Alexandra M. Columbus 
Advances in Psychology Research. Volume 135 [PDF ebook] 

The opening chapter of Advances in Psychology Research. Volume 135 discusses the impact of parenting a child with special needs on couples‘ intimate relationships by integrating three different perspectives on resilience and risk factors. The analysis focuses on the interrelationships between several mediating factors and reveals the complex effect of raising a child with special needs on marital intimacy and quality. Future directions for research and clinical interventions are suggested.The authors evaluate the predictive value of various factors for non-adherence to treatment in order to perform a therapeutic intervention as personalized as possible. The need to carry out psychotherapeutic approaches in order to improve determining aspects in the improvement of adherence to treatment in patients with psychosis is highlighted.The following chapter presents the socio-political background for the integration of self-help into the health care system, a short history of the research on collaboration in Germany before the concept of self-help friendliness emerged and research on and practice of the methodical approach of self-help friendliness.A Cameroonian model for forms of theatre with therapeutic outcomes is described. The authors aim to determine how these participatory approaches of theatre can give rise to a community-based form of therapeutic theatre and the dominant approaches that have therapeutic qualities, can be termed therapeutic and can be used to constitute a community-based approach.The use of the term "nature" within the social and behavioral sciences has had a consistent deterministic meaning value suggesting mostly genetic attributions. This book proposes that the many uses of the word "nature" make it into an empty or floating signifier: a rather meaningless and projective tag unless duly qualified.One included study evaluates a new 10-item measure to assess regret as dissonance after sexual encounters; the "Sexual Regret Scale". Implications of the new scale are discussed in terms of cognitive dissonance, including how individuals‘ sense of self and their actions may have led to an incongruent and negative affect state, thus generating sexual regret.In the final chapter, the authors report 31 comparisons between Kuwaiti and American undergraduate students over a period of twenty years. Their results indicate that Kuwaiti students obtained higher mean scores for depression, obsessive-compulsiveness, hopelessness, pessimism, death obsession, general anxiety, death anxiety, and somatic symptoms, and lower scores for optimism, mental health, happiness, and love of life, as well as an external locus of control and ego-grasping.