Relevance of multicultural training to students' applications to clinical psychology programs

Interest in the efficacy of multicultural training for practitioners and scientists working with multicultural populations has led to questions about the characteristics of students who seek this training. Students of ethnic minority background, as compared with White students, may be more likely to seek programs that offer this training, and their ethnic or racial identity may be related to this preference. This study explores the relevance of multicultural training to White and ethnic minority graduate students in accredited clinical psychology programs. Students rated the relevance of multicultural and general training components to their decisions about where to apply to graduate school. The ethnic minority students' mean ratings of the relevance of multicultural components were higher than those of White students, and the degree of ethnic minority students' ethnic identification was positively correlated to these relevance ratings.     

Prefrontal cortex regulates inhibition and excitation in distributed neural networks.

Prefrontal cortex provides both inhibitory and excitatory input to distributed neural circuits required to support performance in diverse tasks. Neurological patients with prefrontal damage are impaired in their ability to inhibit task-irrelevant information during behavioral tasks requiring performance over a delay. The observed enhancements of primary auditory and somatosensory cortical responses to task-irrelevant distractors suggest that prefrontal damage disrupts inhibitory modulation of inputs to primary sensory cortex, perhaps through abnormalities in a prefrontal-thalamic sensory gating system. Failure to suppress irrelevant sensory information results in increased neural noise, contributing to the deficits in decision making routinely observed in these patients. In addition to a critical role in inhibitory control of sensory flow to primary cortical regions, and tertiary prefrontal cortex also exerts excitatory input to activity in multiple sub-regions of secondary association cortex. Unilateral prefrontal damage results in multi-modal decreases in neural activity in posterior association cortex in the hemisphere ipsilateral to damage. This excitatory modulation is necessary to sustain neural activity during working memory. Thus, prefrontal cortex is able to sculpt behavior through parallel inhibitory and excitatory regulation of neural activity in distributed neural networks.     

Relationship of Connected and Separate Knowing to Parental Style and Birth Order

A total of 249 primarily middle-class, Caucasian college students (141 females, 108 males) completed the Knowing Styles Inventory (KSI) (Knight, Elfenbein, & Messina, 1995) to measure Connected and Separate Knowing and the Parental Authority Questionnaire (PAQ) (Buri, 1991), used to measure different parenting styles (authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive parenting). Authoritative parenting style of the mother was positively associated with Connected Knowing, while authoritative parenting style of the father was negatively related to Separate Knowing for both the female and male participants of the study. For the female participants only, permissive parenting style of the father was positively related to Separate Knowing. It was also found that first-born college students scored significantly higher on Separate Knowing than later-born students. The results suggest that family experiences may be precursors to the epistemologies of college students.     

Higher Pantheism

Romantic sensibility and political necessity led Humphry Davy, Britain's most prominent scientist in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, to pantheism: nature worship, involving for him a fervent belief in the immortality of the soul. Rapt with a vision of sublimity, from mountain tops or balloons, men of science in succeeding generations also found in pantheism a reason for their vocation and a way of making sense of their world. It should be seen as an alternative both to active participation in church life (like Faraday's) and to a gritty agnosticism (like Huxley's), indicating again how subtle and complex relationships were between science and religion in the nineteenth century.     

Orbitofrontal cortex and dynamic filtering of emotional stimuli

Event-related potentials (ER) were recorded in response to mildly aversive somatosensory and auditory stimuli. Patients with orbitofrontal lesions exhited enhanced ERPs (i.e., P3 amplitudes), as compared with control subjects. Moreover, these patients did not habituate to somatoensory stimuli across blocks of trials. The results were specific to orbitofrontal damage, since patients with damage to the dorsolateral prefontal cortex did not exhibit enhanced P3 amplitudes. These findings suggest damage to the orbitofrontal cortex impairs the ability to modulate or inhibit neural responses to aversive stimuli. The findings are couched in terms of dynamic filtering theory, which suggests that the orbitofrontal cortex is involved in the selection and active inhibition of neural circuits associated with emotional responses.     

Duration-based measures of preference for vocational tasks

We compared results from two preference assessments with data on extended performance of vocational tasks by 4 participants with developmental disabilities. All participants engaged in one task exclusively when seven tasks were available concurrently during a 5-min multiple-stimulus assessment. By contrast, all participants exhibited high levels of engagement in most tasks when the tasks were presented singly for 5 min, and these data showed a high degree of correspondence with those obtained during extended (60-min) vocational assessments.     

Alexithymia is not related to tolerance for cold pressor pain

To test the hypothesis that higher scores on alexithymia are associated with reduced tolerance for cold pressor pain, 116 college undergraduates completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 of Bagby, Parker and Taylor and engaged in the cold pressor test. Their alexithymia scores were not associated with tolerance for cold pressor pain, suggesting that individuals scoring high on alexithymia do not show a general hypersensitivity to a cold stimulus.