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In the shadow of the COVID‐19 pandemic, familiar life may be said to have become unequivocally altered as a result of the diffuse death threat posed by the virus and the unprecedented experience of a global lockdown. The unexpected superposition of familiarity and unfamiliarity can be linked to the psychoanalytic notion of the uncanny. For Freud, the uncanny was considered a derivative of the reappearance of the repressed, whose context is dominated by the alien nature of the repression. I suggest that a further perspective can be implied—that the sudden disruption of what is familiar is traumatic and engenders a sense of the uncanny. Reflecting on the COVID‐19 pandemic, this dynamic can be identified in the following aspects: (i) an overwhelming intrusion of an unfamiliar virus upon familiar life, encouraging paranoid denial and projection of the threat and increasing the tendency to stigmatise; (ii) a continuous re‐manifestation of hidden familiarities, both repressed individual conflicts and collective inequalities, illustrating the fragility of the ‘norm’; and (iii) the sudden disruption of an adopted belief (that the virus is beatable), and re‐confrontation with the threat of death following lockdown failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advocacy is an essential element to mental health practitioners' professional identity. Some scholars contend that many couple and family therapists lack the skill set needed to effectively advocate. However, these researchers often discuss advocacy solely on the macrolevel, which makes advocacy appear unidimensional and may feel out of reach for many practitioners. In this article, we argue that advocacy is not unidimensional, but consists of two levels: macro‐ and microlevel advocacy. Microlevel advocacy is client‐centered and is effectively performed by couple and family therapists on a regular basis. By broadening the definition of advocacy to include the microlevel, we argue that advocacy is a common process of couple and family therapy that cuts across therapy models and is interwoven into the very being of a couple and family therapist. We present in this article a comprehensive case vignette to illustrate how microlevel advocacy may be performed by CFTs. Clinical and training implications are offered to help clinicians begin to bridge the gap between micro‐ and macrolevel advocacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study tests the inclusion of social support as a distinct exogenous variable in the Biobehavioral Family Model ( BBFM). The BBFM is a biopsychosocial approach to health that proposes that biobehavioral reactivity (anxiety and depression) mediates the relationship between family emotional climate and disease activity. Data for this study included married, English-speaking adult participants ( n = 1,321; 55% female; M age = 45.2 years) from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication, a nationally representative epidemiological study of the frequency of mental disorders in the United States. Participants reported their demographics, marital functioning, social support from friends and relatives, anxiety and depression (biobehavioral reactivity), number of chronic health conditions, and number of prescription medications. Confirmatory factor analyses supported the items used in the measures of negative marital interactions, social support, and biobehavioral reactivity, as well as the use of negative marital interactions, friends' social support, and relatives' social support as distinct factors in the model. Structural equation modeling indicated a good fit of the data to the hypothesized model (χ2 = 846.04, p = .000, SRMR = .039, CFI = .924, TLI = .914, RMSEA = .043). Negative marital interactions predicted biobehavioral reactivity (β = .38, p < .001), as did relatives' social support, inversely (β = −.16, p < .001). Biobehavioral reactivity predicted disease activity (β = .40, p < .001) and was demonstrated to be a significant mediator through tests of indirect effects. Findings are consistent with previous tests of the BBFM with adult samples, and suggest the important addition of family social support as a predicting factor in the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The impact of personal familiarity upon children's developing emotion-processing has been largely ignored in previous research, yet may prove particularly important given the emotional salience of such stimuli and children's greater exposure to familiar others compared to strangers. We examined the impact of personal familiarity upon developing facial expression recognition (FER). Methods: Participants included 153 children, 4–15 years old. We employed dynamic expressions of five emotions (happy, sad, anger, fear, disgust), posed by familiar (parents, teachers) and unfamiliar identities. Results: Accuracy improved with age for recognising sad and fear expressions, but not anger. Children tended to correctly recognise happiness and fear at lower intensities. The impact of familiarity on FER depended on emotion-category. Familiarity did not affect recognition of sad expressions, but children were less accurate at recognising anger, fear, and disgust in familiar individuals compared to strangers. Conclusion: Personal familiarity may exert a distracting effect on children's performance. Findings highlight the importance of incorporating different emotion-categories and familiarity when examining the development of FER. Clinical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]