“Many books and articles claim that younger and older workers see their jobs differently and want different things,” said 91��ɫ faculty member Paul Fairlie, a behavioural scientist, consultant and the study’s researcher. “But some of that is based on opinion and hearsay. More rigorous research is needed.”

Paul Fairlie 

The study found that age and generations had only a zero to three per cent effect how people see their work and what they desire from the workplace. Positive working conditions were far more responsible for people’s satisfaction, commitment, and retention. 

Younger and older workers surveyed in the study reported similar working conditions, satisfaction, commitment, stay intentions, burnout, engagement and discretionary effort. All workers were motivated by similar work characteristics, with meaningful work topping the list. 

“A 10 per cent increase in meaningful work was linked to seven per cent higher satisfaction, commitment, stay intentions and lower burnout,” said Fairlie. “It was almost eight per cent for higher engagement.” 

Meaningful work was measured as self-actualizing work (work that enables an employee to realize their full potential, values and life goals), social impact (having a positive impact on people and things through work), feelings of personal accomplishment and believing that their highest career goals can be achieved within their current organization. 

The study recommends that employers provide the same positive working conditions to all employees, regardless of age, especially meaningful work, which may have the most widespread, pervasive and positive impacts. The study also suggests that meaningful work can often be provided through communication strategies rather than re-tooling the organization. 

The findings, which were statistically significant and replicated in two other studies, will be published later this year in an academic volume on aging, work and society.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The talk, “Positive Parenting and Positive Development in Children” will take place Wednesday, Nov. 17, from noon to 1pm at the Executive Learning Centre, X106 Seymour Schulich Building, Keele campus. A reception will follow, from 1 to 2pm at the LaMarsh Centre for Child and Youth Research. Everyone is welcome to attend, but as space is limited, it is requested that you RSVP for both the talk and the reception at owhchair@yorku.ca.

Right: Marc Bornstein

Armed with the knowledge that things do not always go well in child development, policy-makers, educators and parents share the laudable and well-intentioned goal to develop preventions, interventions and remediations in the service of children, says Bornstein. “But treatment is not just fixing what is broken; it is also nurturing what is best. My talk takes a ‘positive youth development’ perspective as its starting point.”

In the first part of the talk, Bornstein will look to the literature to define prominent positive characteristics and values in children. In the second part, he will address the important goal of how children can be best helped to achieve those positive characteristics and values.

“To do this, I will show how parents, who are children’s primary advocates and their front-line defence, are the corps most available and in the greatest number to lobby and labour for children,” says Bornstein. “I discuss direct effects of parents on children as well as indirect effects. I focus on both childhood and adolescence and incorporate new work on brain development. Finally, I discuss a specificity principle that may guide future thinking and action in positive child development.”

As a researcher, Bronstein has received numerous awards for his research from such organizations as the National Institute of Child Health & Human Development, the American Psychological Association, the National Institutes of Health, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the American Mensa Education & Research Foundation. In 2008, he was recognized by the Society for Research in Child Development for his efforts in the international and cross-cultural realm with its Distinguished International Contributions to Child Development Award.

Bornstein has been a faculty member at Princeton University and New 91��ɫ, and a visiting scientist, fellow and professor at more than eight universities and research institutes, including the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, University College London, Université René Descartes in Paris, the University of Tokyo and the Sorbonne.

In addition to hundreds of scientific papers, he is co-author of the widely used book series and editor of other book series, including The Crosscurrents in Contemporary Psychology, Monographs in Parenting and Handbook of Parenting. He is the founding editor of and has written several children's books.

Bornstein is also co-editor of a new book that 91��ɫ psychology Professor Maria Legerstee is publishing with University of Toronto Professor David Haley. The book, , will be released later this year by Guilford Press.

Bornstein’s research interests include the origins, status and development of psychological constructs, structures, functions and processes in the first two years of life; the effect of child characteristics and activities on parents; and the meaning of variations in parenting and in the family across different socio-demographic and cultural groups.

The talk is joint venture hosted by the LaMarsh Centre for Child and Youth Research, Echo’s Ontario Women’s Health Council Chair in Women’s Mental Health Research and The Lillian & Don Wright Foundation.

For more information, visit the LaMarsh Centre for Child and Youth Research website. For more information on the LaMarsh Speaker Series, visit the Faculty of Health website.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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Last week, 16 therapists from as far as Israel, Hong Kong, Denmark, Portugal and Australia, as well as the United States, were at 91��ɫ for four days of in-depth skill training at the Emotion-Focused Therapy Level Two 2010 Summer Institute led by Greenberg. The week before, Level One was offered. Both sessions, which were full and had a waiting list, were held at the new  at the 91��ɫ Psychology Clinic (YUPC).

Right: Leslie Greenberg instructs therapists from around the world on emotion-focused therapy

“It’s the only place in the world they can do this in-depth training that I developed with my collaborators, and it’s becoming a world-recognized approach,” says Greenberg, who and the 2010 Carl Rogers Award from the American Psychological Association's Society for Humanistic Psychology (Division 32).

Although ideas about EFT began percolating when Greenberg was completing his doctorate in psychology at 91��ɫ, the approach really started to come together in 1993 following the book , co-authored by Greenberg. He has since authored and co-authored several books on the subject, including . It was in 1995 that Greenberg began doing evidence-based research to support the approach.

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) was the dominant treatment at the time and had already generated evidence that it worked, but as Greenberg says, “it’s not an in-depth approach to how humans function. It’s good at helping people cope, but not really good at dealing with the core problems people have. So it seemed important to develop a much more in-depth approach to human emotions.” And in the 1980s, there was a greater understanding of the role emotions played. “More and more scientific evidence began to show how important emotions were in life.” That included some of the unpleasant emotions.

Left: From front left, therapists Timothy Downing Brown from the United States and Ben Shuhar from Israel, and from back left, Nels Klint Karsvang and Belinda Lange from Denmark, in the Emotion Focused Therapy Level Two 2010 Summer Institute at 91��ɫ

There is strong evidence now that EFT, with its focus on developing emotional intelligence and the importance of secure relationships, helps couples having marital difficulties, as well as individuals suffering from depression, anxiety and eating disorders, says Greenberg, who was awarded the 2004 Distinguished Career Award by the Society for Psychotherapy Research, an international, multidisciplinary, scientific organization.

EFT is designed to help people accept, express, regulate, understand and transform emotion, not deny or suppress it. Emotion alerts people to what is important in any given situation and acts as a guide to what is needed or wanted, says Greenberg. Working with these emotions helps people to figure out what they should do.

Right: From left, Eve Alon from Israel, Leslie Greenberg, Chui Fan Yip from Hong Kong, Melissa Harte from Australia, Candice Knight from the US and João Salgado from Portugal were just a few of the therapists who came to 91��ɫ to learn emotion-focused therapy

“EFT focuses on helping people become aware of emotions, express their emotions in the right way at the right time, learn to tolerate and regulate them, and to reflect on them to make sense of them and transform them,” says Greenberg. It is not enough to learn about emotions; people need to experience them in a safe environment, such as in a therapy session, and learn how to manage and use them in a flexible manner. It’s not about eliminating emotions, but working with them.

Therapeutic approaches such as CBT and psychoanalysis have their place and have helped a lot of people, but they don’t address the whole picture, he says.

Now that EFT is an internationally recognized approach, Greenberg will be spending much of his upcoming sabbatical training therapists around the world who couldn’t make it to 91��ɫ this summer, starting in his home country of South Africa.

The Emotion-Focused Training for Couples 2010 Institute is the next session Greenberg will offer for therapists at the Emotion-Focused Therapy Clinic from Nov. 22 to 25.

For more information or to register for future training institutes, visit the YUPC Continuing Education Web site.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The title will be conferred on Armstrong at the Spring 2010 Convocation on June 16 at 10:30am and on Greenberg during the June 17 ceremony at 10:30am.

A Distinguished Research Professorship is awarded to a professor who has demonstrated scholarly achievement by sustained publication or other recognized and accepted demonstrations of sustained authoritative contributions to scholarship.

Right: Pat Armstrong

Armstrong, who is appointed to graduate programs in health, political science, science & technology, sociology and women's studies, holds a (CHSRF)/ (CIHR) Chair in Health Services. She is also a professor of sociology in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies and an executive member of the 91��ɫ Institute for Health Research and the Graduate Program in Health Policy & Equity .

She recently received Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada () funding through the program to identify promising practices for understanding and organizing long-term residential health care. Armstrong's project seeks to learn from and with other countries to understand the approaches, structures, accountability practices and ownership arrangements that create conditions prompting respectful and dignified treatment for both residents and caregivers.

Another SSHRC-funded research project looks at the risks nurses face in health care, while a Canadian Institutes of Health Research-funded project compared the workplace conditions and levels of violence faced by long-term care workers to those in Nordic countries.

She has authored, co-authored or co-edited over 20 books, including , , and .

Armstrong chairs Women & Health Care Reform, a working group that crosses the Centres of Excellence for Women's Health, and is acting co-director of the National Network on Environments & Women’s Health. She is currently a principal of the Ontario Training Centre in Health Services & Policy Research, a board member of the 91��ɫ Institute for Health Research, and has served as both chair of the Department of Sociology at 91��ɫ and director of the School of Canadian Studies at Carleton.

In addition, Armstrong has served as an expert witness in more than a dozen cases heard before bodies ranging from the federal court to federal human rights tribunals on issues related to women’s health-care work and to pay equity.

Left: Leslie Greenberg

(PhD ’76), appointed to the Graduate Program in Psychology, is among the pioneers and is primary developer of emotion-focused therapy (EFT) for individuals and for couples, which is based on the findings that emotions influence thought and behaviour. It is a psychotherapy technique that promotes the resolution of unpleasant emotions by working with them rather than suppressing or avoiding them. Greenberg is interested in couple and individual therapy using EFT, as well as examining how people deal with unresolved emotions and how that affects their ability to forgive. In recent years, he has used EFT to help couples when one person has had an affair. He is also interested in how EFT can help people with depression.

EFT is now recognized as evidence-based treatment for depression as well as couple conflict, and there is also growing evidence of its effectiveness for trauma, interpersonal problems and eating disorders. In a 2002 study, Greenberg and his colleagues studied individuals who had suffered injuries ranging from emotional to physical abuse and found that those who were treated with EFT had much better results than individuals who were treated with psycho-educational therapy. Greenberg has devoted over 20 years to EFT research and has conducted EFT workshops for therapists interested in learning his theory and technique around the globe. Closer to home, he is providing training in EFT for professionals from around the world at the 91��ɫ Psychology Clinic.

Greenberg has won many awards, including the Award for Excellence in Professional Training from the Canadian Council of Professional Psychology Programs, the Carl Rogers Award from the Division 32, the Distinguished Career Award from the Society for Psychotherapy Research and the Professional Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology as a Profession from the .

His professional publications include more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, 89 book chapters and some 17 books, including , , and .

He is a founding member of the and the Society for Constructivism in Psychotherapy, and a past president of the .

In addition, he is on the editorial board of many psychotherapy journals, including the and the .

For more information about Distinguished Research Professorships, visit the Faculty of Graduate Studies Web page. The list of current and past Distinguished Research Professors is available on the 91��ɫ Research Web site.

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