Perceived intergroup threat and attitudes of host community members toward immigrant acculturation

The authors expected the extent to which host community members (a) perceive immigrants as threatening, (b) believe that the immigrants are able to assimilate to the host community (permeability), and (c) consider their presence in the host community as legitimate to predict attitudes towards immigrant acculturation. The authors designed Study 1 to examine attitudes of Germans toward Turkish immigrants. Participants were 227 German white-collar and blue-collar workers. As expected, ethnocentric acculturation attitudes positively correlated with perceived threat and negatively correlated with perceived legitimacy and perceived permeability. However, only perceived threat contributed uniquely to the prediction of the attitudes. In Study 2, the authors applied an experimental manipulation of perceived threat. Before answering attitude questions, participants read magazine articles with a threatening, enriching, or irrelevant content. The manipulation had the predicted impact on the self-reported attitudes toward immigrants. However, the salience of threatening or enriching aspects of the Turkish culture did not affect implicitly measured attitudes.     

A qualitative study of the therapists' experiences of working with community reinforcement and family training

Community reinforcement and family training (CRAFT) was developed to help and support concerned significant others (CSO) of people with, for example, alcohol use disorder. The aim of this study was to investigate therapists' experiences of working with CRAFT and their experiences of the CSOs receiving CRAFT. The study has a qualitative design and is based on three focus group interviews with 17 therapists. Interviews were analysed using thematic analysis. The analysis revealed six themes and four subthemes: Concerned significant others—A special group; Help prior to CRAFT—Offering information and a shoulder; CRAFT as a new and specific method (The toolbox of CRAFT, Formats for delivering CRAFT, Introducing a diary as homework and Implementing self-help material—Alone or in combination with sessions); Moving from a lack of structure to structure; Change in CSOs from the therapists' point of view; and Change in the therapist's role (Dilemmas—Personalising the intervention). The therapists were generally satisfied with the method and found it easy to adapt to. Moreover, working using a manual was more structured than they were used to and increased feelings of working professionally with the CSOs. Specifically, most therapists found the self-help book useful and indispensable in their work with CRAFT, but also agreed that it could not be used as a stand-alone intervention for most CSOs. The therapists' experiences are relevant for implementation of manualised, structured approaches and group-based interventions more broadly.     

Power and Caution: The Ethics of Self‐Disclosure

Abstract. Good teaching is both powerful and cautious. It is powerful insofar as it creates engaged students. Because an engaged mind is particularly receptive, however, good teaching is also cautious insofar as it provides students with focused guidance through the process of appropriating the learning material. This article reflects critically on expressionist pedagogy by evaluating a classroom situation in which students reacted in unexpected ways to the professor's disclosure of a personal story. It concludes that effective teaching exceeds the goal of merely facilitating student engagement. That is, the use of self‐disclosure has the power to create engaged students, but it also requires cautious content consideration when facilitating post‐disclosure learning. If, by using the powerful expressionist pedagogy of self‐disclosure, we engage students but fail to cautiously guide them through the learning material, we have not taken seriously the ethical responsibility that teaching also implies.     

Kreuzvalidierung der Kurzform des Kindheitsfragebogens

Objectives

Existing questionnaires about parent-child relationships usually assess love and control only. The childhood questionnaire (CQ) offers a more differentiating alternative.

Methods

In a sample of approximately 1,400 patients and more than 500 controls the CQ was reduced from 22 to 11 scales and the number of items of each scale was shortened to 5.

Results

The shortened scales of the CQ also showed good reliability and item characteristics, as well as plausible intercorrelations.

Conclusion

By the use of 66 out of the former 128 items, the shortened version of the CQ assesses three further important dimensions in the parent-child relationship of adults towards their parents in childhood besides love and control: punishment, ambition and role reversal. Beside this, parental separation, divorce and job status as well as various parameters of the socio-economic status (e.g. educational, occupational and financial) of the parents can be assessed.     

What characterizes life story memories? A diary study of Freshmen’s first term

We investigated whether memories are selected for the life story based on event characteristics. Sixty-one students completed weekly diaries over their first term at university. They described, dated and rated two events each week. Three months after the end of the term they completed an unexpected memory test. They recalled three memories from the diary period that were important to their life story. Three randomly selected events scoring low on importance to the life story functioned as control memories. Life story memories were rated higher on goal relevance, emotional intensity, importance and rehearsal in the diary and maintained their higher ratings at the test session, while ratings for control memories dropped off. Life story memories' content was less consistent over time but they were more accurately dated than control memories. The results suggest that event characteristics play an important role for the selection of life story memories.     

Analyzing conditions for recognizing pictures of family members in a patient with Alzheimer's disease

In the present study, an 89‐year‐old woman with the neurocognitive disorder Alzheimer's disease participated. The purpose was to study recognition of the participant's relatives' faces with the use of sorting tests and matching‐to‐sample (MTS) trainings and tests for emergent relations. The stimuli used were pictures of her relatives, their written names, and their family relationship. The study also focused on how responding to pictures of relatives changed over time. Therefore, the participant was presented with experimental conditions over three time periods. Time Period 1 included only sorting tests. In Time Period 2, which began 9 months after Time Period 1, the participant was presented with both sorting tests and conditional discrimination training and testing. In Time Period 3, which began 1 year after Time Period 2, both sorting tests and conditional discrimination training and testing were again presented. The results from Time Periods 2 and 3 showed that the percentage of stimuli sorted correctly was maintained over time. Additionally, the results from the MTS training and tests were maintained at the second follow‐up periods.