An Experimental Computer-Based Educational and Career Exploration System

A major objective of the student guidance and counseling centers in high schools, junior colleges, and universities is to provide individualized aid to each student to help him reduce the uncertainty of his educational and vocational plans. Frequently, this objective is not fully satisfied because of information-handling problems. Two such problems are: (a) the fallibility of both counselor and student in memorizing, associating, and selectively recalling educational and vocational facts; and (b) the inability of the counselor and the student to devote sufficient time, patience, and energy to performing the enormous number of clerical steps involved in relating educational and occupational facts to pertinent information about the student. Computer-based information systems may be able to reduce these deficiencies considerably. This paper describes an experimental information system designed to be used by students as part of the total guidance services offered in schools. Such systems may aid both the student and the counselor.     

Language matters in counselling diversity

The paper presents a personal view of some issues around therapeutic conversations involving difference and minority experience. Language, discourse and mother-tongue are explored from different theoretical standpoints and considered alongside concepts of difference, otherness and the unvoiced. Intercultural counselling offers a framework for unpacking the meaning of decolonising practice in conversations with clients or counsellors from ethnic or other minorities undertaking counselling or supervision. I discuss possibilities for practice informed by existential and hermeneutic phenomenology, including gestalt therapy interventions to bring in the body alongside discourse, and phenomenological empathy as a non-colonising resource in working across difference and diversity.     

Stressor controllability and learned helplessness research in the United States: Sensitization and fatigue processes

Recent work in the learned helplessness paradigm suggests that neuronal sensitization and fatigue processes are critical to producing the behavioral impairment that follows prolonged exposure to an unsignaled inescapable stressor such as a series of electric tail shocks. Here we discuss how an interaction between serotonin (5-HT) and corticosterone (CORT) sensitizes GABA neurons early in the pretreatment session with inescapable shock. We propose that this process eventually depletes GABA, thus removing an important form of inhibition on excitatory glutamate transmission in the amygdala, hippocampus, and frontal cortex. When rats are re-exposed to shock during shuttle-escape testing 24 hrs later, the loss of inhibition (as well as other excitatory effects) results in unregulated excitation of glutamate neurons. This state of neuronal over-excitation rapidly compromises metabolic homeostasis. Metabolic fatigue results in compensatory inhibition by the nucleoside adenosine, which regulates neuronal excitation with respect to energy availability. The exceptionally potent form of inhibition associated with adenosine receptor activation yields important neuroprotective benefits under conditions of metabolic failure, but also precludes the processing of information in fatigued neurons. The substrates of adaptive behavior are removed; performance deficits ensue.     

With a Spirit that Understands: Reflections on a Long‐term Community Science Initiative to End Suicide in Alaska

This retrospective analysis of a long‐term community‐based participatory research (CBPR) process spans over two decades of work with Alaska Native communities. A call to action from Alaska Native leadership to create more effective strategies to prevent and treat youth suicide and alcohol misuse risk initiated a response from university researchers. This CBPR process transformed into a collaborative effort to indigenously drive and develop solutions through research. The People Awakening project started our team on this translational and transformational pathway through community intervention science in the Central Yup'ik region of Alaska. We examine more deeply the major episodes and their successes and struggles in maintaining a long‐term research relationship between university researchers and members of Yup'ik Alaska Native communities. We explore ways that our CBPR relationship has involved negotiation and engagement with power and praxis, to deepen and focus attention to knowledge systems and relational elements. This paper examines these deeper, transformative elements of our CBPR relationship that spans histories, cultures, and systems. Our discussion shares vignettes from academic and community perspectives to describe process in a unique collaboration, reaching to sometimes touch upon rare ground in emotions, tensions, and triumphs over the course of a dozen grants and twice as many years. We conclude by noting how there are points where, in a long‐term CBPR relationship, transition out of emergence into coalescing and transformation can occur.     

Utility of the Millon Behavioral Medicine Diagnostic (MBMD) to Predict Adherence to Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART) Medication Regimens Among HIV-Positive Men and Women

Trait loyalty has received virtually no attention from researchers; consequently, the basic goal of this research was to create a measure of interpersonal loyalty. Principal factor analyses of an initial pool of items revealed 2 factors: Individual Loyalty (e.g., “I stand by my friends, even when they make mistakes”) and Group Loyalty (e.g., “I am loyal to my country”). Analyses of a revised item pool identified the same 2 factors in a second sample. Scales based on these factors were internally consistent and only moderately related to one another. Additional analyses indicated that both scales (a) were stable over time; (b) showed moderate to strong self-peer agreement; (c) positively correlated with conscientiousness, agreeableness, altruism, and positive emotionality; and (d) negatively related to an avoidant attachment style. However, these associations all were moderate in magnitude (in fact, none was as high as |.40|), indicating that the Individual and Group Loyalty Scales tap unique variance that is not captured by existing instruments.     

A search for context-stimulus associations in latent inhibition

Six experiments investigated the effects of pre-exposure to a tone on the subsequent acquisition of conditioned suppression by rats. In Experiments 1-3 the response suppressed was drinking; in Experiments 4-6 it was food-rewarded lever pressing. Repeated exposure to the tone resulted in latent inhibition, i.e., a retardation in the acquisition of suppression. The size of the latent inhibition effect was reduced when a different context was used for conditioning from that used for pre-exposure (Experiment 2). When the context remained the same throughout, a phase of exposure to the context alone, interposed between pre-exposure and conditioning, had no influence on the size of the latent inhibition effect ultimately observed. This last result casts doubt upon Wagner's (1976, 1979) theory of the role of contextual factors in latent inhibition, and alternative accounts are considered.