Building Alliances with (In)Voluntary Clients: A Study Focused on Therapists’ Observable Behaviors

This study aimed to compare therapists’ observable behaviors to promote alliances with involuntary and voluntary clients during brief family therapy. The therapists’ contributions to fostering alliances were rated in sessions 1 and 4 using videotapes of 29 families who were observed in brief therapy. Using the System for Observing Family Therapy Alliances, trained raters searched for specific therapist behaviors that contributed to or detracted from the four alliance dimensions: engagement in the therapeutic process, an emotional connection with the therapist, safety within the therapeutic system, and a shared sense of purpose within the family. The results showed that when working with involuntary clients, therapists presented more behaviors to foster the clients’ engagement and to promote a shared sense of purpose within the family. However, in the fourth session, the therapists in both groups contributed to the alliance in similar ways. The results are discussed in terms of (a) the therapists’ alliance‐building behaviors, (b) the specificities of each client group, and (c) the implications for clinical practice, training, and research.     

Assessing reading comprehension with narrative and expository texts: Dimensionality and relationship with fluency,vocabulary and memory

Reading comprehension assessment should rely on valid instruments that enable adequate conclusions to be taken regarding students' reading comprehension performance. In this article, two studies were conducted to collect validity evidence for the vertically scaled forms of two Tests of Reading Comprehension for Portuguese elementary school students in the second to fourth grades, one with narrative texts (TRC‐n) and another with expository ones (TRC‐e). Two samples of 950 and 990 students participated in Study 1, the study of the dimensionality of the TRC‐n and TRC‐e forms, respectively. Confirmatory factor analyses provided evidence of an acceptable fit for the one‐factor solution for all test forms. Study 2 included 218 students to collect criterion‐related validity. The scores obtained in each of the test forms were significantly correlated with the ones obtained in other reading comprehension measures and with the results obtained in oral reading fluency, vocabulary and working memory tests. Evidence suggests that the test forms are valid measures of reading comprehension.     

Is it advisable to include negative attributes to assess the stereotype content? Yes,but only in the morality dimension

Competence, morality and sociability dimensions have shown to be essential to measure stereotypes. Theoretically, the attributes associated with the negative pole of morality are more reliable and have shown to have higher evaluative weight. However, the current research usually employs only positive attributes to measure each dimension. Since the advantages of the inclusion of negative morality are clear it would be interesting to know about the effects of the inclusion of such type of attributes (i.e., it is good or bad for the measurement). The purpose of this study is to examine if the addition of negative items makes possible to improve the stereotype content measures. This study compares the differences between scales with various compositions of positive and negative items of stereotypes to predict three related variables: anger, fear and a semantic differential of evaluation. The study was carried out with a sample of 550 Spaniards. The data found highlights the importance of using attributes of the negative pole of morality in studying stereotypes. Their use was able to explain the intergroup emotional responses and the semantic differential more efficiently.     

The Social Causes and Political Consequences of Group Empathy

Recent scholarship has discovered significant racial/ethnic group variation in response to political threats such as immigration and terrorism. Surprisingly, minority groups often simultaneously perceive themselves to be at greater risk from such threats and yet still prefer more open immigration policies and civil liberties protections. We suggest a group‐level empathy process may explain this puzzle: Due to their higher levels of empathy for other disadvantaged groups, many minority group members support protections for others even when their own interests are threatened. Little is known, however, about the unique properties of group empathy or its role in policy opinion formation. In this study, we examine the reliability and validity of our new measure of group empathy, the Group Empathy Index (GEI), demonstrating that it is distinct from other social and political predispositions such as ethnocentrism, social dominance orientation, authoritarianism, ideology, and partisanship. We then propose a theory about the development of group empathy in reaction to life experiences based on one's race/ethnicity, gender, age, and education. Finally, we examine the power of group empathy to predict policy attitudes and political behavior.     

Resilience,religiosity and treatment adherence in hemodialysis patients: a prospective study

Resilience and religiosity have received attention as an important process in the experience and management of chronic comorbidities; however, there is no study evaluating resilience in hemodialysis patients and its association with other psychological dimensions or with treatment adherence. This observational prospective study assessed resilience (25 item Wagnild and Young Resilience Scale), religiosity under three dimensions (organizational, non-organizational and intrinsic) using DUREL scale, depressive symptoms (Patient Health Questionnaire-9) and health-related quality of life (Short Form-36 questionnaire). The main outcomes were medication adherence using the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale-8 (MMAR-8) and the missing/shortened dialysis sessions in the following six months. Of 208 patients approached, 202 (97.1%) agreed to participate. One hundred twenty-three patients (60.9%) were males and mean age was 52.8 ± 14.8 years-old. The median time on hemodialysis was 36 months (IQR, 12, 84). 82 (40.6%) patients obtained a MMAS-8 score <6 and were considered as having ‘poor adherence’. Overall, the mean score of medication adherence was low (5.7 ± 2.1). About adherence to hemodialysis sessions, patients missed a total of 234 (1.6%) hemodialysis sessions. Forty-eight patients (23.7%) missed an average of at least three sessions in six months. Regarding adherence to medication, there was no association in the uni- or multivariate analysis between religiosity dimensions and MMAS-8 score. After adjustment, resilience was positively associated with MMAS-8 score (standardized β coefficient .239, p = .016). Organized and intrinsic religiosity were associated with adherence to dialysis sessions (standardized β coefficient .258, p = .004 and .231, p = .026, respectively). Interestingly, opposite to medication adherence, more resilient patients were associated with less adherence to hemodialysis sessions (standardized β coefficient ?.296, p = .001). Religiosity was associated with dialysis adherence but not with medication adherence. Resilience was associated with higher medication adherence but lower adherence to dialysis sessions.     

Is Stephen Hawking Building Walls? A Cosmic Dilemma

Stephen Hawking leaves us with the ancient hospitality dilemma: do we welcome ETIs as immigrants or build a wall to keep them away?     

Inventory of Overburden in Alzheimer's Patient Family Caregivers with no Specialized Training

Background/Objective: Alzheimer-type dementia is one of the most frequent causes of dependence in an aging population, which combines with a considerable demand for care. Furthermore, when the caregiver is a family member or person without specialized training, such care impacts on that person's health. The Inventory of Overburden in Alzheimer's Patient Family Caregivers with no Specialized Training (IPSO-CA24) was designed to find out the needs of these caregivers and evaluate the caregiver's burden or distress. Method: The psychometric properties of the questionnaire were analyzed (in a reliability analysis, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory analysis) based on the responses of 255 caregivers. Results: The factor analyses showed a six-factor structure (Reaction to diagnosis, Physical health, Psychological symptomatology (caretaker), Behavioral symptomatology (patient), Knowledge of the illness, and Level of dependence) explaining 66.52% of the total variance with a reliability of .75 to .93. Support was also found for its convergent validity. Conclusions: The IPSO-CA24 responds to the need for an instrument enabling multidimensional evaluation of the burden on the family caregiver without specialized training.     

The contribution of facial regions to judgements of happiness and trustworthiness from dynamic expressions

What expressive facial features and processing mechanisms make a person look trustworthy, relative to happy? Participants judged the un/happiness or un/trustworthiness of people with dynamic expressions in which the eyes and/or the mouth unfolded from neutral to happy or vice versa. Faces with an unfolding smile looked more trustworthy and happier than faces with a neutral mouth, regardless of the eye expression. Unfolding happy eyes increased both trustworthiness and happiness only in the presence of a congruent unfolding smiling mouth. Nevertheless, the contribution of the mouth was greater for happiness than for trustworthiness; and the mouth was especially visually salient for expressions favouring happiness more than trustworthiness. We conclude that the categorisation of facial happiness is more automatically driven by the visual saliency of a single feature, that is, the smiling mouth, while perception of trustworthiness is more strategic, with the eyes being necessarily incorporated into a configural face representation.     

A confirmatory factor analysis of the "Autoconcepto Forma 5" questionnaire in young adults from Spain and Chile

The aim of this work is to examine the pentafactorial validity of the AF5 Self-Concept Questionnaire in Spanish and Chilean young adults. From the responses of a total of 4,383 young adults aged 17 to 22 years (1,918 Spanish, 44%, and 2,465 Chilean, 56%) it was analyzed the reliability of the instrument, the compared validity of the 5 oblique factor model proposed by the authors versus the unifactorial and the orthogonal alternative models, and was studied the invariance of one Chilean sample. The results of confirmatory factor analyses supported the authors' pentafactorial model. The multi-group factorial invariance showed that Chilean sample of the AF5 does not change neither the Spanish factor weights, nor the variances and covariances of the factors, or the error variances of items. Finally, the internal consistency of the five scales was good in the samples of both countries.     

Predicting team output using indices at group level

The present study explores the usefulness of dyadic quantification of group characteristics to predict team work performance. After reviewing the literature regarding team member characteristics predicting group performance, percentages of explained variance between 3% and 18% were found. These studies have followed an individualistic approach to measure group characteristics (e. g., mean and variance), based on aggregation. The aim of the present work was testing whether by means of dyadic measures group output prediction percentage could be increased. The basis of dyadic measures is data obtained from an interdependent pairs of individuals. Specifically, the present research was intended to develop a new dyadic index to measure personality dissimilarity in groups and to explore whether dyadic measurements allow improving groups' outcome predictions compared to individualistic methods. By means of linear regression, 49.5 % of group performance variance was explained using the skew-symmetry and the proposed dissimilarity index in personality as predictors. These results support the usefulness of the dyadic approach for predicting group outcomes.