A Community‐Responsive Adaptation to Reach and Engage Latino Families Affected by Maternal Depression

As family researchers and practitioners seek to improve the quality and accessibility of mental health services for immigrant families, they have turned to culturally adapted interventions. Although many advancements have been made in adapting interventions for such families, we have yet to understand how the adaptation can ensure that the intervention is reaching families identified to be in greatest need within a local system of care and community. We argue that reaching, engaging, and understanding the needs of families entails a collaborative approach with multiple community partners to ensure that adaptations to intervention content and delivery are responsive to the sociocultural trajectory of families within a community. We describe a cultural adaptation framework that is responsive to the unique opportunities and challenges of identifying and recruiting vulnerable families through community partnerships, and of addressing the needs of families by incorporating multiple community perspectives. Specifically, we apply these principles to the cultural adaptation of an intervention originally developed for low‐income African American and White families facing maternal depression. The new intervention, Fortalezas Familiares (Family Strengths), was targeted to Latino immigrant families whose mothers were in treatment for depression in mental health and primary care clinics. We conclude with key recommendations and directions for how family researchers and practitioners can design the cultural adaptation of interventions to be responsive to the practices, preferences, and needs of underserved communities, including families and service providers.     

Derived Rule Tacting and Subsequent Following by Slot Machine Players

During a slot machine gambling task, six adult participants wagered red or silver coins, which had no impact on the programmed contingencies of the game. Following baseline gambling, each participant was presented with a series of conditional discrimination training and testing trials to establish a self-rule that either the red or silver coins were somehow “better” to use. Tacting of the participant’s self-rule was measured using fill-in-the blank and multiple-choice procedures. Upon returning to slot machine gambling, five of six participants altered their response options among coin colors in accordance with newly derived self-rule. Implications for conceptual development of self-awareness and practical applications of self-awareness using Skinner’s framework of language are discussed.

     

Effects of aging and depression on mnemonic discrimination ability

Aging and depression have been found to be associated with poorer performance in mnemonic discrimination. In the current study, a two-response format mnemonic similarity test, Cognitive Drug Research MST, was used to compare these effects. Seventy-six participants were tested; with 52 participants in the young group, aged 18–35 years, and 24 participants in the elderly group, aged 55 years or older. Twenty-two young participants and 10 elderly participants met DSM-IV criteria for MDD or dysthymia. Age-related deficits were found for lure identification and speed of response. Differences in speed of responses to lure images were found for younger depressed participants, and depressive symptom severity was found to be negatively associated with lure identification accuracy in the elderly. These findings may be viewed as putative behavioral correlates of decreased pattern separation ability, which may be indicative of altered hippocampal neurogenesis in aging and depression.     

Suicidal or self-harming ideation in military personnel transitioning to civilian life

Suicides have markedly increased among military personnel in recent years. We used path analysis to examine factors associated with suicidal/self-harming ideation among male Navy and Marine Corps personnel transitioning to civilian life. Roughly 7% of men (Sailors = 5.3%, Marines = 9.0%) reported ideation during the previous 30 days. Results suggest that combat exposure, substance abuse, and resilience are associated with suicidal ideation/self-harming thoughts through the mediation of posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms and/or depression symptoms. Substance abuse plays a moderating role. Resilience had a direct effect only among the Marines. Implications for improving the transition to civilian life are discussed.     

??Putting on?? Sexiness: A Content Analysis of the Presence of Sexualizing Characteristics in Girls?? Clothing

Objectification theory (Fredrickson and Roberts 1997) proposes that women from Western cultures are widely portrayed and treated as objects of the male gaze, leading to the development of self-objectification, in which girls and women internalize these societal messages and view their own bodies as objects to be evaluated according to narrow standards of (often sexualized) attractiveness. Prompted by findings from the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls (APA 2007), the present study considers girls?? clothing as a possible socializing influence that may contribute to the development of self-objectification in preteen girls. Accordingly, in this content analysis, we examined the frequency and nature of ??sexualizing?? clothing available for girl children (generally sizes 6?C14) on the websites of 15 popular stores in the US. Sexualizing clothing was defined as clothing that revealed or emphasized a sexualized body part, had characteristics associated with sexiness, and/or had sexually suggestive writing. Clothing was also coded for childlike characteristics, such as child-like fabric (e.g., polka dot pattern) or a modest, non-revealing cut. Across all stores and all articles of clothing, 69% of the clothing items were coded as having only childlike characteristics, 4% as having only sexualizing characteristics, 25.4% as having both sexualizing and childlike characteristics, and 1% as having neither sexualizing nor childlike characteristics. ??Tween?? stores like Abercrombie Kids had the highest proportion of sexualizing clothing. The findings are discussed within the framework of the development of self-objectification.     

Writing the history of Russian philosophy

This article addresses the writing of the history of Russian philosophy from the first of such works—Archimandrite Gavriil’s Russian Philosophy [Russkaja filosofija, 1840]—to philosophical histories/textbooks in the twenty-first century. In the majority of these histories, both past and present, we find a relentless insistence on the delineation of “characterizing traits” of Russian philosophy and appeals to “historiosophy,” where historiosophy is employed as being distinct from the historiographical method. In the 1990s and 2000s, the genre of the history of Russian philosophy has grown increasingly conservative with regards to content, with histories from this period demonstrating an almost exclusive Orthodox focus. This conservatism, in turn, has contributed to widespread contention in recent years over the status of these philosophical textbooks—disagreements that often lead to either (1) further appeals to “historiosophical” methods; or (2) denials of the domestic philosophical tradition altogether, where the response to the query “Is there philosophy in Russia?” is emphatically negative. This article argues that the contemporary disputes over the development and preservation of the Russian philosophical canon are in many ways part of a larger debate over the roles of Orthodoxy and the history of philosophy in post-Soviet philosophical thought.     

Behavior-analytic research on dementia in older adults

It is estimated that 1 in 10 adults aged 65 years and older have been diagnosed with dementia, which is associated with numerous behavioral excesses and deficits. Despite the publication of a special section of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA) on behavioral gerontology (Iwata, 1986), there continues to be a paucity of behavior-analytic research with this population. This review compares the research published before and after the behavioral gerontology special section and evaluates the most recently published aging articles in JABA.     

Exploring the within-person coupling of sleep and cognition in older African Americans

This study examined the within-person relationship between sleep and cognitive functioning. Fifty community-dwelling African Americans (age range = 50-80 years) were asked to report their sleep duration and quality the previous evening and to complete cognitive measures over 8 occasions within a 2-3 week period. A within-person daily change in sleep duration was significantly associated with worse global cognitive performance. The greater an individual deviated away from his or her average sleep duration on a particular day, the more likely his or her performance would decline. These results demonstrate that the sleep-cognition relationship can be observed at a within-person level of analysis.