The relationship between marital quality and coronary artery bypass graft surgery as experienced by 3 couples.

Purpose: Marital quality is a key factor in the lived experiences of couples in which one of the partners has undergone coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. Previous research about marital quality has been largely quantitative, and few studies have explored more holistically the marital couple and their experience of a major medical procedure. The purpose of this study was to understand the relationship between marital quality and the ongoing dynamic of a couple's experience of bypass surgery.

Social cognition in nursing home residents with and without cognitive impairment.

Dementia affects the specific cognitive abilities underlying social functioning in ways that are just beginning to be understood. This pilot study compared the performances of 15 nursing home residents with cognitive impairment and 25 without cognitive impairment on a broad range of measures of social-cognitive functioning. The cognitively impaired group scored significantly lower than the unimpaired group on tests of face processing, person perception, and social reasoning but not on tests of affect recognition and the representation of social situations.

Trance and the trickster: hypnosis as a liminal phenomenon.

This paper makes the case that hypnotic phenomena are liminal in nature and that hypnotic practitioners (such as Milton Erickson) share many traits with traditional societies' "tricksters." The ambiguous nature of hypnosis has been apparent since the days of Mesmer's animal magnetism. Hypnotized people often report hallucinations that confound their ordinary distinctions between reality and illusion, external and internal processes, and many other binary oppositions, including time and space as well as mind and body.

Evaluating personal health care and health promotion web sites.

Objective: An exemplary sample of web sites relevant to personal health care and health promotion was chosen and evaluated.

Methods: Both quantitative and qualitative data were converged to assess and rank the sites on nine attributes.

Results: The sites provided a definitive range of value and variety of presentations, health care and health promotion information, and services covering the virtual choices currently available to users of the Internet.

Conflicting perspectives on shamans and shamanism: points and counterpoints.

Shamans' communities grant them privileged status to attend to those groups' psychological and spiritual needs. Shamans claim to modify their attentional states and engage in activities that enable them to access information not ordinarily attainable by members of the social group that has granted them shamanic status. Western perspectives on shamanism have changed and clashed over the centuries; this address presents points and counterpoints regarding what might be termed the demonic model, the charlatan model, the schizophrenia model, the soul flight model, the degenerative and crude technology model, and the deconstructionist model.

Focusing on the positive, focusing on the negative: implications for psychotherapy.

Each of the contributions in this special section challenges some of our preciously held notions. We are challenged to be aware that an overfocus on positivity and optimism can be tyrannical, see the positivity in the negativity, realize that some pessimism can be adaptive, see that complaining has positive value, and be aware that false hope is not necessarily bad. Through an examination of these, I have suggested that (a) we have to be careful to deeply respect the individuality of our clients and to take seriously the possibility that there is some "ecological wisdom" in their apparently dysfunctional behavior, and (b) what is more important than optimism-pessimism, complaining versus not complaining, or false versus realistic hope is the degree to which the client adopts a task-focused orientation towards problems.

A job and a home: social networks and the integration of the mentally disabled in the community.

Formerly hospitalized psychiatric patients participated in a program including skills in apartment living and employment. Contrasted to a comparison group, program graduates showed more multifunctional and more reciprocal relationships with other people. Results highlight the importance of work, housing, and the utilization of community services, and suggest the quality of supportive interpersonal relations as a criterion of program success.

Multiple-case depth research: bringing experience-near closer.

The term "experience-near" has become associated with a variety of alternatives to mainstream clinical research. These alternatives converge on one basic methodological goal-faithfulness to clinical phenomena as lived. This article presents one approach to lived clinical phenomena that I term multiple-case depth research or MCDR.