Career Decision‐Making Intervention With Unemployed Adults: When Good Intentions Are Not Effective

This study adapted existing empirically supported interventions to explore options for serving large numbers of unemployed adults. Participants included 150 unemployed adults (72 experimental group, 78 control group) seeking employment office services to maintain U.S. federal unemployment compensation. A 1‐hour workshop was offered to the 72 experimental group participants. The same career development variables were assessed during data collection for both groups. Results revealed the workshop had no impact on negative career thinking and potentially increased career decision‐making difficulties in the experimental group. Intervention effectiveness issues, implications for future research, and intervention options with unemployed adults are discussed.     

Analytic Standard Errors for Exploratory Process Factor Analysis

Exploratory process factor analysis (EPFA) is a data-driven latent variable model for multivariate time series. This article presents analytic standard errors for EPFA. Unlike standard errors for exploratory factor analysis with independent data, the analytic standard errors for EPFA take into account the time dependency in time series data. In addition, factor rotation is treated as the imposition of equality constraints on model parameters. Properties of the analytic standard errors are demonstrated using empirical and simulated data.     

Predictors of Genetic Testing Decisions: A Systematic Review and Critique of the Literature

Genetic testing is increasingly available in medical settings and direct-to-consumer. However, the large and growing literature on genetic testing decisions is rife with conflicting findings, inconsistent methodology, and uneven attention across test types and across predictors of genetic testing decisions. Existing reviews of the literature draw broad conclusions but sacrifice nuanced analysis that with a closer look reveals far more inconsistency than homogeny across studies. The goals of this paper are to provide a systematic review of the empirical work on predictors of genetic testing decisions, highlight areas of consistency and inconsistency, and suggest productive directions for future research. We included all studies that provided quantitative analysis of subjective (e.g., perceived risk, perceived benefits of testing) and/or objective (e.g., family history, sociodemographic variables) predictors of genetic testing interest, intentions, or uptake, which produced a sample of 115 studies. From this review, we conclude that self-reported and test-related (as opposed to disorder-related or objective) predictors are relatively consistent across studies but that theoretically-driven efforts to examine testing interest across test types are sorely needed.     

Sense of coherence as a protective factor for psychological distress among gay men: a prospective cohort study

Gay men face a greater risk of psychological distress than heterosexual men, yet research on protective factors among gay men has been limited. This prospective cohort study investigated whether a sense of coherence (SOC), as a form of coping, helps to protect against psychological distress among middle-aged and older gay men. A nationwide online survey was conducted among a baseline sample of 1135 Australian gay-identified men aged 40 years and older, with a follow-up survey 12 months later. SOC was measured using the 13-item SOC Scale. Psychological distress was measured using the K10 Psychological Distress Scale. Hierarchical regressions were conducted, with analyses controlling for several potential risk factors for distress. Over half of participants had moderate or high psychological distress. However, baseline distress was significantly lower among those with stronger baseline SOC. In addition, baseline SOC significantly predicted distress 12 months later. This predictive effect of SOC was independent of baseline distress levels and occurred despite a strong correlation between baseline and follow-up distress. With SOC appearing to be a protective factor, strategies among middle-aged and older gay men that strengthen SOC may assist in the prevention and treatment of anxiety and other psychological distress in this vulnerable population.     

Paternal care may influence perceptions of paternal resemblance

Father-child resemblance is increasingly attracting attention from researchers interested in studying paternal investment. The current study sought to determine whether a quasi-experimental infant massage intervention would increase father's perceptions of resemblance. The study included a dozen fathers in each of two groups: the first received an intensive series of lessons on infant-father massage along with their infants, while the second group served as a neutral control. We failed to find significant correlations between paternal investment and resemblance, but we found that fathers who participated in the infant massage intervention reported significantly larger post-study ratings of resemblance and lower ratings of paternal stress. This suggests that the relationship between father-child resemblance and paternal investment may be bidirectional.     

The Prevalence of Well-Being on Teachers in Afri Twin Schools as Well as Non Afri Twin Schools

This study investigated the self-perceived preparedness of students from a historically disadvantaged rural South African setting for psychology studies at a university. The study sample comprised 399 beginning students with a historically Black university (age M = 22.8 years, SD = 5.1; 72.2% women; 65.7% rural background) students. The students responded to a questionnaire investigating, inter alia, prior awareness of the subject, access to psychology literature, awareness of psychologists in their communities, perceived relevance to or clashes with their culture, and parental awareness of the subject. Of the sample, 48.1% first heard about psychology upon entering a university, 75.7% had no access to books on the subject, and only 44.6% received information from their school teachers about psychology as a career. Significantly more urban (65.2%) than rural (34.8%) students had received information about psychology before coming to university.     

Flow state in self-paced and externally-paced performance contexts: An examination of the flow model

ObjectivesKimiecik and Stein's (1992) flow model proposed that personal and situational factors affect the experience of flow. Singer, 1988, Singer, 2000 argued that different mental processes underlie self-initiated and reactive performances. The first purpose of this study was to examine main and interaction effects between imagery use and confidence on flow state in different performance contexts. The second purpose was to assess main and interaction effects between flow state, imagery, and confidence on self-paced service and externally-paced groundstroke performance in tennis.DesignThis field study used a repeated-measures design.MethodA pilot study was conducted to inform the set up of the two performance contexts. Flow states were assessed on two separate occasions, (a) for the service performance, and (b) for the groundstroke performance. A total of 60 junior tennis athletes completed imagery and confidence measures before the field test.ResultsA significant interaction between imagery and confidence was found for flow state in the groundstroke but not in the service task. No significant interaction effects were found for performance outcome. Flow state significantly predicted groundstroke performance, and imagery and confidence predicted service performance.ConclusionsThe examination of flow in different performance contexts is challenging. Imagery and confidence are central to the experience of flow. Flow state appeared to be more important for the externally-paced than self-paced task. The relationship between flow and performance is complex, which requires the conceptual expansion of Kimiecik and Stein's (1992) flow model.     

Resolution of outcome-induced response conflict by humans after extended training

Studies of incongruent discrimination learning, where the outcome event of one response acts as the discriminative stimulus for the opposite response, suggest that humans rely on habitual stimulus–response (S–R) associations when outcome–response (O–R) associations would cause response conflict. Here, two experiments were conducted to investigate the robustness of this habitual strategy. In Experiment 1, we found that extensive instrumental discrimination training supported learning about the incongruent R → O contingencies, as assessed by an outcome devaluation test. Differential representations of the stimulus and the (associatively retrieved) outcome may have allowed for goal-directed incongruent performance. Experiment 2 failed to provide evidence for this possibility; direct presentation as well as associative retrieval of the incongruent events (by Pavlovian stimuli) activated the response that was associated with each event in its role of stimulus as opposed to outcome. We did find that participants successfully acquired explicit knowledge of the incongruent contingencies, which raises the possibility that propositional encoding allowed them to overcome the response conflict caused by O–R associations. Alternative associative and propositional accounts of successful goal-directed incongruent performance with extensive training will be discussed.     

Mentalization-Based Treatment

The concept of mentalizing has captured the interest and imagination of an astonishing range of people—from psychoanalysts to neuroscientists, from child development researchers to geneticists, from existential philosophers to phenomenologists—all of whom seem to have found it useful. According to the Thompson Reuter maintained Web of Science, the use of the term in titles and abstracts of scientific papers increased from 10 to 2,750 between 1991 and 2011. Clinicians in particular have enthusiastically embraced the idea, and have put it to innovative use in their practices. Mentalization-based treatment (MBT)—making mentalizing a core focus of therapy—was initially developed for the treatment of borderline personality disorder (BPD) in routine clinical services delivered in group and individual modalities. Therapy with mentalizing as a central component is currently being developed for treatment of numerous groups, including people with antisocial personality disorder, substance abuse, eating disorders, and at-risk mothers with infants and children (A. Bateman & Fonagy, 2011). It is also being used with families and adolescents, in schools, and in managing social groups (Asen & Fonagy, 2011; Fonagy et al., 2009; Twemlow, Fonagy, & Sacco, 2005a Twemlow, S. W., Fonagy, P. and Sacco, F. C. 2005a. A developmental approach to mentalizing communities: I. A model for social change. Bull. Menninger Clin, 69(4): 265–281. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2005b). In this article, we focus on MBT in the treatment of BPD.     

Vacancy trapping on lattices with different coordination numbers

Abstract

The kinetics of disorder→order transformations in alloys have been studied by Monte Carlo simulations. These simulations employed a vacancy diffusion mechanism, and were set on lattices having different coordination numbers, z. At low temperatures, the vacancy mobility is dominated by processes in which the vacancy becomes confined to local atomic arrangements that serve as vacancy traps. The scaling with z of the ordering kinetics can be interpreted in terms of the strengths and probabilities of vacancy traps on the different lattices.