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Should you sacrifice one man to save five? Whatever your answer, it should not depend on whether you were asked the question in your native language or a foreign tongue so long as you understood the problem. And yet here we report evidence that people using a foreign language make substantially more utilitarian decisions when faced with such moral dilemmas. We argue that this stems from the reduced emotional response elicited by the foreign language, consequently reducing the impact of intuitive emotional concerns. In general, we suggest that the increased psychological distance of using a foreign language induces utilitarianism. This shows that moral judgments can be heavily affected by an orthogonal property to moral principles, and importantly, one that is relevant to hundreds of millions of individuals on a daily basis.

The Revised Dyadic Adjustment Scale (RDAS; Busby, Crane, Larson, & Christensen, 1995) is a measure of couple relationship adjustment that is often used to differentiate between distressed and non-distressed couples. While the measure currently allows for a determination of whether group mean scores change significantly across administrations, it lacks the ability to determine whether an individual's change in dyadic adjustment is clinically significant. This study addresses this limitation by establishing a cutoff of 47.31 and reliable change index of 11.58 for the RDAS by pooling data across multiple community and clinical samples. An individual whose score on the RDAS moves across the cutoff changes by 12 or more points can be classified as experiencing clinically significant change.

Aim It is increasingly important for mental healthcare providers and researchers to reliably assess client change, particularly with common presenting problems such as anxiety. The current study addresses this need by establishing a Reliable Change Index of 6 points for the GAD-7. Method Sample size included 116 online community participants using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and archival data for 332 clinical participants. Participants completed measures of the GAD-7 and the MDI in 2 rounds. Using previously established cutoff scores and Jacobson and Truax’s (1991) method, we establish a Reliable Change Index which, when applied to 2 administrations of the GAD-7, indicates if a client has experienced meaningful change. Results For the GAD-7, the mean score for the clinical sample was 10.57. For the community sample at Time 1, the mean score was 4.14. A Pearson’s correlation was computed to assess the 14-28-day test-retest reliability of the GAD-7, r(110) = .87, indicating good test-retest reliability. Conclusion Using the RCI equation, this resulted in an RCI of 5.59. For practical use the RCI would be rounded to 6.

It is useful for clinicians and researchers to know why clients present for therapy in order to devise effective treatments. Using a feminist-informed, client-centered framework, this study provides information about clients’ perspectives on key presenting problems using self-report data from individuals, families, couples, and high-conflict coparenting dyads from a university-based counseling center. Clients most frequently reported anxiety/stress as the chief presenting problem. A number of people listed having been coerced into treatment or someone else’s problem as their chief concern. Common presenting problems varied by modality and were associated with the clients’ perceived pressure to attend therapy, readiness to change, dyadic adjustment, anxiety, and depression.

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Expectations influence experiences and are an important factor in interpersonal exchanges. Within therapy, client expectations are a common factor contributing to client change. It is important for both clinicians and researchers to explore the breadth and nature of their clients’ expectations for treatment in order to provide personalized and effective care. Furthermore, client expectations may be predictive of client outcomes and thus may be a worthwhile target for intervention. Despite the importance of understanding client expectations, little research has been done on this topic in the field of marriage and family therapy. This may be due to a need for a robust measure for client expectations that goes beyond studying individual adult clients and which is also feasible to administer. This article provides information about existing measures in the mental health field and suggests guidelines for the development of a measure that would be appropriate for the field of marriage and family therapy.