Kinship is the primary organizing principle in human relations. The notion of psychological kinship is introduced to account for those instances where persons treat certain genetically unrelated significant others "as if" they were family. As in other human relations, psychological kinship is assumed to play an important moderating role in client-therapist and helpee-helper relations in the helping professions. Various implications of psychological kinship for professional helping, "low" and "high" kinship approaches, and characteristics of the "kinship therapist" are discussed.Kinship is the primary organizing principle in human relations. People do not simply relate but rather they relate and interact in adaptive and predictable ways governed largely by their bioevolutionary mammalian and primatological natures on the one hand, and their sociocultural learning experiences on the other (Bailey, 1987;Fox, 1975). The anthropologist Fox (1972) says, "Kinship systems link us more directly to the beasts than any other subsystems of human culture in that they are in effect breeding systems" (p. 284). The basic elements of kinship in advanced mammalsThe author thanks William Hawkes and Elaine Monnier for help in generating items for the Kinship Scale, Gus Nava for conducting the pilot study and analyzing the data, and Rees Chapman for additional help in data analysis. Appreciation is also expressed to Seymour B. Sarason for his comments on an earlier version of this article.

Assessed role playing, videotape feedback, and modeling in combination, using 18 male and 30 female undergraduates randomly allocated into 4 groups of 12 Ss each: no-treatment controls, role playing, video feedback, and modeling. The control condition consisted of a waiting period, and the other 3 groups "played therapist" for 2 12-min sessions with a "client" confederate. Interposed between Sessions 1 and 2 was a 12-min interval during which the role-playing group merely waited, the feedback group received a verbatim replay of Session 1, and the modeling group watched a modeling tape. All 4 groups were pretested and posttested on several measures, and "therapist behavior" was assessed by the Ashby Client's Personal Reaction Questionnaire and specially developed verbal and nonverbal behavioral coding systems. Results show, as predicted, that modeling produced the greatest overall behavioral change, feedback was next, and role playing was a poor third. It is concluded that modeling has significant impact on therapist behaviors in a brief quasi-therapeutic encounter, videotape feedback is inconsistent and erratic in its effects, and role playing is basically inert when used alone. (26 ref)

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There are numerous ethical, moral, philosophical, and social psychological issues involved in modern sex therapy. Psychologists have accorded sex therapy a warm reception into the field, but present ethical guidelines are insufficient to protect clients from psychological damage in the form of massive intrusions on privacy and reoriented moral and religious values. Further, the more explicit procedures seem to carry a message to society that "anything goes." The Zeiss, Rosen, and Zeiss procedure is used as a reference point for discussing these various issues.In a recent review, Byrne (1977) outlined the progressive evolution of research on sexual behavior from animal studies in the early phases, to primitive cultures, abnormal sexuality, and finally up to the contemporary focus on normality emanating from Freud, Kinsey, and Masters and Johnson. Byrne stated that social psychologists were attracted to the area by virtue of revolutionary societal changes in attitudes and actual behavior, by research initiated by the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, and by the pressing need to solve the problem of unwanted conception. Following his in-depth historical analysis of research on sexuality, Byrne concluded that social psychologists have much to gain and much to offer by providing a "warm welcome" to this fundamental area of social psychological interest.Perusal of recent issues of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology (JCCP) reveals that sex research is being warmly received by clinical researchers and therapists as well, and, further, it appears that there is a parallel trend to use increasingly explicit materials, methods, and procedures in the sex laboratory. A recent JCCP issue, for example, included a study in which introductory psychology students viewed films of masturbation and subsequently responded to various measures of sexual arousal and affcctivity (Mosher & Abramson, 1977), and another study used a behaviorally oriented masturbation procedure for treating inorgastic women

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