Potential for Suicide and Aggression in Delinquents at Juvenile Court in a Southern City

Because juvenile delinquents rarely communicate their wishes for suicide or homicide appropriately to busy caretakers, some means to identify those juveniles at greatest risk of acting out was sought. Psychological examiners in a Southern city individually questioned 263 Juvenile Court offenders about whether they wished to be dead, to kill themselves, or to kill others; and also about their existential experiences, thoughts and feelings. Taking the data associated with each wish, we used stepwise multiple logistic regression to pinpoint experiences, such as substance abuse, that were associated with a high likelihood of verbalizing a wish for destructive behavior. These results included sexual abuse as a risk factor and the presence of a mother or grandmother as a protective factor, and led to recommending education of caretakers and forming a screening test.     

Age differences in overlapping-task performance: evidence for efficient parallel processing in older adults

Two psychological refractory period (PRP) experiments were conducted to examine overlapping processing in younger and older adults. A shape discrimination task (triangle or rectangle) for Task 1 (T1) and a lexical-decision task (word or nonword) for Task 2 (T2) were used. PRP effects, response time for T2 increasing as stimulus onset synchrony (SOA) decreased, were obtained for both age groups. The effect of word frequency on T2 was smaller at the short SOA than at the long SOA, reflecting slack effects, which were larger for older than younger adults in both experiments. These results suggest that older adults can perform lexical access of T2 in parallel with the processing of T1 at least as efficiently as younger adults.     

Adapting Group Therapy to Address Real World Problems: Insights from Groups Offered in the Bahamas

This article presents a cultural adaptation of a group therapeutic approach that is being offered in the Bahamas. “The Family: People Helping People” project was designed as an intervention to improve socialization in New Providence, the Bahamian capital and its most heavily populated city. “The Family” group model offers support and training to improve communication in relationships and to encourage constructive emotional expression. This article will provide an overview of “The Family,” address key elements of this approach that are culturally tailored, and offer clinical examples and note implications for group therapy training. This cultural adaptation offers helpful insights for addressing community problems, such as violence and societal fragmentation, and may inform the development of community-based group interventions in other settings.     

Building a Pink Dinosaur: the Effects of Gendered Construction Toys on Girls’ and Boys’ Play

Play with building toys such as LEGO® sets promotes spatial learning in children. The present study examined the effects of the color of the bricks (either pink or blue) and the femininity/masculinity of the object built on boys’ and girls’ play with LEGO® sets. Children (n = 116, M _age  = 7.27 range = 5–10) were given the opportunity to build with LEGO® brick sets, both instructed and free play tasks. For the instructed task, the type of object (feminine: cat; masculine: dinosaur) and color of the bricks (pink, blue) were counterbalanced across participants. Their play was coded for accuracy of following the instructions and time to complete the task. In the free play task, brick color (pink, blue) was counterbalanced across participants, and structures were coded for femininity/masculinity and the number of bricks used. Overall, children took longer to build a feminine object with blue bricks than with pink bricks. In the free-play task, boys built more masculine objects than girls did, regardless of the color of bricks they were given. Results showed that boys completed the LEGO® tasks faster than did girls, controlling for interest in and experience with LEGO® play. These findings suggest that toy color and type can impact how children interact and play with toys.     

A Controlled Study of Clicker‐Assisted Memory Enhancement in College Classrooms

Personal response systems, commonly called ‘clickers’, are widely used in secondary and post‐secondary classrooms. Although many studies show they enhance learning, experimental findings are mixed, and methodological issues limit their conclusions. Moreover, prior work has not determined whether clickers affect cognitive change or simply alert students to information likely to be on tests. The present investigation used a highly controlled methodology that removed subject and item differences from the data to explore the effect of clicker questions on memory for targeted facts in a live classroom and to gain a window on the cognitive processes affecting the outcome. We found that in‐class clicker questions given in a university psychology class augmented performance on delayed exam questions by 10–13%. Experimental results and a class survey indicate that it is unlikely that the observed effects can be attributed solely to attention grabbing. Rather, the data suggest the technology invokes the testing effect. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.