Counselor Education and Supervision: The Development of the CACREP Doctoral Standards

The purpose of this article is to illuminate the unique features of the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs guidelines and accreditation standards that shaped doctoral preparation in counselor education. Current issues that affect advanced training in counselor education and implications for future doctoral standards revisions are also presented.     

Self-Regulation Deficits Explain the Link between Reactive Aggression and Internalizing and Externalizing Behavior Problems in Children

Childhood aggression is often associated with significant psychosocial maladjustment; however, adjustment difficulties may vary based on the function of aggression. The present study used the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF; Gioia et al. Child Neuropsychology 6:235–238, 2000) to examine whether difficulties in particular domains of self-regulation serve as common mechanisms in the association between reactive (versus proactive) aggression and internalizing or externalizing adjustment problems in clinic-referred children. Reactive aggression was associated with poorer behavioral regulation and metacognition, whereas proactive aggression was not associated with poorer self-regulation. Further, the association between reactive aggression and adjustment problems, both internalizing and externalizing, was accounted for by poorer behavioral regulation and metacognitive skills. Gender, age, ADHD diagnosis, IQ, and psychotropic medication status did not account for the results. These findings suggest that self-regulation skills influence adjustment problems in reactively aggressive youth and may be important targets of intervention for such children.     

Recall initiation strategies must be controlled in training studies that use immediate free recall tasks to measure the components of working memory capacity across time

There has been great interest in using working memory (WM) training regimens as an alternative treatment for ADHD, but it has recently been concluded that existing training regimens may not be optimally designed because they target the primary memory component but not the secondary component of WM capacity. This conclusion requires the ability to accurately measure changes in primary and secondary memory abilities over time. The immediate free recall task has been used in previous studies to measure these changes; however, one concern with these tasks is that the recall order required on training exercises may influence the recall strategy used during free recall, which may in turn influence the relative number of items recalled from primary and secondary memory. To address this issue, previous training studies have explicitly controlled recall strategy before and after training. However, the necessity of controlling for recall strategies has not been explicitly tested. The present study investigated the effects of forward-serial-order training on free recall performance under conditions in which recall strategy was not controlled using a sample of adolescents with ADHD. Unlike when recall order was controlled, the main findings showed selective improvement of the secondary memory component (as opposed to the primary memory component) when recall order was uncontrolled. This finding advances our understanding of WM training by highlighting the importance of controlling for recall strategies when free recall tasks are used to measure changes in the primary and secondary components of WM across time.     

Finding faults: analogical comparison supports spatial concept learning in geoscience

A central issue in education is how to support the spatial thinking involved in learning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). We investigated whether and how the cognitive process of analogical comparison supports learning of a basic spatial concept in geoscience, fault. Because of the high variability in the appearance of faults, it may be difficult for students to learn the category-relevant spatial structure. There is abundant evidence that comparing analogous examples can help students gain insight into important category-defining features (Gentner in Cogn Sci 34(5):752–775, 2010). Further, comparing high-similarity pairs can be especially effective at revealing key differences (Sagi et al. 2012). Across three experiments, we tested whether comparison of visually similar contrasting examples would help students learn the fault concept. Our main findings were that participants performed better at identifying faults when they (1) compared contrasting (fault/no fault) cases versus viewing each case separately (Experiment 1), (2) compared similar as opposed to dissimilar contrasting cases early in learning (Experiment 2), and (3) viewed a contrasting pair of schematic block diagrams as opposed to a single block diagram of a fault as part of an instructional text (Experiment 3). These results suggest that comparison of visually similar contrasting cases helped distinguish category-relevant from category-irrelevant features for participants. When such comparisons occurred early in learning, participants were more likely to form an accurate conceptual representation. Thus, analogical comparison of images may provide one powerful way to enhance spatial learning in geoscience and other STEM disciplines.     

A look at how we look at others: Orientation inversion and photographic negation disrupt the perception of human bodies

Although disproportionate inversion effects have often been considered manifestations of the special processes recruited by upright faces, several papers using sequential matching tasks have reported that body postures also produce sizeable inversion effects. However, comparison of inversion effects observed with transient body postures and effects elicited by judgements of facial structure is complicated by qualitative differences between the stimuli and the tasks. Here we report a series of experiments that use attractiveness judgements to provide a better comparison of the effect of inversion as well as contrast negation on face and body perception. Significant effects of inversion and negation were observed for both face and body stimuli. While the magnitude of the inversion effects was broadly comparable, the negation effect was considerably larger for faces. These effects converge with evidence from cognitive neuroscience to suggest that both faces and bodies recruit similar orientation-specific processes distinct from processes used for generic objects.     

Going the distance: Extra-symbolic contributions to the symbolic control of spatial attention

Over the past 30 years, researchers have used symbolic cues such as spatial words and arrows to direct observers' attention to the location of target objects that appear at a single, fixed distance in simple visual environments; however, they have done so by using symbolic cues that provide only partial—directional—information about the spatial location of target objects. Thus, it remains unclear whether observers can only shift their attention broadly in the cued direction in response to these cues or whether they can shift their attention to the specific location of the target by combining an expectation about direction (derived from apprehension of the directional cue) with an expectation about distance (derived from some extra-symbolic cue). The results of two experiments showed that observers do shift their attention to relatively coarse spatial locations by combining expectancies about direction and distance, and that the extent to which observers do so is modulated by the presence of visible markers and the expected distance of the target. These findings are important because they provide the first evidence that extra-symbolic information about distance contributes to the symbolic control of spatial attention.     

The Transracial Adoption Debate: Counseling and Legal Implications

Over the last 30 years, the practice of White American parents adopting African American children has been the focus of much deliberation and commentary. In this article, the authors illuminate relevant literature and research regarding transracial adoption. Counseling and legal implications are also discussed.     

Social Support, Job Stress, Health, and Job Satisfaction Among Nurses in the United Kingdom

Recruitment and retention of nurses is a major concern in healthcare provision in several countries. This study explored the relationship between perceived social support, job stress, health, and job satisfaction among nurses from 4 organizations in northwest England. A total of 350 usable questionnaires measuring stressors, perceived support, health, and job satisfaction, was obtained from a sample of 1,162 nurses drawn from 4 healthcare organizations. A follow-up study was conducted after 6 months. Results indicate that perceived organizational support is related to nurses' health and job satisfaction. Current interventions to increase support, which typically operate at individual or group level, may be limited in their effectiveness unless nurses' perceptions of organizational support are taken into account.     

Preparing Rural Adolescents for Post‐High School Transitions

In this study, the authors evaluated the impact of 4 career development curricular strategies and emotional/instrumental support in preparing rural adolescents to make successful post‐high school transitions. Curriculum strategies and perceived support helped 8th‐, 10th‐, and 12th‐grade students attain critical aspects of career development, enhanced student satisfaction that their education was better preparing them to achieve future educational and career goals, and increased student intentions to enter post‐high school settings that required greater levels of education and training. Girls reported earning higher grades and participating in more work‐based learning activities and intended to enter post–high school training settings that required more education than did boys.     

Reasonable reasons for waiting

Recent decision‐making research claims to establish that, in violation of Savage's normative sure‐thing principle, individuals often wait to acquire noninstrumental information and subsequently base their decisions upon this information. The current research suggests that characterizing individuals as pursuing noninstrumental or useless information may be overstated. Through a series of experiments we establish, first, that many people choose to wait, even when waiting provides no additional information at all. Second, the longer people are allowed to wait before having to decide, the more people prefer to wait rather than decide immediately. Third, those individuals who choose to wait are the ones less confident about committing themselves to a decision. For them, the benefit from waiting may be especially valuable by allowing them to come to terms with a less‐than‐ideal decision. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.