Prevent Repent Reform Revenge

Prevent, Repent, Reform, Revenge is a study of the aims that people intend to achieve by the sanctions and treatments they recommend for wrongdoers. The book is designed to answer two main questions: What kind of analytical scheme can profitably reveal the nature of people's reasoning about the aims of sanctions they propose for perpetrators of crimes and misdeeds? In the aims that people express what changes in overt moral reasoning patterns appear between later childhood and the early adult years? The authors conducted interviews with 136 youths between the ages of 9 and 21 to find out what sanctions and aims they felt were appropriate in three cases of wrongdoing. The resulting information provides an important insight into adolescent moral development.

Demands for forgiveness, even in the face of horrific crimes, were common to the late twentieth century and remain critical aspirations for persons and communities in the early twenty-first century. Research on forgiveness and revenge has nevertheless revealed that many people hold divergent moral and pragmatic beliefs about forgiving, and most survivors express longstanding skepticism about when forgiveness is appropriate and when it is not. By taking an interdisciplinary approach to these issues, the current volume considers the complexities of forgiveness and revenge in the modern world. The chapters address some of the most critical inquiries today: How is forgiveness facilitated or obstructed? What is the role of truth, restitution, reparation or retribution? When is forgiveness without restitution appropriate? Is forgiveness in the true sense of the term even possible? Through empirical, theoretical and literary analyses, this volume addresses the power of revenge and forgiveness in human affairs and offers a unique outlook on the benefits of interdisciplinary discussions for enhancing forgiveness and deterring revenge in multiple aspects of human life.

This volume addresses the psychological impact of interethnic contact and acculturation in Latin American settings, focusing on the effects of acculturation on self-esteem among adolescents. Opening with an account of relevant theoretical and empirical literature on interethnic contact and acculturation, this book represents an acid test of the cross-cultural applicability of theory and method largely derived from research on acculturation to North American and European settings. Much research has focused on acculturation processes among ethnic immigrants and ethnic minorities leading to the impression that host or majority groups remain unchangeable during acculturation. By contrast, this volume shows that psychological changes occur in all groups involved in the contact, reinforcing the idea that acculturation is a special case of mutual influence. This book will be of special interest for researchers, scholars or students seeking to understand the acculuturation process outside North America and Europe. Strong evidence is pressented showing the development of positive ties with both one's own and other relevant groups provides a more solid basis for self-esteem than relinquishing ties to the ethnic group of reference.

Integrating diverse scientific data, this book relates the biological versus psychosocial aspects of adolescence. Relevant data from scientific literature have been pulled together into a systematic presentation of the biological and psychosocial issues of contemporary adolescence. Part I describes the biological and sociopsychological developmental processes; Part II focuses on the special problems of contemporary adolescents; Part III analyzes the causes of the problems and discusses tentative remedies. Written for psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, and anthropologists.

Trauma is now being recognized as a major mental health challenge, with clients from children to the elderly presenting symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, often with no awareness of the cause. Yet managed care—and the growing incidence of trauma patients, presenting increased demands on existing professionals—requires brief treatments whenever possible. This book explains how to apply brief, existing, generic treatments to help manage the traumatized and diminish or eliminate their traumatic symptoms. These recommended brief treatments are guided by sound assessment methods that can be verified empirically. The treatment chapters provide detailed information for the practitioner, including ways to incorporate the treatment approach into an overall plan. The volume will be helpful to practitioners who work exclusively with traumatized clients, as well as those who are only occasionally presented with such cases.

The problems of a family are often conditioned by the cultural issues its members face, regardless of their socioeconomic background. However, most therapeutic models ignore this important factor. Ariel's book offers a model for diagnosis and therapy that incorporates cultural issues. It provides clinicians and trainees with readily applicable concepts, methods, and techniques for helping families and their members overcome difficulties related to intermarriage, immigration, acculturation, socioeconomic inequality, prejudice, and ecological or demographic change. This approach enables therapists to analyze and describe a family as a cultural system, explain its culture-related difficulties, and design and carry out culturally sensitive strategies for solving these difficulties. The model introduced in this book integrates theories in family therapy in general and culturally oriented family therapy in particular with ideas drawn from many other fields, such as cross-cultural psychology, psychiatry, anthropology and linguistics. The form of therapy presented in this book is integrative, drawing from traditional curing and healing techniques employed in folk psychotherapy and medicine, in addition to more conventional therapeutic models. Every technique is modified to be adapted to the cultural character of the family in question. This book is designed to be a handbook for clinicians and a textbook for students, trainees and researchers. It can be used as a guide for a complete independent method of family therapy and also as a source of ideas and techniques that can be incorporated selectively into other forms of therapy.

Moral Development Theories—Secular and Religious introduces readers to 13 secular models and 13d religious theories in a wide-ranging comparative study of the roots of moral development. The secular models include attribution theory, cognitive-structural views, social-learning and social-cognition approaches, Freud's psychoanalysis (plus Erikson and Fromm), Marxist beliefs, a composite theory, Hoffman's conception of empathy, Anderson's information-integration view, Gilligan's gender distinction, Sutherland and Cressey's explanation of delinquency, and Lovinger on ego development. Religious theories represent the Judaic-Christian-Islamic line, Hinduism and derivatives (Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism), Confucianism, Shinto, and four minor theories drawn from the belief systems of the Navajo, Zulus, Vodou adherents, and Okinawans. The description of each theory is designed to answer a common set of questions introduced in Chapter 1. The closing section of each chapter evaluates that chapter's theories in terms of a series of assessment standards described in Chapter 2. The book's final chapter inspects all of the theories from the viewpoint of five desires that people often hold in relation to their conceptions of moral development. The desires are: (a) for immanent justice; (b) to understand the causes of the consequences that result from people's behavior in moral situations; (c) to become immortal; (d) to enjoy a happy life, and (e) to understand the moral-development process in order to help others who need moral guidance.

Explaining Conversations offers a different way of interpreting people's social exchanges than has been available in the past. The book is replete with examples of people's verbal interactions in the form of chats, arguments, debates, and negotiations, both within a culture and across cultures. The volume's subtitle, A Developmental Social-Exchange Theory, identifies a theme featured in Chapters 2 and 5--the typical pattern by which social-exchange skills evolve over the first two decades of life. Throughout the book, the underlying meanings of conversations are interpreted in terms of (a) the needs people seek to fulfill through their conversations, (b) the influence of a person's culture on what is said, (c) individuals' patterns of thought (metacognition) during a conversation, (d) how people's expectations about a conversation affect what they will say, and (e) strategies individuals adopt to achieve their goals. The book includes a chapter designed to guide parents and teachers in promoting young children's and adolescents' social-exchange skills.