Transitioning Between Systems of Care: Missed Opportunities for Engaging Adults with Serious Mental Illness and Criminal Justice Involvement

Individuals with serious mental illness are overrepresented in the criminal justice system and face difficulties accessing mental health services both during incarceration and upon re‐entry into the community. This study examines how such individuals describe their experiences receiving care both during and after their time in custody and explores the perspectives of mental health service providers who treat this population upon re‐entry. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 43 individuals identified as having a history of serious mental illness and criminal justice involvement, as well as with 25 providers who have worked with this population. Clients noted the stress of transitioning to criminal justice settings, the uneven availability of services within jail and prison, and the significant challenges faced upon re‐entry. Providers reported barriers to working with this population, including minimal coordination with the criminal justice system and challenging behaviors and attitudes on the part of both clients and providers. Findings identify potential target areas for improved care coordination as well as for additional provider education regarding the unique needs of this population. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Change of Perspective: Seeing Through Children at the Front of the Classroom, to Seeing Children from the Back of the Classroom

This article considers a noted trend by teacher educators at a South African University where student teachers seem to have very little connection with children they teach on their teaching practicals. This lack of engagement and ability to see individual children that are being taught and respond to them is the focus of the paper. The paper considers how such a circumstance may come into being by looking at socio-historical practices in education through a Foucauldian lens using the notions of government and governmentality. Ways in which people were managed and dominant forms of knowledge and being are in tension with curricular shift that construct children as competent and able. It then proposes that within teacher education a shift of perspective is needed in enabling students to ‘look’ at the children in their classrooms in a deeper, more engaged way. This draws from research methods that use observation as for researchers to understand participants through their eyes (Hatch A, Doing qualitative research in education settings, State University of New York Press, Albany, 2002). Three examples are given from classroom observations as a way of exploring what close observations of children can teach us about children’s needs and interests. The paper concludes with a general framework students might draw on that places children as the focus in the classroom.     

Spearman's law of diminishing returns: A statistical artifact?

Spearman's Law of Diminishing Returns (SLODR) is the idea that the structure of human cognitive ability is more differentiated and g a weaker determinant of cognitive performance at higher levels of ability. In this study, we distinguish between ‘traditional’ methods of testing SLODR and ‘contemporary’ methods of testing SLODR. It is the former set of methods from which the vast majority of the evidence base for SLODR derives. We demonstrated that it is easy to mimic SLODR and reverse SLODR effects in these traditional methods of assessing SLODR by using data with skewed observed variable distributions. The skewness magnitudes did not need to be large to produce these effects and they fell well within the range of values that are usually considered unproblematic for parametric statistic analysis. In simulated datasets, positive subtest skewness resulted in SLODR and negative subtest skewness resulted in reverse SLODR. In contemporary methods of testing SLODR, non-linear g-loadings or a skewed g are assumed to reflect evidence for SLODR. When we applied contemporary methods of testing SLODR to these data, there was evidence of heteroscedastic residuals but no evidence of non-linear g-loadings or skewed g distributions. We broadly replicated the effects of subtest skew from these simulated datasets in real data from the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. Results imply that traditional methods of assessing SLODR cannot distinguish between effects due to subtest characteristics that have nothing to do with differences in ability structure at different levels of g and true SLODR effects. This calls into question the empirical support for SLODR.     

The impact of parents’ mental health on parent–baby interaction: A prospective study

The aims of the current study were to examine the effect of fathers’ and mothers’ pre and postnatal mental health on mother–infant and father–infant interactions. Mental health was broadly defined to include anxiety, depression and PTSD. A community sample of 44 mothers and 40 fathers from 45 families completed questionnaire measures of mental health in late pregnancy and three months postpartum. Mother–infant and father–infant interactions were observed and videoed three months postpartum and analysed using the CARE-index. Results showed that prenatal mental health, in particular anxiety, was associated with parent–infant interactions to a greater extent than postnatal mental health. Fathers’ prenatal symptoms were associated with higher paternal unresponsiveness and infant passivity whilst fathers’ postnatal symptoms were associated with higher levels of infant difficulty in the father–baby interaction. The results also indicated that mothers and fathers interaction with their babies were similar, both on average and within the couples, with 34% being inept or at risk. These findings highlight the need for early detection and prevention of both mental health and parent–infant relationship problems in fathers as well as mothers. However, further prospective and longitudinal studies are needed to understand the influences of parental mental health on the parent–infant interactions further. Also it should be noted that the mental health scores were low in this sample, which may reflect the sample characteristics. Future studies therefore would benefit from focusing on more vulnerable groups of parents.     

Predicting uptake of a routine cervical smear test: A comparison of the health belief model and the theory of planned behaviour

Abstract

This paper reports on a study carried out to identify predictors of uptake of cervical screening among 142 women (59% response rate) in inner London. Two social cognition models were used: The Health Belief Model (HBM; Becker, 1974) and the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB; Ajzen, 1991) and in addition anticipated affect following non-attendance for screening was assessed. The TPB emerged as by far the superior model for predicting screening intentions, explaining 51% of the variance in comparison with only 4% explained by the HBM variables. However, neither model was able to predict a significant amount of variance in uptake of screening three months later. Possible reasons for the poor prediction of this type of behaviour are discussed.     

Counselling in a culture of competence

In this article, a counsellor working in the public sectors of health and education considers her work in the light of the contemporary political context. Describing the trend towards what she is calling a ‘culture of competence’, she notes recent changes to the identity of the professional, whose authority, once taken for granted, is increasingly limited and subject to evaluation and proof of effectiveness. She then considers some ways in which counsellors working in the public sector are now experiencing such measures, noting both the benefits that can accrue from evaluating their work, but also the dangers when certain pressures and anxieties are not taken into account.     

The Blicket Within: Preschoolers' Inferences About Insides and Causes

Four experiments examined children's inferences about the relation between objects' internal parts and their causal properties. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds recognized that objects with different internal parts had different causal properties, and those causal properties transferred if the internal part moved to another object. In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds made inferences from an object's internal parts to its causal properties without being given verbal labels for objects or being shown that insides and causal properties covaried. Experiment 3 found that 4-year-olds chose an object with the same internal part over one with the same external property when asked which object had the same causal property as the target (which had both the internal part and external property). Finally, Experiment 4 demonstrated that 4-year-olds made similar inferences from causal properties to internal parts, but 3-year-olds relied more on objects' external perceptual appearance. These results suggest that by the age of 4, children have developed an understanding of a relation between an artifact's internal parts and its causal properties.     

Tailoring Cognitive Behavioral Treatment for Binge Eating in Adolescent Girls

Whereas effective treatments exist for adults with recurrent binge eating, developmental factors specific to adolescents point to the need for a modified treatment approach for youth. We adapted an existing cognitive behavioral therapy treatment manual for adults with bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder (Fairburn, 2008) for use with adolescents. This paper presents a number of clinical case vignettes, drawn directly from interactions with teen participants, that illustrate some of the developmental factors common to adolescents—as well as the importance of our adaptations to address for these factors.     

Working memory and reasoning: An individual differences perspective

This article reports three experiments that investigated the relationship between working memory capacity and syllogistic and five-term series spatial inference. A series of complex and simple verbal and spatial working memory measures were employed. Correlational analyses showed that verbal and spatial working memory span tasks consistently predicted syllogistic and spatial reasoning performance. A confirmatory factor analysis showed that three factors best accounted for the data—a verbal, a spatial, and a general factor. Syllogistic reasoning performance loaded all three factors, whilst spatial reasoning loaded only the general factor. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of reasoning theories and contemporary accounts of the structure of working memory.     

Eye gaze patterns reveal how we reason about fractions

ABSTRACT

Fractions are defined by numerical relationships, and comparing two fractions’ magnitudes requires within-fraction (holistic) and/or between-fraction (componential) relational comparisons. To better understand how individuals spontaneously reason about fractions, we collected eye-tracking data while they performed a fraction comparison task with conditions that promoted or obstructed different types of comparisons. We found evidence for both componential and holistic processing in this mixed-pairs task, consistent with the hybrid theory of fraction representation. Additionally, making within-fraction eye movements on trials that promoted a between-fraction comparison strategy was associated with slower responses. Finally, participants who performed better on a non-numerical test of reasoning took longer to respond to the most difficult fraction trials, which suggests that those who had greater facility with non-numerical reasoning attended more to numerical relationships. These findings extend prior research and support the continued investigation into the mechanistic links between numerical and non-numerical reasoning.