lthough there has been debate among college counseling professionals as to whether levels of student need and client psychopathology have progressively increased in recent years, there is agreement that the severity of student concerns has been at least steady through the 1990s and 2000s and that the complexity of students' experiences while in college and the clinical demands of college client caseloads have clearly grown. In fact, on the basis of his comparison of the recent experiences of college counseling professionals and counseling trends among adolescents and young adults in off-campus settings, Rudd (2004) concluded that university and college counseling centers were becoming essentially community clinics within a special institutional context. All of the articles appearing in this issue of the Journal of College Counseling contribute to the knowledge that college counselors require to better understand their students' experiences and their clients' dynamics.
The first four articles in the Research section are focused on a few of the intrapersonal dynamics and interpersonal experiences that often bring students to the counseling center. Barbara Gormley and Frederick G. Lopez present new findings about the roles of attachment orientations, defenses, and stressors in psychological abuse in heterosexual dating relationships. Mandy Morrill-Richards and Stephen J. Leierer report on one of the few studies that have been conducted to examine the influences on one's sense of well-being of either experiencing or perpetrating sibling maltreatment. In their in-depth focus on attachment styles, Chia-Chih DC Wang, Codi L. Schale, and Kristina K. Broz examine the relationships among adult attachment, minority sexual orientation identities, and student sexual attitudes, while Eileen L. Cooley, Amy Van Buren, and Steven P. Cole look at attachment styles and their connections with women's social skills and experience of depression. In the fifth research article, Andrew M. Burck, John M. Laux, Holly Harper, and Martin Ritchie help counselors better understand cautions about using the Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Inventory-3 (SASSI-3;Miller & Lazowski, 1999) in counseling centers as a screening tool for substance dependence in the light of client defensiveness and "faking" dynamics.
Next, in her article in the Professional Issues and Innovative Practice section, Laura H. Choate describes the eating disorder not otherwise specified (EDNOS) symptom constellation-by far the most common eating-related concern among women on campus-and provides a rationale and a strategy for using cognitive behavior therapy to address the needs of female clients with these eating problems. Finally, returning to the topic of problematic substance use in this issue's College Counseling Case Studies section, B.