Empowerment praxis in community coalitions

Community coalitions address a wide variety of community problems, espousing a community development processes that promotes individual and collective self-determination. They offer a promising venue for the study of empowerment of individuals and organizations. This study utilizes data from members of 35 community coalitions organized for the prevention of alcohol and other drug problems to address the following questions: What individual characteristics are related to the psychological empowerment of coalition members? What organizational characteristics are related to the collective empowering of members? What organization characteristics are related to a coalition being organizationally empowered to succeed in achieving its objectives? At the individual level, psychological empowerment was most strongly related to individuals' participation levels, sense of community, and perceptions of a positive organizational climate. At the group level, the strongest predictors of collective empowering (our operationalization of the empowering organization) were net benefits of participation, commitment, and positive organization climate. Psychological empowerment and positive organizational climate were the two predictors of organizational effectiveness (the empowered organization). Implications and limitations of these findings are discussed.     

Tactile Prompting and Weekly Performance Feedback for Increasing Teachers’ Behavior-Specific Praise

The school-based consultation literature includes a variety of empirically supported procedures for increasing teachers’ implementation of classroom management strategies. However, teachers may respond differently to empirically supported consultation procedures. This study used a multiple baseline design across three elementary teachers to test the effects of a tactile prompting and weekly performance feedback consultation procedure for increasing teachers’ behavior-specific praise. Additionally, this study included data for teachers’ rate of reprimands and their classrooms’ appropriately engaged behavior and disruptive behavior. Results indicated that tactile prompting and weekly performance feedback increased behavior-specific praise for all three teachers. However, a functional relation between tactile prompting and weekly performance feedback and changes in teachers’ reprimands and their classrooms’ appropriately engaged and disruptive behavior was not established. Implications for applied practice, and limitations and directions for future research are discussed.     

Virtual reality goes to war: a brief review of the future of military behavioral healthcare

Numerous reports indicate that the incidence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in returning OEF/OIF military personnel is creating a significant healthcare challenge. These findings have served to motivate research on how to better develop and disseminate evidence-based treatments for PTSD. Virtual Reality delivered exposure therapy for PTSD has been previously used with reports of positive outcomes. This article details how virtual reality applications are being designed and implemented across various points in the military deployment cycle to prevent, identify and treat combat-related PTSD in OIF/OEF Service Members and Veterans. The summarized projects in these areas have been developed at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies, a U.S. Army University Affiliated Research Center, and this paper will detail efforts to use virtual reality to deliver exposure therapy, assess PTSD and cognitive function and provide stress resilience training prior to deployment.     

Examination of psychiatric symptoms in student athletes

In the present study, the authors examined the severity of psychiatric symptoms in undergraduate recreational (noncompetitive) athletes (n = 64) and National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA; competitive) athletes (n = 72). The results indicated that the 2 groups were similar in the severity of psychiatric symptoms. The recreational and NCAA athletes combined (n = 136) showed less severe global psychiatric symptoms when they were compared with an undergraduate control group (n = 435). The implications of the study are discussed in the context of those findings.     

Media ratings for violence and sex. Implications for policymakers and parents

This article reviews research on the implementation of media-rating systems, parents' use and evaluation of them, and the impact of ratings on children. Although half or more of parents report using media-rating systems, understanding of various components of the systems is low, particularly for television ratings. A meta-analysis of national polls shows that parents overwhelmingly prefer that ratings specify content, rather than giving age recommendations. A second meta-analysis, of experiments testing the effects of ratings on children's interest in programs, shows that ratings indicating restricted or controversial content have a deterrent effect for children under age 8 but that, by age 11 and especially for boys, the ratings show a small enticement effect. This effect occurs for both age-based and content-based ratings. Implications for policymakers and parents are discussed.