Review Of Recent Empirical Literature Research Articles

Online and Mobile Psychotherapeutic Treatments for Female Sexual Difficulties: a Review of Recent Empirical Literature

Online and Mobile Psychotherapeutic Treatments for Female Sexual Difficulties: a Review of Recent Empirical Literature

Causes and consequences of burnout among mental health professionals: A practice-oriented review of recent empirical literature.

Burnout is a psychological syndrome characterized by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment. Due to the demands of treating people with psychological problems, burnout is prevalent among psychotherapists. In this article, we present a comprehensive review of 44 quantitative and qualitative studies from the past decade focusing on both the risk factors for, and effects of, burnout among psychotherapists. Factors influencing burnout include perceived job control, the nature of psychotherapists' caseload, countertransference reactions, supervisory support, and psychotherapists' mental health history. Burnout affects psychotherapists' general well-being, as well as the extent to which clients engage in and benefit from psychotherapy. Implications for psychotherapists and their supervisors for burnout prevention and intervention are discussed, and recommendations for further research in this area are identified. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Help Helps, But Only So Much: Research on Help Seeking with Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Help seeking is an important process in self-regulated learning (SRL). It may influence learning with intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs), because many ITSs provide help, often at the student’s request. The Help Tutor was a tutor agent that gave in-context, real-time feedback on students’ help-seeking behavior, as they were learning with an ITS. Key goals were to help students become better self-regulated learners and help them achieve better domain-level learning outcomes. In a classroom study, feedback on help seeking helped students to use on-demand help more deliberately, even after the feedback was no longer given, but not to achieve better learning outcomes. The work made a number of contributions, including the creation of a knowledge-engineered, rule-based, executable model of help seeking that can drive tutoring. We review these contributions from a contemporary perspective, with a theoretical analysis, a review of recent empirical literature on help seeking with ITSs, and methodological suggestions. Although we do not view on-demand, principle-based help during tutored problem solving as being as important as we once did, we still view it as helpful under certain circumstances, and recommend that it be included in ITSs. We view the goal of helping students become better self-regulated learners as one of the grand challenges in ITSs research today.

Religious Faith, Homosexuality, and Psychological Well-Being: A Theoretical and Empirical Review

Individuals who identify as same-sex attracted have a long history of discrimination within many Western societies. Although most of these individuals are raised in families who practice religious faith, gay men and lesbians have traditionally been excluded from many Judeo-Christian religious communities based on teachings that homosexuality is immoral. Research among the general population has shown positive associations between religious practice and psychological well-being, but researchers have only recently begun to focus on these associations among gay men and lesbians. This paper gives a brief overview of empirical literature examining the relationship between religious practices and psychological well-being among the general population, followed by an account of the evolving relationship between religious traditions and homosexuality and a review of qualitative studies depicting conflicts between religious and sexual orientation identities. Next, a review of recent empirical literature on the relationships between religious practices and psychological well-being among gay men and lesbians is given. This paper concludes with a summary of the findings and directions for future research.

‘Key to a good life’ or just a bad investment? How do carers of children view and value education in the context of high HIV and AIDS?

In the face of a generalized Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and Acquired Immune Deficiency Virus (AIDS) epidemic in Southern Africa, children's education is viewed increasingly as a key area of concern as well as a potential opportunity for HIV intervention. However, the relationship between HIV and AIDS and education is a complex one, as the epidemic may influence educational indicators negatively through multiple pathways. This paper focuses upon one of these potential pathways: caregivers' attitudes to and perceptions of formal education. We argue that this area has not been afforded adequate attention among researchers and practitioners in Southern Africa despite evidence, from both the developed and developing world, that parental attitudes are important influencers of children's attitudes to education and educational outcomes. A review of recent empirical literature, and findings of a 2006–07 exploratory study we conducted across three sites in Southern Africa, suggest that economic factors or considerations – rather than health and objective life expectancy – are central in influencing the value caregivers attribute to children's formal education, even in a context of generalized HIV/AIDS. Further integrated qualitative and quantitative investigation is clearly needed in our region to explore determinants of parental attitudes to education among communities highly affected by the epidemic, and how these attitudes affect education-related decisions and outcomes. Interventions have a greater possibility of succeeding if they aim to support income-generating opportunities and include efforts to bridge schooling and health education with economic opportunities. Moreover, conditional transfers and school-based interventions or services are more likely to be effective at ensuring school attendance than unconditional transfers, particularly where the value caregivers attribute to education is low.

There is more to contracts than incompleteness: a review and assessment of empirical research on inter-firm contract design

This paper aims at achieving a greater understanding of how contracts operate in practice through a review of recent empirical literature on inter-firm contract design. Our focus on the structure of contractual agreements differentiates this review from others that dedicated ample coverage also to the antecedents of the decision to contract and of the choice of contracting versus integration. Our framework develops Stinchcombe’s (Organization Theory and Project Management, 1985) hypothesis that contracts are an organizational phenomenon. This allows us to uncover considerable but unevenly distributed evidence on a number of organizational processes formalized in relational contracts, which partially overlap with the processes that are observed in integrated organizations. It also enables us to describe contracts in terms of a larger number of dimensions than is commonly appreciated. The paper summarizes the evidence by proposing a general and tentative framework to guide the design of relational contracts, discusses a number of lingering issues, and outlines directions for further research on contracts as an organizational phenomenon.