our cultural trauma narrative and my own implication in it.     

Implementing a Trauma Recovery Framework for Youths in Residential Treatment

This paper describes an intervention designed to address the special needs of youths with histories of maltreatment and exposure to family and community violence. The primary components of the model include an enhanced therapeutic community environment and a psychoeducation program that is aimed at changing non-adaptive cognitive and behavioral patterns which developed as means of coping with traumatic experiences. The implementation of the model and proximal effects on the therapeutic communities and youths are being examined in comparison to standard residential services. Initial perceptions of staff illustrate the challenges in applying an intervention that calls for changing the organizational culture.     

An evaluation of a social norms marketing project for tobacco prevention with middle, high, and college students; use of funds from the Tobacco Master Settlement (Virginia)

The Anti-Tobacco Media Blitz (ATMB), a social-norms marketing program, was utilized for tobacco prevention with middle and high school students. University students assisted middle and high school students with the implementation of this campaign, which included a variety of media. Students worked in teams to design, develop, and evaluate tobacco-free messages through posters, radio, television, and peer-led activities. Evaluation of the campaign was constant and included assessment of message retention and demonstration of positive behaviors. This article discusses the procedures of this project, the five-step social norms marketing model, with emphasis on the student-centered evaluation and results.     

Critical aspects of institutional programs for youths

This study examines aspects of institutional life that influence, for better or worse, the treatment of adolescent residents. Psychosocial development of 802 youths was measured by four indices, internality, self-concept, opportunism and number of deviant signs. Subjects were interviewed while placed at fourteen residential and five alternative day treatment programs. An analysis of 200 youths' developmental progress after two to five months of treatment showed slight positive changes among institutional residents and negative changes among day treatment youths. Canonical correlation analysis of measures suggested three main types of programs: the positive program which produced the most mature youths, the poorly staffed facility which went with delinquent personality development, and the underfinanced but caring program which seemed to foster more disturbed personality profiles.     

Empirical studies of Posture-Gesture Mergers

This study describes four experiments which support the hypothesis that Posture-Gesture Mergers (PGMs) accompany verbal expressions that are truthful, relaxed, sincere, or authentic. PGMs are defined as body movements which occur when a posture (full body movement) leads into a gesture (partial body movement) or vice versa. Proportion of PGMs to nonPGMs constituted the dependent variable. Three experiments manipulated situational conditions in order to affect PGMs. In the first study, PGM behavior was compared when subjects were instructed to lie vs. when they were instructed to tell the truth. In the second study, PGM behavior was compared when subjects were frustrated vs. not frustrated by an experimental task. In the third study, PGM behavior was studied after subjects underwent relaxation training. The fourth study assessed naturally occuring PGM rates in a debate tournament and showed that PGMs are positively correlated with a judge's ratings of contestants' relaxation, sincerity, and effectiveness. Implications of the research for Action Profiling, as well as dance, movement, and body therapy, are addressed.This work was supervised and written by the senior author. Each of the junior authors designed one experiment and collected data, as well as served as a judge for a second experiment.     

A Study of the Shape of Dose-Response Curves for Acute Lethality at Low Response: A "Megadaphnia Study"

Dose-response curves were developed for the immobilization response in Daphnia magna to four toxicants. The purpose of this work was to study the effect of the form of the model and the number of concentration levels used on the estimates of typical low-dose effective concentrations (1%, 5%, 10%). The generalized four-parameter logistic model was used as the reference. When using 12 concentration levels, one of the logistic family two- or three-parameter models was shown reliably to represent each of these various sets of dose-response data, and to provide adequate estimates of EC01 and EC05, as well as EC10 and EC50. For two of the toxicants, an asymmetric model was required. When reducing the number of concentrations to five, the EC10 and EC50 were well estimated by the probit model, with acceptable results at the EC05 level.     

Parent – Adolescent Relationships and Girls’ Unhealthy Eating: Testing Reciprocal Effects

This longitudinal study tested the direction of associations between parent –adolescent relationships and adolescent girls’ unhealthy eating. Girls (N= 184) were seen at Time 1 (M age = 14.30 years), and then again 2 years later (Time 2; M age = 16.04 years). At both assessment periods, they completed measures that assessed their eating attitudes and behaviors, relationships with their parents, height, weight, and age of menarche. Whereas unhealthy family relationships have been hypothesized as a precursor to unhealthy eating attitudes and behaviors, it is also possible that increases in these behaviors contribute to more negative relationships within the family. Structural equation modeling was employed to simultaneously investigate the longitudinal influence of parent – adolescent relationships on girls’ unhealthy eating, and girls’ unhealthy eating on parent – adolescent relationships. The model was tested with the following controls: body mass (kg/m²), pubertal timing and age. A longitudinal direct effect was found for unhealthy eating on parent– adolescent relationships; however, no direct effect was found for parent– adolescent relationships on unhealthy eating over time. For middle– and late–adolescent girls, it appears that unhealthy eating behaviors and attitudes are predictive of less positive parent – adolescent relationships over time.     

THE SOUTHERN REGION

Analysts use a variety of indicators to assess whether the South remains a distinctive cultural region, and reach different conclusions. This analysis examined the distinctiveness of the South by comparing the attitudes and beliefs of Southerners to those of non-Southerners. A group of characteristics thought to be distinctively Southern was selected and factor analyzed to determine both the number of constructs which underlie the indicators and the degree to which each indicator measures these constructs. They were found to represent four conceptual domains of Southern culture. Logistic regression analyses of these indicators demonstrated that Southerners remain distinctive in their attitudes in a number of areas. Most analyses of trends over time and differences between age groups indicated that neither convergence nor divergence between regions had occurred between 1972 and 1982. The results show, then, that the South remains a distinctive cultural region.