Integration of the brief behavioral activation treatment for depression (BATD) into a college orientation program: depression and alcohol outcomes

College freshmen face a variety of academic and social challenges as they adjust to college life that can place them at risk for a number of negative outcomes, including depression and alcohol-related problems. Orientation classes that focus on teaching incoming students how to better cope with college-oriented stress may provide an opportunity to prevent the development of these adjustment problems. This article outlines a program based on behavioral activation that can be integrated into college orientation programs to provide a more comprehensive orientation experience. Data are presented from an initial pilot study in which 71 first-semester freshman at the University of Maryland participated in a 15-week, 2 hr per week orientation class (n = 37 in the behavioral activation-enhanced orientation classes and n = 34 in the control orientation as usual classes). Students' depression and alcohol use were evaluated at the beginning, middle, and end of the course. Results indicated a Time × Group interaction such that problem drinking (but not consumption) was significantly reduced across assessments in the behavioral activation classes and largely unchanged in the standard classes. No difference was observed in depression scores; however, fairly low depression scores across the 3 time points may have limited the opportunity to observe any meaningful impact of the orientation classes on depression. The authors conclude with a discussion of the implications of their findings for preventing adjustment problems among incoming college students and future directions.     

“Back Home,People Say America is Heaven”: Pre-Migration Expectations and Post-Migration Adjustment for Liberians in Pittsburgh

The African-born population in the United States is now the immigrant group growing at the fastest rate, yet African immigrants are often overlooked in studies of immigrant incorporation and social adjustment. One factor negatively impacting immigrant adjustment is a lack of congruence between pre-migration expectations and post-migration realities. Existing academic literature on this topic largely overlooks African immigrants with the exception of refugees, and current studies of Liberians in the United States also focus overwhelmingly on refugees. This article reorients the discussion of African immigrant incorporation by exploring such issues with a sample of Liberian immigrants in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area who arrived with a range of visa types. Using the results of five focus groups (N?=?31), I outline shared unrealistic expectations of abundant wealth and development, an easier life, and Americans having extensive knowledge about Africa. I also examine often unanticipated challenges such as communication issues, negative interactions (including racism and African origin prejudice), cultural differences, problems finding jobs and adjusting to American work culture, and high expectations from home, including remittances. The results suggest that non-refugee immigrants face many of the same challenges as refugees and can benefit from information and resources fostering more successful integration.     

Therapeutic Assessment With Children: A Pilot Study of Treatment Acceptability and Outcome

Therapeutic Assessment (TA) with children is a hybrid of psychological assessment and short-term intervention. It uses the ongoing process and results of psychological assessment to enhance parents' understanding of their child and to facilitate change. Clinical reports and single case studies suggest that TA with children is an acceptable and effective brief intervention. However, no aggregate data have been published to support this claim. This pilot study investigated the acceptability and preoutcome–postoutcome of TA with 14 clinically referred children with emotional and behavior problems and their parents. Results indicated high treatment acceptability as well as significantly decreased child symptomatology and enhanced family functioning as reported by children and mothers. In addition, mothers demonstrated a significant increase in positive emotion and a significant decrease in negative emotion pertaining to their children's challenges and future. The findings, although limited due to the design and small sample size, support assertions from published single case studies that TA is possibly an efficacious child and family intervention for children with emotional and behavioral problems and should be studied in a larger, comparison design.     

Global ethics and human responsibility: challenges for the theory and the discipline

The aim of this article is to identify the main challenges for global ethics as an academic discipline. This article assesses the moral and practical justifications for common global principles. Individual and institutional responsibility on the supranational level is connected with the standard of human rights and the relational aspects of the globalised world. It also points out two separate problems which global ethics should aim to solve. The first is metatheoretical and methodological and concerns the discipline's lack of self-reflexiveness. The second is essential and concerns the clash of values (human rights and sovereignty). Regarding the second problem, the main future challenge of global ethics is to construct a measurement to bring political decisions closer to morality and more strongly connect rights with responsibilities.     

Parenting stress and external stressors as predictors of maternal ratings of child adjustment

This study sought to disentangle the effects of different kinds of stress on maternal ratings of child externalizing and internalizing problems, social inhibition, and social competence, with a primary focus on parenting stress. The relations were explored in a sample consisting of mothers of 436 children (M_age = 7 years) in Sweden. Half the sample had had early clinical contacts during infancy due to child regulation problems, and the rest were mothers without known such early contacts. Demographic factors, family stressors, and parenting stress were examined in stress – adjustment models. Family stressors were clinical contact during infancy, current child and parent health problems, recent negative life events, and insufficient social support. Parenting stress as a mediator of the effect of other stressors on rated child adjustment was tested as was social support as a moderator of the effect of parenting stress on adjustment. The results showed that a higher parenting stress level was associated with maternal ratings of more externalizing and internalizing behaviors, more social inhibition, and lower social competence. Other family stressors and background variables were also found to be of importance, mainly for externalizing and internalizing problems and to some extent for social competence. Social inhibition had a unique relation to parenting stress only. Parenting stress mediated effects of other stressors in twelve models, whereas social support had no moderating effect on the link between parenting stress and child adjustment. Thus, parenting stress seems to be an important overarching construct. Clinical implications are proposed.     

Contextualized self-representations in adulthood

Theorizing has focused on individuals' self-representations as a psychological resource for coping with life stress and developmental challenges in adulthood. Many of the prominent theories have conceptualized self-representations with regard to specific social contexts (e.g., role-specific self-representations) and have examined specific structural organizations of the self-concept with regard to psychological adjustment. This article describes research on the associations between self-concept structures and psychological well-being in adulthood. Specific emphasis is given to the feature of self-concept differentiation (SCD). Most research suggests that a high level of SCD tends to indicate self-fragmentation and tends to be associated with poorer adjustment and psychological well-being. Findings from a daily diary study with adults of all ages are reported showing that different levels of SCD were in a consistent and meaningful way related to the daily endorsement of positive and negative self-attributes. Daily self-representations, in turn, were significantly related to individuals' level of daily negative affect and to intra-individual variation in negative affect. These findings suggest that SCD may exert its effect on adjustment and psychological well-being through specific ways of processing self-related information.     

Religious Education and Information Technology: Challenges and Problems

Abstract. With advances in information technology, the velocity of information production on the global level has expanded as well. This acceleration has led to the delegitimizing of knowledge, the equating of information with knowledge, and the giving of predominance to information rather than knowledge. This advance has created epistemological challenges for the process of religious education. At the same time, the growth of the internet has created a “rhizomatic space” possessing new methodological characteristics that create problems for religious education. Information technology generates a “hypertextual learning space,” which weakens the place of traditional texts in the learning process, particularly in a traditional religious education process. This hypertextual development is especially problematic for religious education in conservative or fundamentalist traditions. This article analyzes the epistemological, methodological, and contextual problems and challenges posed by information technology for traditional religious education processes.     

Reactive temperament traits and behavioural problems in children: the mediating role of effortful control across sex and age

This study examines the mediating role of effortful control between reactive temperament traits (negative affectivity and extraversion) and children’s internalizing and externalizing behavioural problems. The sample was composed of 424 non-clinical children from 3 to 6 years of age (60% male). Use of a structural equation model revealed effortful control-mediated relations between reactive temperament traits and behavioural problems. Nevertheless, uniquely and directly, negative affect predicted externalizing problems and extraversion predicted internalizing problems. Assessment of invariance by children’s sex showed that the mediating role of effortful control tends to be stronger for externalizing problems in boys than in girls. Results showed no significant age differences. According to these results, effortful control as a method of self-regulation seems to be an essential process through which reactive temperament traits affect a child’s psychological adjustment.     

Mothering in a Foreign Land

The process of becoming a mother in an adopted land presents unique challenges in identity formation of immigrant mothers. The bidirectional influence of the mother's own transformation and that of the larger family system has significant implications for child development. This article addresses the ways in which cultural displacement has an impact on the dilemmas of motherhood, as evident in adaptation to the immigration process, changing conceptions of gender roles and attachment, bicultural conflicts, and changing family structure and social network. Mothers' attempts to integrate the old and the new cultural frameworks are explored, particularly in the context of psychotherapy. Clinical cases are discussed to illustrate the intrapsychic and interpersonal conflicts faced by immigrant mothers.     

Karamojong Adolescents in Tororo,Uganda: Life Events,Adjustment Problems,and Protective Factors

The Karamojong people of Uganda are marginalized and likely to have difficult lives. Research is needed to understand Karamojong children’s challenges, adjustment, and resiliency to help guide interventions and policies to improve their lives. Thus, 18 Karamojong 10–16-year-olds (10 girls; M?=?13.33 years; SD?=?1.81) were recruited from a nongovernmental organization in Tororo District, Uganda, and interviewed about their life events, coping strategies, social support, and hope. Adolescents also were verbally administered questionnaires about their life events and adjustment problems. Participants reported many negative life events (M?=?9.28 of 16). The number of negative life events was positively correlated with internalizing, but not with externalizing, problems. Participants described a variety of coping strategies. Most participants received emotional or instrumental social support, and were hopeful about their futures. Hardships were often alcohol- or poverty-related events, whereas hope was often centered on education.     

Effectiveness evaluation of the Positive Family Support intervention: A three-tiered public health delivery model for middle schools

This article presents the results of an evaluation of Positive Family Support, an ecological family intervention and treatment approach to parent supports and family management training developed from a history of basic and translational research. This effectiveness trial, with 41 public middle schools randomly assigned to intervention or control, examined student-, teacher-, and parent-reported outcomes, as well as math and reading scores and school attendance. Multilevel analyses suggested that for students at risk for behavior problems, immediate-intervention schools outperformed control schools on parent-reported negative school contacts for students at risk for behavior problems. Implementation, however, was hampered by several challenges, including school funding cuts, lack of staff time to provide parenting supports, and staff turnover. Given that preventive interventions are generally cost effective, it is critical that researchers continue their efforts to refine these interventions and find ways to support schools' implementation of evidence-based programs that can reduce problem behavior. This article is part of a special issue “Parental Engagement in School-Based Interventions”.     

Neighborhood Deprivation during Early Childhood and Conduct Problems in Middle Childhood: Mediation by Aggressive Response Generation

The tremendous negative impact of conduct problems to the individual and society has provided the impetus for identifying risk factors, particularly in early childhood. Exposure to neighborhood deprivation in early childhood is a robust predictor of conduct problems in middle childhood. Efforts to identify and test mediating mechanisms by which neighborhood deprivation confers increased risk for behavioral problems have predominantly focused on peer relationships and community-level social processes. Less attention has been dedicated to potential cognitive mediators of this relationship, such as aggressive response generation, which refers to the tendency to generate aggressive solutions to ambiguous social stimuli with negative outcomes. In this study, we examined aggressive response generation, a salient component of social information processing, as a mediating process linking neighborhood deprivation to later conduct problems at age 10.5. Participants (N = 731; 50.5 % male) were drawn from a multisite randomized prevention trial that includes an ethnically diverse and low-income sample of male and female children and their primary caregivers followed prospectively from toddlerhood to middle childhood. Results indicated that aggressive response generation partially mediated the relationship between neighborhood deprivation and parent- and teacher-report of conduct problems, but not youth-report. Results suggest that the detrimental effects of neighborhood deprivation on youth adjustment may occur by altering the manner in which children process social information.     

Identity Strategies Among Adolescent Girls of Moroccan Descent in the Netherlands

Sometimes it is assumed that Moroccan girls in the Netherlands have a problematic adolescence: They are supposed to be "caught between two cultures." Adolescence can be seen as the stage of life in which individuals should develop their own identity by exploring different alternatives. Moroccan girls, however, may not have these possibilities for exploration during adolescence; they seem to be restricted in many ways. This article first looks at these presumed restrictions. In the specific context of belonging to a minority group, the girls' parents regard the traditional rules to be very important. The notion of virginity, for instance, can be a (symbolic) boundary between the migrant community and the society. However, the girls themselves may also choose these traditions. Especially religion provides a "proper" set of rules in a sometimes confusing world. Should these girls, then, be seen as primarily foreclosed in their identity process? And, if so, is that why their adolescence is supposed to be problematic? The girls in this research, however, do not seem to have many problems in the process of their identity construction. They do mention other kinds of problems or challenges. Following traditional rules in a non-Muslim society can cause practical problems or even loyalty conflicts. In response to this, the girls seem to have developed certain strategies that they use to combine the conflicting values.     

Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Men and Anger: Three Single Case Studies

The treatment of men with anger problems presents significant challenges for practitioners. This article discusses a cognitive-behavioral, individual therapy, approach within the framework of three single case studies involving men. Treatment challenges and methodology are presented. Key treatment issues included: establishing a therapeutic relationship; facilitating understanding of the cognitive basis of anger; and addressing male-role socialization messages and male-identity schema that contributed to the experience and expression of anger in these men. Limitations relative to the small sample (n = 3) and the lack of a randomized control group preclude any definitive statements regarding the effectiveness or generalizability of the intervention. Nevertheless, the study highlights important theoretical and practical concerns for practitioners and future researchers to consider when working with men and anger.     

Teaching Ethics to Engineers: Ethical Decision Making Parallels the Engineering Design Process

In order to fulfill ABET requirements, Northern Arizona University’s Civil and Environmental engineering programs incorporate professional ethics in several of its engineering courses. This paper discusses an ethics module in a 3rd year engineering design course that focuses on the design process and technical writing. Engineering students early in their student careers generally possess good black/white critical thinking skills on technical issues. Engineering design is the first time students are exposed to “grey” or multiple possible solution technical problems. To identify and solve these problems, the engineering design process is used. Ethical problems are also “grey” problems and present similar challenges to students. Students need a practical tool for solving these ethical problems. The step-wise engineering design process was used as a model to demonstrate a similar process for ethical situations. The ethical decision making process of Martin and Schinzinger was adapted for parallelism to the design process and presented to students as a step-wise technique for identification of the pertinent ethical issues, relevant moral theories, possible outcomes and a final decision. Students had greatest difficulty identifying the broader, global issues presented in an ethical situation, but by the end of the module, were better able to not only identify the broader issues, but also to more comprehensively assess specific issues, generate solutions and a desired response to the issue.     

青少年亲子关系、消极社会适应和网络成瘾的关系:一个有中介的调节作用

为探讨亲子关系、消极社会适应和网络成瘾的关系,采用问卷法对六个城市共2324名中学生进行研究。结果表明：（1）冲突型青少年网络成瘾倾向得分最高,依恋型青少年网络成瘾倾向得分最低;（2）消极社会适应在亲子依恋和亲子冲突对网络成瘾的预测中均起部分中介作用;（3）消极社会适应的中介作用受到性别的调节。这一研究结果揭示了积极和消极亲子关系对网络成瘾的共同作用机制,为从家庭层面干预和预防青少年网络成瘾状况提供了参考。     

Ethical Dilemmas in Psychological Research with Vulnerable Groups in Africa

The present article highlights ethical challenges and practical solutions to the problems that arise when designing and conducting the fieldwork data collection with the members of violent youth gangs, prison inmates, and arrestees held in police cells in Nigeria. Issues related to the process of seeking approval and then implementing the research, gaining access, achieving informed consent, confidentiality, the use of interpreters, and remuneration are presented through case studies. The conclusion stresses the need for researchers to be well prepared and sensitive to the research participants' community and cultural backgrounds while following ethical practices in multicultural contexts, especially in Africa and other developing nations.     

OFFICIAL APOLOGIES IN THE AFTERMATH OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE

Abstract: This article examines the uses of official apologies for massive human rights abuses in the context of democratic transitions. It sketches a normative model of apologies, highlighting how they serve to provide some moral and practical redress for past wrongs. It discusses a number of contributions apologies can make, including publicly confirming the status of victims as moral agents, fostering public reexamination and deliberation about social norms, and promoting critical understandings of history that undermine apologist historical accounts. The article then presents certain normative criteria that any official apology must satisfy, and concludes with a discussion of several theoretical and practical challenges that apologies face in transitional contexts. It draws on Chilean President Patricio Aylwin's apology for his predecessor's crimes as an illustration of some of the promises and challenges that apologies face.     

Constructive Metatheory: II. Implications for Psychotherapy

Abstract

The implications of constructive metatheory for the conceptualization and practice of psychotherapy are briefly outlined. It is argued that the constructivist therapist construes the client as an active and developing process, and that psychological problems are approached not as piecemeal flaws or deficiencies, but as expressions of current discrepancies between an individual's adaptive capacities and the challenges she or he faces. Likewise, the process of psychotherapy is portrayed as one of trial-and-error experimentation with different (novel) ways of “being in the world.” Ideally, the client and therapist create an intimate and emotionally charged alliance in and from which the client can explore and experiment with self and world relationships. These practical features dovetail with many assertions of the major me-tatheories of psychotherapy, and it is argued that constructive metatheory may be uniauely suited to facilitating attempts at conceptual integration     

Dyadic Adjustment Processes in Divorce Counseling

This article reviews nine stage models of divorce adjustment, all but one of which define adjustment to divorce in terms of the individual experience. As an alternative to these models, the authors describe the Dyadic Divorce Adjustment Processes Model, which depicts the divorce process as a journey traveled by two persons, experiencing parallel, but not necessarily simultaneous progression, and which presents the transition from married to divorced as both a linear and dynamic phenomenon. In addition, the authors introduce the concept of experiential levels or states in the adjustment process, accounting for the dynamic aspect of divorce. Four different levels and concomitant therapeutic issues for each level are presented and described in relation to divorce adjustment counseling.