Why misinformation is more likely to be recognised over time: A source monitoring account

Although memory for actual events tends to be forgotten over time, memory for misinformation tends to be retrieved at a stable rate over long delays or at a rate greater than that found immediately after encoding. To examine whether source monitoring errors contribute to this phenomenon, two experiments investigated subjects' memory for the source of misinformation at different retention intervals. Subjects viewed a slide presentation, read a narrative containing misinformation, and, either 10 minutes or 1 week later, completed a recognition test about details seen in the slides and about the source of these details. After the longer retention interval in both experiments, participants were more likely to agree that they had seen misleading information and were also more likely to incorrectly associate the misinformation with the slide event. Theoretical implications of these findings are considered.     

A model of dual attitudes

When an attitude changes from A1 to A2, what happens to A1? Most theories assume, at least implicitly, that the new attitude replaces the former one. The authors argue that a new attitude can override, but not replace, the old one, resulting in dual attitudes. Dual attitudes are defined as different evaluations of the same attitude object: an automatic, implicit attitude and an explicit attitude. The attitude that people endorse depends on whether they have the cognitive capacity to retrieve the explicit attitude and whether this overrides their implicit attitude. A number of literatures consistent with these hypotheses are reviewed, and the implications of the dual-attitude model for attitude theory and measurement are discussed. For example, by including only explicit measures, previous studies may have exaggerated the ease with which people change their attitudes. Even if an explicit attitude changes, an implicit attitude can remain the same.     

Transforming mental health care for children and their families

In April 2002, the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health was created by executive order to study the mental health care delivery system in our nation and to make recommendations for improvements so that individuals with serious mental disorders can live, work, learn, and fully participate in their homes and communities. In its report, "Achieving the Promise: Transforming Mental Health Care in America," the commission provided strategies to address critical infrastructure, practice, and research issues. This article focuses on the work of the commission's Subcommittee on Children and Families, describing its vision for mental health service delivery for children and providing suggestions for strengthening community-based care for youths with or at risk of behavioral health disorders. Training, research, practice, and policy implications for psychologists are discussed.     

Characteristics of auditory agnosia in a child with severe traumatic brain injury: a case report

We present a case that is unusual in many respects from other documented incidences of auditory agnosia, including the mechanism of injury, age of the individual, and location of neurological insult. The clinical presentation is one of disturbance in the perception of spoken language, music, pitch, emotional prosody, and temporal auditory processing in the absence of significant deficits in the comprehension of written language, expressive language production, or peripheral auditory function. Furthermore, the patient demonstrates relatively preserved function in other aspects of audition such as sound localization, voice recognition, and perception of animal noises and environmental sounds. This case study demonstrates that auditory agnosia is possible following traumatic brain injury in a child, and illustrates the necessity of assessment with a wide variety of auditory stimuli to fully characterize auditory agnosia in a single individual.     

Implementation of a comprehensive schoolwide behavioral intervention: The ABC program

The Academic and Behavioral Competencies (ABC) Program, a schoolwide program to reduce classroom disruption and encourage rule following, academic task completion, and homework completion, is described. The program was initially developed and implemented in an elementary school with a high-risk population. Data from teachers, parents, and children indicate high levels of satisfaction with the program. In addition, unobtrusive measures of program impact, reported as reductions in referrals to the principal's office, suspensions, and increases in homework completion rates relative to the year prior to implementation of the program, suggest a preliminary positive impact of the program. A replication is reported for another school district, with teacher evaluations of satisfaction and effectiveness reported, supporting the flexibility and adaptability of the program. Although the present article does not constitute a systematic evaluation of the ABC Program, it presents preliminary data on the process of implementation and stakeholder satisfaction.     

Treatment of pharmacotherapy-refractory posttraumatic stress disorder among Cambodian refugees: a pilot study of combination treatment with cognitive-behavior therapy vs sertraline alone

Cambodian refugees with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) represent a cohort in severe need of treatment, but little information is available to guide treatment choices. We selected a sample of pharmacotherapy-refractory individuals to test the efficacy of combination treatment with sertraline and cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) for treating PTSD. Participants in this pilot study were ten Khmer-speaking women who had been at a mean age of 22-26 years during the Pol Pot period (1975-1979). These patients were randomly assigned to either sertraline alone or combined treatment. We found that combined treatment offered additional benefit in the range of medium to large effect sizes for PTSD and associated symptoms. Our findings indicate that substantial gains can be achieved by adding CBT to pharmacotherapy for PTSD, and that a program of CBT emphasizing information, exposure, and cognitive-restructuring can be successfully modified for Khmer-speaking refugees.     

Promoting responsible conduct in research through “survival skills” workshops: Some mentoring is best done in a crowd

For graduate students to succeed as professionals, they must develop a set of general "survival skills". These include writing research articles, making oral presentations, obtaining employment and funding, supervising, and teaching. Traditionally, graduate programs have offered little training in many of these skills. Our educational model provides individuals with formal instruction in each area, including their ethical dimensions. Infusion of research ethics throughout a professional skills curriculum helps to emphasize that responsible conduct is integral to succeeding as a researcher. It also leads to the consideration of ethical dimensions of professional life not covered in traditional ethics courses.     

Lay Theories Concerning Causes and Treatment of Depression

This study compared perceptions of the causes of, therapies for, and means of coping with, depression between two groups of currently nondepressed adults: one with a history of major depression and one with no history of depression. Currently nondepressed participants were selected so that effects of past experience of depression could be distinguished from those of current mood. Recovered depressed participants (RD) (n = 25) and Never depressed participants (ND) (n = 25) recruited via newspaper advertisements completed self-report measures of (a) the perceived utility of either professional or self-help coping strategies for managing their own experiences of depression; (b) likely effectiveness of several major therapies for depression; and (c) perceived accuracy of several etiological theories of depression. RD participants rated depression as being less amenable to everyday self-help methods of coping and more in need of professional intervention. However, RD and ND subgroups did not differ significantly in their perceptions of the plausibility of etiological theories of depression in general, nor in their ratings of the likely helpfulness of major therapies.     

Self as verb and the metaphor of dance: An explanation of the self discovery experience within a constructivist framework

The concept of self discovery within a constructivist framework is difficult to explain given the central assumption of constructivism that self is a created construct rather than an entity to be discovered. Two problems are identified as impediments to constructivist accounts of the self discovery experience: first, their failure to adequately account for the embodied experience of self, and second, the difficulties inherent in using self as a noun to express a process.
It is proposed that if self is considered as a verb, as the action of a body-subject, the verbal contortionism of referring to self as a process in a language that places self as an entity may be overcome. The notion of self as verb places the individual firmly in the role of active embodied participant in the experience of self. The metaphor of "self'" as "dance" is explored to emphasize the materiality of the human animal that is argued to be central to the experience of self discovery.