Ethical social justice: Do the ends justify the means?

This article offers an ethical decision‐making model, informed by community psychology values, as a means for guiding psychologists when engaging in social justice‐oriented work. The applicability of this model is demonstrated through a case analysis elucidating how America's psychologists individually and collectively arrived at the decision to endorse torture—ostensibly as a means for preventing terrorism. Critics have wondered how the American Psychological Association succumbed to these involvements, and how to prevent such ethical lapses in the future. Unfortunately, the American Psychological Association's ethical codes fail to provide explicit guidance for psychologists' involvement in social justice work that impacts communities and systems. To address this gap, we present a values‐driven, ethical decision‐making framework that may be used to guide psychologists' future practices. This framework infuses fundamental community psychology values (i.e., caring and compassion; health; self‐determination and participation, human diversity, social justice; and critical reflexivity) into a 9‐step model.     

Maintenance of Parent-Implemented Discrete-Trial Instruction during Videoconferencing

Access to behavior-analytic professionals who can implement interventions like discrete-trial instruction (DTI) may be limited for families living in rural communities. We trained four rural parents of children with autism to implement DTI accurately with a confederate using in vivo behavioral skills training. The DTI skills that parents demonstrated with a confederate generalized to working with their children. We then assessed whether periodic supervision during videoconferencing maintained parents’ DTI skills following training. Parents accurately implemented untrained DTI programs with their children and maintained accurate implementation over several months of remote supervision occurring twice a week, weekly, and biweekly. Videoconferencing may be an effective way for individuals responsible for direct implementation to maintain contact with behavior analysts who are not locally accessible.     

When Mothers’ Work Matters for Youths’ Daily Time Use: Implications of Evening and Weekend Shifts

Drawing upon the work-home resources model, this study examined the implications of mothers’ evening and weekend shifts for youths’ time with mother, alone, and hanging out with peers unsupervised, with attention to both the amount and day-to-day consistency of time use. Data came from 173 mothers who worked in the long-term care industry and their youths who provided daily diaries. Multilevel modeling revealed that youths whose mothers worked more evening shifts on average spent less time with their mothers compared to youths whose mothers worked fewer evening shifts. Youths whose mothers worked more weekend shifts, however, spent more time with their mothers and exhibited less consistency in their time in all three activity domains compared to youths whose mothers worked fewer weekend shifts. Girls, not boys, spent less time alone on days when mothers worked weekend shifts than on days with standard shifts. Older but not younger adolescents spent more time hanging out with friends on evening and weekend shift days, and their unsupervised peer time was less consistent across days when mothers worked more evening shifts. These effects adjusted for sociodemographic and day characteristics, including school day, number of children in the household, mothers’ marital status and work hours, and time with fathers. Our results illuminate the importance of the timing and day of mothers’ work for youths’ daily activities. Future interventions should consider how to increase mothers’ resources to deal with constraints on parenting due to their work during nonstandard hours, with attention to child gender and age.     

Norman Garmezy (1918-2009)

Norman Garmezy, a pioneer in research on risk and resilience, died in Nashville, Tennessee, on November 21, 2009, at the age of 91. He was a legendary mentor as well as an eminent scientist in clinical psychology. Norm was born on June 18, 1918, in New York City and grew up in the Bronx in a Jewish neighborhood where educational attainment was highly valued. The scientific study of resilience as conceived by Norman Garmezy, his peers, and students has transformed the science and practice of multiple disciplines, from the molecular level to the global ecosystem, infusing a strength-based and recovery-oriented approach into psychology, education, social work, and psychiatry. Current research on resilience ranges from studies of plasticity in brain development to effective planning for resilience in the context of disaster. Norm's influential ideas and research earned him international acclaim and many honors for lifetime achievements in science. Throughout his career, Norm held many leadership roles. Throughout his life, Norm spoke with great love about his wife of 63 years, Edie Garmezy (who died just months before him in 2009), and their children. In addition to his work and his family, Norm had three abiding passions-theater, movies, and politics. During the last two decades of his life, Norm and those who loved him endured his long decline from Alzheimer's, which slowly stole his brilliant mind and hilarious sense of humor. Nonetheless, the incredible spirit and humanity of this giant scholar continued to shine through this terrible disease. To the end of his life, Norm's face would light up with a smile as he greeted the people he loved, and he would often exclaim, "Wonderful!" Norman Garmezy was a remarkable person and scholar who left an extraordinary legacy of love and work to inspire future generations in their efforts to understand and promote the human capacity for competence and resilience.     

Interactions between early parenting and a polymorphism of the child's dopamine transporter gene in predicting future child conduct disorder symptoms

Mounting evidence suggests that genetic risks for mental disorders often interact with the social environment, but most studies still ignore environmental moderation of genetic influences. The authors tested interactions between maternal parenting and the variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) polymorphism in the 3' untranslated region of the dopamine transporter gene in the child to increase understanding of gene-environment interactions involving early parenting. Participants were part of a 9-year longitudinal study of 4- to 6-year-old children who met criteria for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and demographically matched controls. Maternal parenting was observed during standard mother-child interactions in Wave 1. The child's conduct disorder (CD) symptoms 5-8 years later were measured using separate structured diagnostic interviews of the mother and youth. Controlling for ADHD symptoms and child disruptive behavior during the mother-child interaction, there was a significant inverse relation between levels of both positive and negative parenting at 4-6 years and the number of later CD symptoms, but primarily among children with 2 copies of the 9-repeat allele of the VNTR. The significant interaction with negative parenting was replicated in parent and youth reports of CD symptoms separately.     

The interiorizing movement of logical life: reflections on Wolfgang Giegerich

The following article is an account of my discovery of and subsequent immersion in Wolfgang Giegerich's work. A sampling of his voluminous writings on the soul is set out to illustrate how he attempts to penetrate thinkingly into psychological phenomena and his claim that this inevitably brings out their internal dialectic. The article summarizes his critiques of Jung, Hillman, and The Red Book: Liber Novus.     

The organization of narrative discourse in Lewy body spectrum disorder

Narrative discourse is an essential component of day-to-day communication, but little is known about narrative in Lewy body spectrum disorder (LBSD), including Parkinson’s disease (PD), Parkinson’s disease with dementia (PDD), and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). We performed a detailed analysis of a semi-structured speech sample in 32 non-aphasic patients with LBSD, and we related their narrative impairments to gray matter (GM) atrophy using voxel-based morphometry. We found that patients with PDD and DLB have significant difficulty organizing their narrative speech. This was correlated with deficits on measures of executive functioning and speech fluency. Regression analyses associated this deficit with reduced cortical volume in inferior frontal and anterior cingulate regions. These findings are consistent with a model of narrative discourse that includes executive as well as language components and with an impairment of the organizational component of narrative discourse in patients with PDD and DLB.     

Age-independent effects of pubertal status on behavioral constraint in healthy adolescents

Studies have examined age-related changes in personality traits from adolescence through young adulthood, finding that aspects of negative emotionality decrease while conscientiousness increases over time. Varied mechanisms may underlie these transitions, including puberty-driven hormonal changes. Here, healthy adolescents completed the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire-Brief Form and self-report measures of pubertal status at baseline and after two years. Independent of age, pubertal status impacted primary trait scales of the MPQ-BF Constraint factor in a sex-specific manner. Females decreased in Constraint, and particularly Control, while males increased in Constraint, and particularly Harm Avoidance, with advancing puberty. Longitudinal analyses validated these findings for Control. Findings are discussed relative to males’ versus females’ achievement of optimal levels of behavioral control in adolescence.