Acceptability and Feasibility of Peer Assisted Supervision and Support for Intervention Practitioners: A Q-methodology Evaluation

Evidence-based interventions often include quality improvement methods to support fidelity and improve client outcomes. Clinical supervision is promoted as an effective way of developing practitioner confidence and competence in delivery; however, supervision is often inconsistent and embedded in hierarchical line management structures that may limit the opportunity for reflective learning. The Peer Assisted Supervision and Support (PASS) supervision model uses peer relationships to promote the self-regulatory capacity of practitioners to improve intervention delivery. The aim of the present study was to assess the acceptability and feasibility of PASS amongst parenting intervention practitioners. A Q-methodology approach was used to generate data and 30 practitioners volunteered to participate in the study. Data were analyzed and interpreted using standard Q-methodology procedures and by-person factor analysis yielded three factors. There was consensus that PASS was acceptable. Participants shared the view that PASS facilitated an environment of support where negative aspects of interpersonal relationships that might develop in supervision were not evident. Two factors represented the viewpoint that PASS was also a feasible model of supervision. However, the third factor was comprised of practitioners who reported that PASS could be time consuming and difficult to fit into existing work demands. There were differences across the three factors in the extent to which practitioners considered PASS impacted on their intervention delivery. The findings highlight the importance of organizational mechanisms that support practitioner engagement in supervision.     

Digital Stress over the Life Span: The Effects of Communication Load and Internet Multitasking on Perceived Stress and Psychological Health Impairments in a German Probability Sample

The present study investigated the psychological health effects and motivational origins of digital stress based on a representative survey of 1,557 German Internet users between 14 and 85 years of age. Communication load resulting from private e-mails and social media messages as well as Internet multitasking were positively related to perceived stress and had significant indirect effects on burnout, depression, and anxiety. Perceived social pressure and the fear of missing out on information and social interaction were key drivers of communication load and Internet multitasking. Age significantly moderated the health effects of digital stress as well as the motivational drivers of communication load and Internet multitasking. The results, thus, underline the need to address digital stress from a life span perspective.     

Diminished cooperativeness of psychopaths in a prisoner's dilemma game yields higher rewards

Maladaptive social behavior is one of the defining characteristics of psychopathic personality disorder. Nevertheless, maladaptive social behavior has only rarely been observed among psychopaths in experimentally controlled situations. The authors assessed the behavior of criminal psychopaths from high-security psychiatric hospitals in a computer simulation of a social dilemma situation. The psychopaths showed a markedly higher proneness to competitive (i.e., noncooperative) behavior than did healthy adults from the general population. The odds ratio between defection and being a psychopath was estimated at 7.86 in the sample. The probability to choose selfish instead of cooperative behavior was significantly linked to the following subscales of the Psychopathy Personality Inventory-Revised (S. O. Lilienfeld & M. R. Widows, 2005): rebellious nonconformity, Machiavellian egocentricity, and the total score. On average, the psychopathic participants accumulated higher gain and more strongly exploited their counterpart than did the healthy participants.     

“I’m Not Really Afraid of Osama Bin Laden!” Fear of Terrorism in Dutch Children

We examined to what extent children in The Netherlands are affected by the threat of terrorism. For this purpose, a sample of school children living in Rotterdam or adjacent satellites (N = 216) completed a fear survey that included a number of terrorism-related items, and were confronted with ambiguous vignettes to measure threat-related interpretation bias. The results demonstrated that although a number of terrorism-related items (i.e., bombing attacks, explosions in a bus or subway) listed high in a ranking of most intense childhood fears, very few children made terrorist-related interpretations of ambiguous situations.     

Visual categorization of natural stimuli by domestic dogs

One of the fundamental issues in the study of animal cognition concerns categorization. Although domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) are on the brink to become one of the model animals in animal psychology, their categorization abilities are unknown. This is probably largely due to the absence of an adequate method for testing dogs’ ability to discriminate between large sets of pictures in the absence of human cueing. Here we present a computer-automated touch-screen testing procedure, which enabled us to test visual discrimination in dogs while social cueing was ruled out. Using a simultaneous discrimination procedure, we first trained dogs (N = 4) to differentiate between a set of dog pictures (N = 40) and an equally large set of landscape pictures. All subjects learned to discriminate between the two sets and showed successful transfer to novel pictures. Interestingly, presentation of pictures providing contradictive information (novel dog pictures mounted on familiar landscape pictures) did not disrupt performance, which suggests that the dogs made use of a category-based response rule with classification being coupled to category-relevant features (of the dog) rather than to item-specific features (of the background). We conclude that dogs are able to classify photographs of natural stimuli by means of a perceptual response rule using a newly established touch-screen procedure. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Infants' imitation of goal-directed actions: the role of movements and action effects

This paper reviews studies on infants' imitation of goal-directed actions in the first two years of life. Special emphasis is given to the role of the two observable components of an action, that is, the movement and the action effects, on infants' replication of target actions. The reviewed studies provide evidence that infants benefit most from a full demonstration of both movements and effects. If movements are demonstrated in isolation, infants may encode this information, but they preferentially reproduce actions that lead to salient effects. If action effects are presented in isolation, infants younger than 19 months usually fail to emulate the unseen movements that would be necessary to produce these effects. Infants' ability to predict action effects or to infer unseen movements from incomplete demonstrations improves substantially at the end of the second year of life. It is concluded that the capability to learn relations between movements and action effects by observation, and the knowledge about movement-effect relations acquired so far, may be important factors underlying the developmental changes in infants' imitation of goal-directed actions.     

Imagery intervention in open and closed tennis motor skill performance

To assess use of imagery intervention in performance of two tennis motor skills the quasi-experimental design included a pre- and posttest and a control group. The tennis service shot and service receiving skill were selected as representative of open and closed skills, respectively. 48 subjects, male tennis players, whose ages ranged from 16 to 18 yr. (M = 17.2), were divided into two groups: (1) Technical practice only which was used as control group and (2) Imagery group who received both imagery and technical practice. Analysis of covariance showed a significant main effect for the imagery intervention on the closed skill (p = .002). Findings suggest that imaging a positive outcome may be more powerful in improving performance of closed skill movements than of open skill movements.     

How 7-month-olds interpret ambiguous motion events: Category-based reasoning in infancy

This paper investigates the role of static and dynamic attributes for the animate-inanimate distinction in category-based reasoning of 7-month-olds. Three experiments tested infants’ responses to movement events involving an unfamiliar animal and a ball. When either the animal or the ball showed self-initiated irregular movements (Experiment 1), infants expected the previously active object to start moving again. When both objects were moving together in an ambiguous motion event (Experiment 2), infants expected only the animal to start moving again. Initial looking preferences for each object did not influence results. When either the facial features of the animal were removed, or its furry body was replaced by a plastic spiral in an ambiguous motion event (Experiment 3), infants formed no clear expectation regarding future movements. Based on this set of findings we conclude that 7-month-olds flexibly combine information about the static and dynamic properties of objects in order to reason about motion events.     

What Explains Boys’ Stronger Confidence in their Intelligence?

This study investigated whether boys’ stronger confidence in their intelligence is explained by gender differences in measured intelligence and gender-stereotypical parental perceptions of their children’s intelligence. Verbal, numeric, figural, and reasoning intelligence and corresponding self-ratings were assessed for 496 German 11th and 12th graders (284 girls; age: M?=?16.95). Parents also rated their children’s intelligence (339 parents; 205 mothers; age: M?=?46.66). With and without controlling for intelligence, boys rated their numerical, figural, and reasoning abilities higher than girls. The same pattern appeared in parental intelligence perceptions. Boys even judged themselves as more intelligent controlling for both measured intelligence and parental intelligence estimates. Thus, neither intelligence nor gender-stereotypical parental perceptions totally explains boys’ stronger confidence in their intelligence.     

Stress Management in Bus Drivers: A Pilot Study Based on the Model of Effort–Reward Imbalance

A number of studies documented associations between work stress and elevated morbidity in professional drivers. The model of effort–reward imbalance (ERI) identifies distinct situational and personal characteristcs which elicit chronically stressful experience at work in terms of a mismatch between high costs and low gain. Fifty-four highly stressed male inner-city bus drivers (mean age 49,5 ± 5,3) were recruited to participate in a 12 weeks stress management program based on the ERI model (intervention group (IG) n = 26, control group (CG) n = 28). Intervention included relaxation, coping with anger and excessive work commitment (“high need for control”), management of conflicts with superiors, and recommendations for structural changes at work. After 12 weeks, mean level of “need for control,” a critical, health adverse style of coping with job demands, was significantly reduced in IG vs. CG, and this effect persisted after 3 months. In conclusion, a theory-based worksite stress management program in an occupational risk group is feasible and shows beneficial psychological effects.