Many White people simultaneously hold both sympathetic and antagonistic attitudes toward Blacks. The present research found that activation of these conflicted racial attitudes gives rise to psychological tension and discomfort, as evidenced by negative mood change, and that the amount of discomfort depends on individual differences in measured ambivalence. The salience of Mite subjects' racial attitudes was manipulated by exposing half the subjects to controversial statements about a recent local incident of racial violence; the other half read neutral material Before and after this manipulation, subjects took a mood test disguised as a subliminal perception task. Subjects in the high-salience condition showed significantly more negative mood change. This effect was carried by high-salience subjects who were also relatively high on dispositional racial ambivalence, as measured by a questionnaire. Ambivalence was unrelated to mood in the control condition. A second study showed that merely completing the questionnaire was not sufficient to produce negative mood change.

Studies of users' views of family therapy have rarely explored the means by which children construct their experiences. Family interviews after a first session of therapy included thirteen children aged 8 to 15 years. An analysis of the transcripts demonstrated that, like adults, children draw on forms of explanation generated by acknowledged experts. They used discourses of counselling, therapy, consumerism and education to construct and assess their experiences. The ages of the children affected the construction and evaluation of therapy and the positions taken up in relation to adults. Older children demonstrated more independence from parents. Like adults, the children adopted a variety of stakes, their sophistication increasing with age, suggesting a developmental path towards full membership of adult discursive communities. Recognition that children are active in construing therapy should enhance therapists' insights and facilitate positive therapeutic relationships.

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This paper draws on a study that asked twenty family users about their first session of family therapy. Analyses of the interviews indicated that families entered therapy with a pre-existent knowledge about therapy, which did not always chime with those of professionals and which positioned speakers in ways which governed their expectations and perceptions of therapy. This paper, therefore, is concerned with the acquisition and deployment of knowledge: specifically, the knowledge involved in being a user of family therapy. Three key discourses were identified through this analysis: medical, counselling and consumerist. We aim to illustrate how these discourses served as a resource for members of the family in constructing therapists, therapy and themselves in relation to their experience. The examination of the rhetorical, ideological and practical effects of the positions chosen and the objects constructed, in terms of how speakers wanted to present themselves, with what enhanced or diminished status as patients, shows users actively engaging with the power of therapeutic institutions. Users' accounts suggest that while most speakers felt anxious about the prospect of therapy, there were clear differences in overall satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the experience according to the synchrony between speakers' construction of the therapist, and themselves as client/ patients. Those who seemed to take a traditional view of therapy within a medical discourse valued therapists who offered diagnosis and a cure; those who sought and experienced a counselling relationship with the therapist found their experience to be constructive in terms of enhanced selfknowledge. We believe that the research findings discussed in this paper have implications for family therapists in accommodating to parental and child positions to maximise the effectiveness of therapy and so minimise drop-out.