Emotion Focused Therapy-Therapist Fidelity Scale (EFT-TFS): Conceptual Development and Content Validity.

The Emotion Focused Therapy-Therapist Fidelity Scale (EFT-TFS) is introduced as a scale to measure a therapist's fidelity to the EFT model. The rationale and conceptual development of the scale are presented. Members of an EFT electronic mailing list who participated in a survey (n=130) rated all of the items as highly important for the practice providing support for the content validity of the scale. Finally, the 13 items of the EFT-TFS are presented. Future research directions for the EFT-TFS are presented.

Bereaved adults' evaluations of grief management messages: effects of message person centeredness, recipient individual differences, and contextual factors.

This study identifies grief management strategies that bereaved adults evaluate as more and less helpful, assesses whether the person centeredness of these strategies explains their helpfulness, and determines whether strategy helpfulness varies as a function of demographic, personality, and situational factors. Participants (105 bereaved young adults) assessed the helpfulness of 16 grief management strategies; these strategies were coded for their degree of person centeredness. Strategy person centeredness was strongly correlated with helpfulness. Strategy helpfulness varied as a function of participant gender and the disruptiveness of the decedent's death, but not as a function of need for cognition or decedent closeness.

Telling it like it is: the adaptive function of narratives in coping with loss in later life.

As the population ages, caregivers and health care providers need more insight into how people experience old age and their attitudes and emotions about growing older. It is particularly critical to understand how communication processes change and how older adults communicate their concerns and feelings. This article proposes that some discursive activities may play a crucial role in successfully adapting to, and coping with, loss in later life. Thus, this study explored how older adults reflect on and express themselves concerning recent experiences of loss. A sample of 41 residents of 2 independent-living retirement communities wrote in journals about a recent significant loss. Participants wrote about their losses during brief lab sessions over the course of 3 consecutive days. Each set of 3 journals was content-analyzed to measure the frequency with which the participants employed emotional expression, factual recounting, account giving, religious-account giving, humor, intensifiers, and referential statements. The analysis indicates that, overall, participants shifted from a primarily factual mode (what the loss was, how the loss occurred, etc.) to more of a focus on the impact of this loss on their lives (e.g., handling new tasks and expressions of emotions) over the 3 sessions. In addition, most participants offered accounts of their losses; that is, they attempted to find some meaning in the loss and integrate the loss into an overall framework for their lives. Many of these accounts focused on religion. Final sections of the article discuss the implications of journaling as a mechanism for effective coping with loss, as a useful tool for expressing emotions, and as a means for older adults' caregivers and health care providers to better adapt their supportive messages.