Pathways to vocational services: factors affecting entry by veterans enrolled in Veterans Health Administration mental health services

The current study provides naturalistic data documenting the pathways-to-care to vocational services for 155 veterans who were receiving some form of mental health care from the Veterans Health Administration and had a vocational need but were not currently enrolled in vocational services. Of the participants, 94.2% had recognized their vocational need, 80.6% reported that they or someone else had sought help to alleviate the need, and 77.4% had previously received some form of vocational services. The median length of the participants' vocational need was more than 4.2 years. Delays associated with recognition, help-seeking, and treatment entry all contributed to the overall delay in entering appropriate care. Filtering factors associated with quicker recognition, seeking help, and receiving services included diagnosis, level of disability, type of vocational need, and support from primary providers, family, and friends. The results provide information for designing interventions to improve service entry by adults with mental health problems and vocational needs.     

EFFECTS OF PREFERENCE AND REINFORCER VARIATION ON WITHIN-SESSION PATTERNS OF RESPONDING

We examined correspondence between preference assessment outcome and within‐session patterns of responding in one subject with autism. Responding maintained by a single highly preferred item resulted in a greater total number of responses, a slower decline in within‐session response rates, and a greater proportion of short interresponse times compared to responding maintained by varied moderately preferred (MP) stimuli. Presenting varied MP stimuli within the same session produced greater levels and more sustained responding than presenting those same stimuli individually.     

Item and order information in semantic memory: students’ retention of the “CU fight song” lyrics

University of Colorado (CU) students were tested on memory for the “CU Fight Song” in order to examine serial position effects in semantic memory while controlling for familiarity across positions. In Experiment 1, students reconstructed the order of the nine lines of the song. Students with previous exposure to the song performed better and showed a more bowed serial position function than did students with no knowledge of the song. Experiment 2 added a task assessing memory of item information. One word was removed and replaced with a blank in each line, and an alternative word was offered as an option, along with the correct word. Students selected the word that fit into each blank and then reconstructed the order of the lines. There was a bow-shaped curve for order reconstruction, but not for item selection, which implies that the serial position function in semantic memory stems from order, rather than item, information.     

Memory for details about people: familiarity,relatedness, and gender congruency

This study examines factors that influence memory for details about people. In two experiments, subjects learned fictitious details about familiar (friends, relatives) and/or unfamiliar individuals, and were tested both immediately and after a 1-week delay. To control for a confounding between familiarity and genetic relatedness in Experiment 1, in Experiment 2 specific relationships (identical twin, first cousin, acquaintance) were assigned to unfamiliar individuals. Across experiments, retention was enhanced for familiar compared to unfamiliar individuals, for friends/acquaintances compared to relatives, for more closely than distantly related individuals, and for individuals of the opposite gender as the subject.     

Worldviews and World-Pictures. Avoiding the Myth of the Semantic Given

Topoi - In this paper I focus on the notion of worldview as a conceptual scheme and the role of language in shaping our view of reality. In particular, I engage with Wittgenstein’s notion of...     

Questioning Pygmalion in the twenty-first century: the formation,transmission, and attributional influence of teacher expectancies

Teacher expectancy effects, the class of phenomena in which teacher beliefs about students influence student outcomes, are widely believed to operate through recursive processes of teacher-student interaction. Recent work in “wise” interventions has shown profound and robust effects in educational domains, and has attributed these effects to similar recursive processes (Yeager and Walton 2011). In this paper, we lay a foundation for forging connections between what we know about expectancy effects and how we might envision applying that knowledge as a lever in intervention research. We review the evidence for the existence and significance of teacher expectancy effects, as well as their possible mediators, including perceptual biases, confirmation biases, stereotyping, and attributional biases. We also hypothesize that empathy could play a role in mediating a relationship between expectancies and attributions. Finally, we propose a research agenda focused on the transmission, mediation, and attributional effects of teacher expectancies.     

Using Artist Trading Cards as an Expressive Arts Intervention in Counseling

Artist trading cards (ATCs) are miniature works of art that are created within the dimensions of standardized trading cards or playing cards (2.5 inches × 3.5 inches). ATCs can be made with a variety of media—everything from pen and ink to oil paints, collages, mosaics, stamping, and altered photos. Using this compact art format as an expressive arts intervention in the therapeutic environment provides the counselor with most, if not all, of the same therapeutic benefits of larger art media (e.g., expressive release, creativity, artistic communication, symbolic self-expression, self-exploration, etc.). The unique benefit of the ATC format is that ATCs allow for traditional expressive arts interventions to be “better, faster, and cheaper” in many ways.     

Collectivizing Rescue Obligations in Bioethics

Bioethicists invoke a duty to rescue in a wide range of cases. Indeed, arguably, there exists an entire medical paradigm whereby vast numbers of medical encounters are treated as rescue cases. The intuitive power of the rescue paradigm is considerable, but much of this power stems from the problematic way that rescue cases are conceptualized—namely, as random, unanticipated, unavoidable, interpersonal events for which context is irrelevant and beneficence is the paramount value. In this article, I critique the basic assumptions of the rescue paradigm, reframe the ethical landscape in which rescue obligations are understood, and defend the necessity and value of a wider social and institutional view. Along the way, I move back and forth between ethical theory and a concrete case where the duty to rescue has been problematically applied: the purported duty to regularly return incidental findings and individual research results in genomic and genetic research.