The American Psychological Association was founded in 1892 for the purpose of elevating the psychological professions to a science by promoting research, teaching and education. Among other endeavors the APA holds seminars, publishes studies, teaches advanced methods and advocates for the profession. News releases, publication excerpts are available on-line.

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To address the ongoing controversy about American Psychological Association's Practice Guidelines for Boys and Men, we want to clarify what these guidelines are, and what they are not.

The American Psychological Association (APA) is the nation's largest organization of psychologists. It consists of clinicians who treat patients with psychological disorders like depression and anxiety and academics who teach and do psychological research, among other types of psychologists. This fortunate combination of practitioners and scholars has enabled an evidence-based approach to clinical practice. APA has a long history of developing guidelines for psychological practice through collaboration between scientists and practitioners. Practice Guidelines have been developed both for specific groups such as girls and women, older adults, racial and ethnic minority groups, transgender and gender non-conforming people, and sexual minority persons, and for specialized practice areas such as telepsychology or forensic psychology.

The "Guidance for Developers and Users of Professional Practice Guidelines" published by APA defines these guidelines as "designed to guide psychologists in practice with regards to particular roles, populations, or settings and provide them with the current scholarly literature. These guidelines reflect consensus within the field since the very process of guideline development helps to resolve areas of disagreement."

We were both centrally involved in the development of the boys and men practice guidelines over a 13-year period. Furthermore, Dr. Levant was the cofounder of the APA division that produced them and as APA president in 2005 he created the task force to write the guidelines, and Dr. McDermott is the current president of that division.

The development of the boys and men practice guidelines was undertaken by a large group of scholars and clinicians who have devoted their lives to the psychological study of men and masculinity and/or to clinical practice with boys and men. This group effort followed all of the APA rules and procedures for professional practice guideline development, and met all of the criteria for acceptance, as specified in the formal APA procedure documents.

The guidelines have recently been criticized on grounds of scientific methodology, which would be much more appropriate for a critical review of the scientific literature than for a set of guidelines for professional practice. Furthermore, such a methodological critique would be equally applicable to any other set of professional practice guidelines adopted by APA.

But setting these academic squabbles aside, the big picture is that the critics confuse "men" with "masculinity." The term men, like women, or intersex, usually refers to biological sex. However, when applied to transgender persons that term can also refer to gender identity. On the other hand, masculinity refers to a set of gender norms—that is, societal expectations for behavior appropriate to one's sex. Gender norms vary with culture and historical era. For example, one current masculine norm is to restrict the expression of affection between men, yet in Abraham Lincoln's time the norm was the exact opposite. Back then, men were expected to be verbally and physically affectionate with their close male friends, even going so far as to sleep in the same bed when they visited each other. Furthermore, masculinity norms can be adhered to by women and non-binary persons as well as men. And they can be rejected by people of any gender identity.

The masculine norms in the U. S. today include both prescriptions and prohibitions: avoid all things feminine, disdain men whom they consider feminine (sexual minority men), restrict the expression of emotions (except anger), be self-reliant, dominant, and tough, and be very interested in sex. Masculine norms have been found over four decades of research to be associated with a long list of harmful outcomes. These harms can come to the men, women, and non-binary people who conform to masculine norms, and to those around them.

For the sake of illustration, let's take the problem of gun violence—one of heightened concern in the U. S. today. The vast majority of mass gun violence perpetrators (greater than 90 percent) are boys and men, yet the vast majority of boys and men (greater than 90 percent) are not violent. The question then becomes: What predisposes a small minority of males to commit these heinous acts? Recent research has found that part of the answer is believing that one has not lived to one's masculine ideals or that one's masculinity has been compromised or threatened.

Boys and men in the U. S. are not faring very well these days, according to a large number of indicators in educational and vocational attainment, health, mental health, and creating social problems such as gun violence. Psychological research strongly suggests that a big part of all of these problems is that young boys, in elementary school and even earlier, are made to feel that conforming to masculine norms is obligatory, and that they should feel ashamed of themselves if they violate these norms This gender role socialization process has been well-documented, and the long-lasting effects show up when adult men are asked to reveal their "top secret"—the thing they have never told anyone and never would. It turns out that many of these shameful secrets reflect their own violation of masculine norms when they were boys. The APA Practice Guidelines for Men and Boys provides guidance to psychologists to help them understand the gender role socialization of boys and its consequences and provides tools to help boys and men who want to overcome the lingering effects of their socialization to do so.

Many of the guidelines' critics offer no solutions to help men and boys manage the social pressures and consequences of gender role socialization. Instead, they attack our methodology and our message. To be clear, psychologists did not create restrictive masculine norms, we simply observed and described them using psychological science over many decades to help men and boys live happier, healthier lives.

In other words, the guidelines relayed a message that is clearly reflected in the data—the way we socialize young boys into men can lead to problems when men are not able to be flexible in what they believe it means to be a man. Rather than providing solutions to these issues, however, the critics would much rather wage war on the messengers.

Ronald F. Levant is noted for his leading role in creating the field of the psychology of men and masculinities. He is a former president of the American Psychological Association.

Ryon McDermott is the president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinities, a division of the American Psychological Association.

The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.

For decades, radical and intersectional feminists have assured us that it's impossible to be sexist toward men because we live in a patriarchal society. Well, the American Psychological Association (APA) is working hard to prove those feminists wrong.

A few years ago, the APA released practice guidelines for therapy with men and boys. An APA press release on the new guidelines made clear just what those guidelines amounted to: an assault on traditional men and boys.

"They draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage," reads the press release. "The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful."

The guidelines go on to explore this harmfulness, claiming that "conforming to traditional masculinity ideology has been shown to limit males' psychological development, constrain their behavior, result in gender role strain and gender role conflict, and negatively influence mental health and physical health." Traditional masculinity leads to violence, the guidelines claim. "An analysis of masculine norms may shed light on the context of violence against gender and sexually diverse people, as spaces where this discrimination occurs are often marked by traditional masculinity," the authors write. To correct for this, the guidelines recommend that "when working with boys and men, psychologists can address issues of privilege and power related to sexism in a developmentally appropriate way to help them obtain the knowledge, attitudes, and skills to be effective allies and potentially live less restrictive lives."

It would be one thing if it were true that traditional masculinity was steeped in violence and harm. But it's far from clear that this is indeed what 40 years of research shows—making the APA's attack on masculinity even harder to defend.

I've just published what I believe is the first peer-reviewed assessment of the APA's guidelines for men and boys. What I found was a mess. Far from there being a slam dunk link between traditional masculinity and negative mental health or behavioral outcomes, the evidence was inconsistent and, across the board, methodologically very weak.

The authors of the guidelines are uniformly focused on the social construction of gender, ignoring biological inputs to both sex and gender identity. But even worse in my opinion, the APA's report is clearly disparaging of traditional men and their families, linking traditional, masculine values to an entire suite of negative mental and physical health outcomes—with no real scientific rationale.

Indeed, it was politics that motivated these conclusions. The guidelines were written from a radical, intersectional perspective. And this isn't my subjective opinion. In conversations I had with most of the authors, they acknowledged as much. "While the Guidelines were drafted by about 30 psychologists over a 13-year period, your comment about its emphasis on intersectionality is on target," one told me. "It is accurate to say that intersectionality over time emerged as a good way to frame understanding and accessing the multiple intersectional identities of boys and men," another admitted.

The intersectional approach that motivated these the guidelines reflect forms of feminism focused on identity politics, patriarchy, privilege, and other loadstone jargon from the political far Left, a kind of "Practice Guidelines for Dogs" written by cats. I consider myself a feminist, but as a clinical psychologist myself, I am highly skeptical that the partially unemployed coal miner, struggling to feed his family of five, is going to benefit much from discussions of his privilege.

It didn't have to be this way. The APA guidelines do have value in supporting the well-being of non-traditional men, and those need not come at the expense of traditionally masculine men.

Discussions of identity in exact decades have obsessed over the notions of power and privilege, but as progressive ideologies sweep through left-leaning institutions such as the APA, we're beginning to see some real inversion of these concepts, or at least, we're reaching a point where they have become more complex.

By releasing practice guidelines that misrepresent the science, the APA does harm to public trust in science. If the public increasingly believes—for good reasons or bad—that science is political nonsense, giving the public exactly that is poor strategy.

Ethically too, the APA has an obligation not to promote prejudice or discrimination against any group. Though the APA has historically failed on this score in relation to women and non-white ethnicities, this is no excuse for the APA to now evince what appears to me to be a clearly bigoted attitude toward traditional men.

But the biggest risk is obviously to traditional men, boys, and their families, not just because the APA has decided they are a legitimate target for sexism and prejudice, but also because many men and their families are now going to view psychotherapy as directly hostile to their values. These men and their families won't seek therapy they might otherwise benefit from. The costs to well-being, potentially even lives, isn't hard to imagine.

None of this minimizes very real sexism toward woman and misogyny that exists across societies. Issues of violence toward women and equal pay remain of worldwide significance. Yet sexism toward men and women can coexist in a fractious society.

Is it possible to be sexist toward men? Sure; the APA has proved it so.

Chris Ferguson is a professor of psychology at Stetson University and author of How Madness Shaped History, Mortal Combat: How the War on Violent Video Games is Wrong and the mystery novel Suicide Kings.

The views in this article are the writer's own.

© 2022 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

APA (NASDAQ:APA) has observed the following analyst ratings within the last quarter:

In the last 3 months, 11 analysts have offered 12-month price targets for APA. The company has an average price target of $54.27 with a high of $75.00 and a low of $41.00.

Below is a summary of how these 11 analysts rated APA over the past 3 months. The greater the number of bullish ratings, the more positive analysts are on the stock and the greater the number of bearish ratings, the more negative analysts are on the stock

This current average represents a 4.64% decrease from the previous average price target of $56.91.

Analysts are specialists within banking and financial systems that typically report for specific stocks or within defined sectors. These people research company financial statements, sit in conference calls and meetings, and speak with relevant insiders to determine what are known as analyst ratings for stocks. Typically, analysts will rate each stock once a quarter.

Some analysts publish their predictions for metrics such as growth estimates, earnings, and revenue to provide additional guidance with their ratings. When using analyst ratings, it is important to keep in mind that stock and sector analysts are also human and are only offering their opinions to investors.

If you want to keep track of which analysts are outperforming others, you can view updated analyst ratings along withanalyst success scores in Benzinga Pro.

This article was generated by Benzinga's automated content engine and reviewed by an editor.

Investors could have picked just about any oil and gas stock in the past two years and made money, given the surge in commodity prices. To profit over the next year, they’ll have to look for distinctive companies.

One of the industry’s most compelling outliers is APA Corp. (ticker: APA), a modest-size Houston firm with a wide-ranging global footprint. It drills in Texas but also happens to be the largest oil producer in Egypt and an offshore driller in Europe.

EXCLUSIVE: Jen Rudin has joined APA where she will launch and head up the agency’s Animation and Voice Over department. Rudin is the 12th former ICM agent/executive brought in by APA over the past year — more than all other agencies combined — as the agency has been aggressively pursing ICM staffers made available by the CAA acquisition. Most of the hires have been at a senior level, including several department heads. Backed by a major investment from Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa Companies two years ago, APA has been in an expansion mode, going on a hiring spree as it is looking to bulk up and move up the agency pecking order, which was disturbed by the CAA-ICM merger.

Rudin, a veteran of the animation and voice-over world, will be establishing a formal department focused on these areas which had been previously serviced by APA talent departments agents. She spent the last two years building and helming the animation department at ICM Partners.

While at ICM, Rudin shepherded animated feature deals for such clients as Lucy Liu, Wanda Sykes, Samuel L. Jackson, Rachel Zegler, Lana Condor, Stephanie Beatriz, Jason Ritter, Nathan Lane, Alan Cumming, and Cathy Ang. In addition, Rudin signed popular Peloton instructor Tunde Oyeneyin across the board and was instrumental in closing Tunde’s book deal with Simon & Schuster and securing a branding partnership with Nike.

“Our strategic acquisitions of talented agents from ICM Partners are with one thing in mind, to aggressively serve our client’s best interests, expanding the footprint of the agency by bringing in proven, talented agents like Jen who will immediately be able to make an impact in their lives, careers and earning power,” said Jim Gosnell and Jim Osborne, CEO and President of APA respectively.

Added Andrew Rogers, Global Head of Talent who worked with Rudin at ICM Partners, “Jen was an invaluable asset in the talent department at ICM. Our clients will greatly benefit from her knowledgeable, aggressive, and extremely well-connected expertise in the Animation casting and Voice-Over business, which exploded during Covid and remains a vital part of the business.”

Before ICM, Rudin was a casting director/executive at The Walt Disney Company and former head of Jen Rudin Casting who earned Artios Awards for Chicken Little and The Princess and the Frog. She is also the author of the book Confessions of a Casting Director, published by HarperCollins.

“I am thrilled to join not only my former colleagues but the entire APA team,” said Rudin. “The momentum that APA has built is being felt across the industry, and I’m excited to start.”

This article's principal interest is in the stock prices of APA Corporation (NASDAQ:APA).

Investment Portfolio Discipline Summary

Active Investing strategy wealth-building depends on compounding gains from repeated shorter-term positions entered, closed out, and reinvested immediately. This is a keep capital continuously working, not an irregularly opportunistic hopeful trading scheme.

Reinvestment of liberated (usually expanded) capital is with choice of best informed-prospects for (1) profitable outcome, (2) worthwhile size gain, (3) happening soon, with (4) minimal interim price draw-down experiences. All of these factors targeted in advance, based on prior experience under similar reward~risk forecasts. Portfolio management discipline uses them as operating control, particularly as to the (3) time element.

“The performance measurement fund invests in equities whenever Market-Maker hedging activity forecasts that 80% or more of the near-coming price range is expected to be to the upside and 10% or less may be to the downside.

At the time of each purchase a GTC sell order at upside top forecast price for all of those just bought shares is placed with the broker where bought. His system will monitor and direct to you the sale confirmation when accomplished, probably with encouragement for reinvestment.

At the time of the buy, only on your own personal private calendar a note is made to review this holding at 3 months after the purchase, Then, if not yet sold, but is priced at a loss, sell, and put the proceeds into the reinvestment stream. If at a gain, after considering alternatives, decide to sell or move the calendar note a month further forward. Discipline matters, but should not take time from making effective reinvestment choices.

Description of Primary Investment Candidate

“APA Corporation, through its subsidiaries, explores for, develops, and produces oil and gas properties. It has operations in the United States, Egypt, and the United Kingdom, as well as has exploration activities offshore Suriname. The company also operates gathering, processing, and transmission assets in West Texas, as well as holds ownership in four Permian-to-Gulf Coast pipelines. APA Corporation was founded in 1954 and is based in Houston, Texas.”

Source: Yahoo Finance

Here are several industry competitors to APA Corporation. Following the same analysis as with APA, historic sampling of today's Risk~Reward balances were taken for each of the alternative investments. They are mapped out in Figure 1.

Figure 1

(used with permission).

Expected rewards for these securities are the greatest gains from current closing market price seen worth protecting short positions. Their measure is on the horizontal green scale.

The risk dimension is of actual price draw-downs at their most extreme point while being held in previous pursuit of upside rewards similar to the ones currently being seen. They are measured on the red vertical scale.

Both scales are of percent change from zero to 25%. Any stock or ETF whose present risk exposure exceeds its reward prospect will be above the dotted diagonal line. Capital-gain attractive to-buy issues are in the directions down and to the right.

Our principal interest is in APA at location [12], just above DVN at location [8] and left of PBR [6] at the right-hand edge of the green price growth Reward scale. A "market index" norm of reward~risk tradeoffs is offered by SPY at [10]. Most appealing (to own) by this Figure 1 view is DVN, but Figure 2 should clarify the better choice in APA.

Comparing features of Alternative Investment Stocks

The Figure 1 map provides a good visual comparison of the two most important aspects of every equity investment in the short term. There are other aspects of comparison which this map sometimes does not communicate well, particularly when general market perspectives like those of SPY are involved. Where questions of "how likely' are present other comparative tables, like Figure 2, may be useful.

Yellow highlighting of the table's cells emphasizes factors important to securities valuations and the security APA, most promising of near capital gain as ranked in column [R].

Figure 2

(used with permission)

Why do all this math?

Figure 2's purpose is to attempt universally comparable answers, stock by stock, of a) How BIG the prospective price gain payoff may be, b) how LIKELY the payoff will be a profitable experience, c) how SOON it may happen, and d) what price draw-down RISK may be encountered during its holding period.

Readers familiar with our analysis methods after quick examination of Figure 2 may wish to skip to the next section viewing Price range forecast trends for APA.

Column headers for Figure 2 define investment-choice preference elements for each row stock whose symbol appears at the left in column [A]. The elements are derived or calculated separately for each stock, based on the specifics of its situation and current-day MM price-range forecasts. Data in red numerals are negative, usually undesirable to "long" holding positions. Table cells with yellow fills are of data for the stocks of principal interest and of all issues at the ranking column, [R]. Cells with pink fills have dimensions usually regarded as inappropriate for buys.

The price-range forecast limits of columns [B] and [C] get defined by MM hedging actions to protect firm capital required to be put at risk of price changes from volume trade orders placed by big-$ "institutional" clients.

[E] measures potential upside risks for MM short positions created to fill such orders, and reward potentials for the buy-side positions so created. Prior forecasts like the present provide a history of relevant price draw-down risks for buyers. The most severe ones actually encountered are in [F], during holding periods in effort to reach [E] gains. Those are where buyers are emotionally most likely to accept losses.

The Range Index [G] tells where today's price lies relative to the MM community's forecast of upper and lower limits of coming prices. Its numeric is the percentage proportion of the full low to high forecast seen below the current market price.

[H] tells what proportion of the [L] demo of prior like-balance forecasts have earned gains by either having price reach its [B] target or be above its [D] entry cost at the end of a 3-month max-patience holding period limit. [I] gives the net gains-losses of those [L] experiences.

What makes APA most attractive in the group at this point in time is its basic strength of reward to risk ratio of 1.9 to 1 in [T], the brief holding periods in [J], and the Win Odds of 10 out of every 11 in [H].

Further Reward~Risk tradeoffs involve using the [H] odds for gains and the 100 - H loss odds as weights for N-conditioned [E] and for [F], for a combined-return score [Q]. The typical position holding period [J] on [Q] provides a figure of merit [fom] ranking measure [R] useful in portfolio position preferencing. Figure 2 is row-ranked on [R] among alternative candidate securities, with APA in top rank.

Along with the candidate-specific stocks these selection considerations are provided for the averages of some 3000+ stocks for which MM price-range forecasts are available today, and 20 of the best-ranked (by fom) of those forecasts, as well as the forecast for S&P500 Index ETF (SPY) as an equity-market proxy.

Current-market index SPY is not competitive as an investment alternative with its Range Index of 36 indicates 2/3rds of its forecast range is to the upside, but lesss than 3/4ths of previous SPY forecasts at this range index produced profitable outcomes, with enough losers to put its average in single-digit positive [I] result.

As shown in column [T] of figure 2, those levels vary significantly between stocks. What matters is the net profit between investment gains and losses actually achieved following the forecasts, shown in column [I]. The Win Odds of [H] tells what proportion of the demo RIs of each stock were profitable. Odds below 80% often have proven to lack reliability.

Price range forecast trends for APA

Figure 3

(used with permission)

No, this is not a “technical analysis chart” showing only historical data. It is a Behavioral Analysis picture of the Market-Making community’s actions in hedging investments of the subject. Those actions define expected price change limits shown as vertical bars with a heavy dot at the closing price on the date of the forecast.

It is an actual picture of experienced market professionals expected future prices, not a simple hope of a recurrence of the past. Expectations are backed up by significant bets of investment capital made to protect market-makers or to earn a proprietary profit from risk-taking.

The special value of such pictures is their ability to immediately communicate the balance of expectation attitudes between optimism and pessimism. We quantify that balance by calculating what proportion of the price-range uncertainty lies to the downside, between the current market price and the lower expected limit, labeled the Range Index [RI].

A RI at zero indicates no further price decline is likely, but not guaranteed. The odds of 3 months passing without either reaching or exceeding the upper forecast limit or being at that time below the expected lower price (today’s) are quite slight.

The probability function of price changes for APA are pictured by the (thumbnail) lower Figure 3 frequency distribution of the past 5 years of RI values with the today value indicated. Today’s RI of 45 with few higher forecasts helps explain the short holding periods as upside movements tend to reach earlier upper forecast limits.

Conclusion

The multi-path valuations explored by the analysis covered in Figure 2 is rich testimony to the near-future value prospect advantage of a current investment in APA Corporation over and above the other compared alternative investment candidates.