Treatment Outcomes and Perceived Benefits: A Qualitative and Quantitative Assessment of a Women's Substance Abuse Treatment Program

This study examines outcomes of a women's substance abuse treatment program based on empowerment, choice, and client/therapist collaboration. The program was assessed through qualitative and quantitative research methods. The article includes extensive quotes from six client interviews as well as data from pre-post surveys of 50 women in the treatment program. Results show that the women felt they benefited from the collaborative treatment approach. Benefits to the women included feeling more empowered and learning to take responsibility for their lives. The importance of taking a broad view of recovery that includes ongoing evaluation of positive changes in various areas of the clients' lives is discussed.     

Task-dependent costs in processing two simultaneous auditory stimuli

A listener presented with two speech signals must at times sacrifice the processing of one signal in order to understand the other. This study was designed to distinguish costs related to interference from a second signal (selective attention) from costs related to performing two tasks simultaneously (divided attention). Listeners presented with two processed speech-in-noise stimuli, one to each ear, either (1) identified keywords in both or (2) identified keywords in one and detected the presence of speech in the other. Listeners either knew which ear to report in advance (single task) or were cued afterward (partial-report dual task). When the dual task required two identification judgments, performance suffered relative to the single-task condition (as measured by percent correct judgments). Two different tasks (identification for one stimulus and detection for the other) resulted in much smaller reductions in performance when the cue came afterward. We concluded that the degree to which listeners can simultaneously process dichotic speech stimuli seems to depend not only on the amount of interference between the two stimuli, but also on whether there is competition for limited processing resources. We suggest several specific hypotheses as to the structural mechanisms that could constitute these limited resources.     

What results when firms implement practices: the differential relationship between specific practices, firm financial performance, customer service, and quality

Previous research on organizational practices is replete with contradictory evidence regarding their effects. Here, the authors argue that these contradictory findings may have occurred because researchers have often examined complex practice combinations and have failed to investigate a broad variety of firm-level outcomes. Thus, past research may obscure important differential effects of specific practices on specific firm-level outcomes. Extending this research, the authors develop hypotheses about the effects of practices that (a) enable information sharing, (b) set boundaries, and (c) enable teams on 3 different firm-level outcomes: financial performance, customer service, and quality. Relationships are tested in a sample of observations from over 200 Fortune 1000 firms. Results indicate that information-sharing practices were positively related to financial performance 1 year following implementation of the practices, boundary-setting practices were positively related to firm-level customer service, and team-enabling practices were related to firm-level quality. No single set of practices predicted all 3 firm-level outcomes, indicating practice-specific effects. These findings help resolve the theoretical tension in the literature regarding the effects of organizational practices and offer guidance as to how to best target practices to increase specific work-related outcomes. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed.     

Development of a mentoring program for Chinese immigrant adolescents' cultural adjustment

The development and evaluation of a peer mentoring program for Chinese immigrant adolescents' cultural adjustment is described. Twenty-three high school students who recently immigrated from Mainland China participated in the year-long program and 4 high school students served as their peer mentors. Data analyses revealed that the students who participated in the mentoring program had significantly higher peer attachment-trust and need for closeness scores at post-test than at pre-test. Implications for working with adolescent immigrants are discussed.     

Age-related changes and the attention network task: an examination of alerting, orienting, and executive function

The effects of aging on alerting, orienting, and executive function were examined with the use of the Attention Network Task, which combines the Posner spatial cuing task and the Eriksen flanker task into a single procedure. We found that older adults showed significantly less alerting than young adults in response to a warning cue, although there were no age differences in orienting or executive function once processing speed was taken into account. We suggest that age differences in alerting may depend in part upon the presentation duration or persistence of the warning cue.     

Possible differences in family patterns in anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa

This paper examines the interactions in three families, one where the daughter had anorexia nervosa and two where the daughters had bulimia nervosa, and proposes some differences in the families’ patterns of enmeshment. It is hypothesized that these may be linked to differences in the development of the mother—child relationship. Implications for the choice of therapeutic strategies are discussed.     

MMPI Profiles of Liver and Heart Transplant Candidates With and Without Significant Histories of Heavy Alcohol Use

This study compared the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) profiles of liver and heart transplant candidates with (n = 104) and without (n = 253) significant histories of heavy alcohol consumption. The alcohol and nonalcohol groups had similar overall mean profiles with significant or marginally significant (i.e., T 69) clinical elevations on Scales 1, 2, and 3. However, significantly higher proportions of those in the liver transplant group than in the heart transplant group scored within the clinical range on Scales F, 4, 6, and 8. In addition, the proportions of respondents obtaining clinically elevated scores were significantly higher for the alcohol than for the nonalcohol group on Scale 4 and the MacAndrew Scale; the proportion was higher for the nonalcohol than for the alcohol group on Scale K. The overall similarity of the mean profiles indicates that candidates for liver or heart transplantation with and without histories of heavy alcohol use generally display similar psychological presentations. The observed differences between the liver and the heart transplant groups may reflect impairments in mental status among liver transplant candidates due to metabolic consequences of liver disease. The differences between the alcohol and the nonalcohol groups may be more a reflection of past behavioral patterns than present psychological status.     

Contextual-Hierarchical Reconstructions of the Strengthened Liar Problem

In this paper we shall introduce two types of contextual-hierarchical (from now on abbreviated by ‘ch’) approaches to the strengthened liar problem. These approaches, which we call the ‘standard’ and the ‘alternative’ ch-reconstructions of the strengthened liar problem, differ in their philosophical view regarding the nature of truth and the relation between the truth predicates T r ⁿ and T r ⁿ⁺¹ of different hierarchy-levels. The basic idea of the standard ch-reconstruction is that the T r ⁿ⁺¹-schema should hold for all sentences of \(\mathcal {L}^{n}\). In contrast, the alternative ch-reconstruction, for which we shall argue in section four, is motivated by the idea that T r ⁿ and T r ⁿ⁺¹ are coherent in the sense that the same sentences of \(\mathcal {L}^{n}\) should be true according to T r ⁿ and T r ⁿ⁺¹. We show that instances of the standard ch-reconstruction can be obtained by iterating Kripke’s strong Kleene jump operator. Furthermore, we will demonstrate how instances of the alternative ch-reconstruction can be obtained by a slight modification of the iterated axiom system KF and of the iterated strong Kleene jump operator.     

A review of Evidence‐Based Evaluation of Measures for Assessing Social and Emotional Well‐Being in Indigenous Australians

Addressing low levels of social and emotional well‐being (SEWB) in Indigenous communities has been a national strategic priority for over 10 years and yet progress in assessing the impact of interventions has been slow. One of the key factors limiting the development of evidence‐based practice has been the lack of well‐validated instruments to assess SEWB and how it changes over time as a result of intervention. This article systematically reviews available measures, classifying them in terms of the evidence base that exists to support their use. It is concluded that there is an ongoing need to develop psychometrically sound, comprehensive, culturally appropriate measures to operationalise Indigenous SEWB at a population health, programme evaluation, and clinical level. It is suggested that seven pathways be followed to achieve this goal, including the need to recognise that the gold standard status for Indigenous measurement tools cannot be ascribed based on evidence‐based assessment criteria alone.