Increasing the Cultural Proficiency of Clinical Managers

The author describes the development of a 20‐hour curriculum to train clinical managers to enhance the cultural competence of their staff. After training, managers reported improvements in their multicultural competence and in the ability to enhance their staff's cultural competence. El autor describe el desarrollo de un plan de un currículo de 20 horas de entrenar directores clínicos para aumentar la competencia cultural de su personal. Después del entrenamiento, los directores informaron mejoria en su competencia multicultural y en la habilidad de aumentar la competencia cultural de su personal.     

Virginal Status and Adolescent Delinquency: The Birds and the Bees,Deviance, and Teens

Much of society deems pre-marital adolescent sexual activity to be deviant. Current research seeks to determine if losing one’s virginity has an impact on participation in delinquent acts. It is hypothesized that youth who are more socially bonded to conventional people and activities, with higher levels of self-control, will not have participated in sexual intercourse and will have lower rates of delinquency. Data from Add Health are analyzed. Results do not indicate a significant effect of virginal status on delinquency. However, various social bonds were found to differentially effect delinquency for virgins and non-virgins, which may be important to consider.     

Patterns of critical consciousness and associations with sociocultural factors in black adolescents

Critical consciousness includes an understanding of structural oppression, agency to act and actions to redress oppression. Questions remain regarding how youth's experiences with oppression and their social identities might relate to their critical consciousness. In this study, we explored associations between critical consciousness (critical reflection, critical agency, and action) and sociocultural factors (racial identity, racial socialization, and racial stress) among Black adolescents (n = 604; M_age = 15.44, SD = 1.24). We used latent profile analysis and identified four profiles of critical consciousness: Precritical Bystander (62.7%), Liberated Actor (19.9%), Precritical Actor (10.8%), and Acritical Bystander (6.6%). These profiles were distinct in critical reflection, critical agency, and critical action. Next, we examined associations between critical consciousness profiles and sociocultural factors. We found that profile membership was differentially associated with some aspects of racial identity, racial socialization, and racial stress. These findings suggest that there are specific patterns of critical consciousness among Black youth which are differentially associated with racial identity, racial socialization that emphasizes cultural pride, and experiences of cultural racism. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement .     

Reproductive Health CHOICES for Young Adults with Sickle Cell Disease or Trait: Randomized Controlled Trial Outcomes over Two Years

Interventions to assist reproductive health decision-making in populations affected by sickle cell disease (SCD) or trait (SCT) lack proven efficacy over time. Our aim was to compare effects of CHOICES, a Web-based multimedia education program on implementing informed reproductive plans, and usual care education (e-Book) on reproductive knowledge, intention, and behavior over 24 months. We randomized 234 participants with SCD (n?=?138) or SCT (n?=?96) (age 18–35 years, 35 % male, 94 % African American) to CHOICES and e-Book groups. Participants completed a sickle cell-specific reproductive measure before and four times after the intervention (6, 12, 18 and 24 months). Compared to the e-Book group the CHOICES group had significantly more improvement in knowledge over time (p?=?.004) but not intention (p?=?.18) or behavior (p?=?.69). At baseline, 114 (48.7 %) participants reported having partners who would not put the couple at risk for their children inheriting SCD. Of the 116 (49.6 %) at-risk participants, a higher poroportion of those who were in the CHOICES group chose partners that reduced their risk by the last visit than the e-Book group (p?=?.04). Study findings provide important insights for designing a national trial of the CHOICES intervention focusing on subjects whose partner status puts them at risk for having a child with SCD.     

Event boundaries and anaphoric reference

The current study explored the finding that parsing a narrative into separate events impairs anaphor resolution. According to the Event Horizon Model, when a narrative event boundary is encountered, a new event model is created. Information associated with the prior event model is removed from working memory. So long as the event model containing the anaphor referent is currently being processed, this information should still be available when there is no narrative event boundary, even if reading has been disrupted by a working-memory-clearing distractor task. In those cases, readers may reactivate their prior event model, and anaphor resolution would not be affected. Alternatively, comprehension may not be as event oriented as this account suggests. Instead, any disruption of the contents of working memory during comprehension, event related or not, may be sufficient to disrupt anaphor resolution. In this case, reading comprehension would be more strongly guided by other, more basic language processing mechanisms and the event structure of the described events would play a more minor role. In the current experiments, participants were given stories to read in which we included, between the anaphor and its referent, either the presence of a narrative event boundary (Experiment 1) or a narrative event boundary along with a working-memory-clearing distractor task (Experiment 2). The results showed that anaphor resolution was affected by narrative event boundaries but not by a working-memory-clearing distractor task. This is interpreted as being consistent with the Event Horizon Model of event cognition.     

Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Philosophy

Many philosophers would, in theory, agree that the methods and tools of philosophy ought to be supplemented by those of other academic disciplines. In practice, however, the sociological data suggest that most philosophers fail to engage or collaborate with other academics, and this article argues that this is problematic for philosophy as a discipline. In relation to the value of interdisciplinary collaboration, the article highlights how experimental philosophers can benefit the field, but only insofar as they draw from the distinctive methods of philosophy and overcome the charge of “amateur psychology” by more consistently collaborating with the scientists they seek to emulate. It concludes that philosophers ought to collaborate with other academics in order to gain an experience‐based understanding of the methods of other disciplines in addition to an understanding of the content of these disciplines.