FULL DISCLOSURE POLICY In accordance with the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education's Standards for Commercial Support, all CME providers are required to disclose to the activity audience the relevant financial relationships of the planners, teachers, and authors involved in the development of CME content. An individual has a relevant financial relationship if he or she has a financial relationship in any amount occurring in the last 12 months with a commercial interest whose products or services are discussed in the CME activity content over which the individual has control. Relationship information appears at the beginning of each CME-accredited article in this issue.
Ethical issues abound in any relationship that is defined by differences between the parties in rank, status, and power. Such is the case in the relationship between a doctoral student in clinical psychology and his or her mentor. In this article, we examine several potential areas of ethical concern within the mentor-student relationship. We present a series of vignettes and our analyses of the issues that arise within them as we examine romantic dual relationships, nonromantic dual relationships, and other ways in which the mentor's power may be intentionally or unintentionally misused for personal gain. We also look at several examples of unhelpful mentoring. Problematic situations often arise when there is the potential for loss of objectivity by either party or exploitation of the student by the mentor. Although the relationship with one's mentor may be one of the most important and gratifying aspects of the graduate school experience, both mentors and students should keep in mind that behavioral choices within this relationship are often complex ones that require forethought, self-monitoring, and discussion between the parties.
Preliminary investigations of disasters, including terrorism, have identified degree of exposure as a highly reliable predictor of trauma symptoms. However, this effect has not been consistently demonstrated in studies conducted in Israel. One explanation for this may be found in the different mechanisms that influence the relationship between exposure and symptoms in situations of recurrent versus one-time terror events. We examined traumatic symptoms and response to life events as variables which may be affected by repeated exposure to violence. Students from Tel Aviv University (n=65) and the College of Judea and Samaria, in the West Bank (n=47), completed measures of exposure to terrorism, trauma symptoms, life event stress reactions, and psychopathology. As in previous studies, no relationship between the overall degree of terror-related exposure and trauma symptoms was found for either group. General level of anxiety mediated the relationship between terror-related trauma symptoms and life event stress reactions. For the Ariel group, exposure to terror was related to anxiety and hostility. Direct terror-related exposure was negatively related to life event stress for the Tel Aviv group. In summary, our findings suggest that the exposure-symptom relationship may function differently in a context of ongoing threat than in a context of single-event terror.
Previous research indicates that people with social anxiety disorder tend to experience escalating distress when thinking about past social situations. We investigated whether such distress could be limited by either an intervention or the participant's pre-existing abilities. Participants were 38 undergraduate students who reported problematic levels of social anxiety. Participants who endorsed a poor ability to purposefully engage with thoughts about stressful social situations reported a deterioration of mood after 25 min of unstructured writing about a recent problematic social situation, whereas those who demonstrated low levels of purposeful engagement but received writing prompts (based on cognitive restructuring techniques) did not show a strong deterioration of mood. In contrast, participants who endorsed greater purposeful engagement ability did not show such deterioration. Results suggest that the negative effects of thinking about social situations might be ameliorated, for at least some participants, if they are provided with structure.