Emotionally Focused Family Therapy: Rebuilding Family Bonds

Relationships with parents, siblings, and other family members go through transitions as they move along the life cycle. Resilient families realign their relationships to respond to the changing demands and stressors within the family system. Those who are unable, find themselves in repetitive patterns marked by conflict and distress, often resulting in their need to seek treatment. Based on attachment theory, Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) is a pragmatic short-term treatment approach designed to alleviate distress in family functioning. This chapter provides an overview of EFFT process, its theoretical underpinnings and the strategies EFT family therapists employ to promote positive outcomes. The presentation of a case study provides a unique lens where the therapist illustrates moment to moment interventions in an attempt to create new and more favorable family interactions, ones that enhance family members’ feelings of attachment, empathy, communication and stability

Achievement goals as predictors of metacognitive knowledge monitoring and academic help-seeking behavior among college students

This study investigated the impact of motivation orientation on the accuracy of metacognitive knowledge monitoring; the impact of metacognitive knowledge monitoring on academic help-seeking behavior; and the impact of motivation orientation on academic help-seeking behavior, and the joint impact of metacognitive knowledge monitoring and motivational orientation on help-seeking. The participants (N = 137) were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 treatment groups: mastery, performance-approach, performance-avoidance, and a control group. At the start of the experiment, giving each subject a written set of goals before presenting them with the task induced motivation orientation. At this time subjects also completed the Achievement Goal Orientation Questionnaire. Participants in each group performed the same sequence of tasks. First, subjects estimated whether they could or could not define each of 40 vocabulary words, 5 of which were nonsense words. Then subjects took a multiple-choice test containing the same words. Finally, participants selected 10 words on which they wished to receive help on. Results revealed subjects with higher knowledge monitoring ability reviewed more words which they had originally estimated not knowing and then failed on the test. In addition participants with high knowledge monitoring ability reviewed more nonsense words. No significant results were obtained for the impact of motivation orientation on academic help-seeking behavior, or the joint impact of metacognitive knowledge monitoring, motivational orientation on help-seeking. The present study, therefore, confirmed general expectations of a relationship between metacognitive knowledge monitoring ability and help-seeking