Early childhood mental health consultation: Care providers’ experiences of the consultative relationship

This article presents findings from a qualitative research study exploring child care teachers’ experiences receiving early childhood mental health consultation (ECMHC). As an emerging intervention in early childhood education, ECMHC is already yielding promising results, namely in helping teachers better address challenging behaviors in their classroom and promote a more nurturing classroom environment. However, there remains a lack of personal testimony from teachers who receive this intervention. Considering that teachers are the primary focus of most ECMHC interventions, the purpose of this study was to examine child care teachers’ personal experiences receiving consultation. Eight child care teachers were interviewed for this study. Results from this study illuminate key interpersonal processes in the development of the consultant–consultee relationship, indicate what teachers consider to be the most helpful components of consultation, and speak to the challenges that teachers experience in consultation. By examining the personal testimony of child care teachers who have received ECMHC services, consultants and researchers can consider ways to expand and improve future implementation of ECMHC.     

Personality,interview faking,and the mediating role of attitudes,norms, and perceived behavioral control

This study investigated the psychological processes underlying interview faking, and that link personality to interview faking. In a sample of 198 recent interviewees, surveyed across three time points, we examined the mediating role of three constructs from the theory of planned behavior (TPB; i.e., attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control) in explaining the relationship between the traits of Honesty–Humility and Conscientiousness and one form of interview faking (i.e., extensive image creation). Results indicated that all three TPB constructs correlated with interview faking, although only attitudes and subjective norms predicted faking incrementally. Attitudes and norms mediated the relationships between Honesty–Humility and Conscientiousness and interview faking. This study provides insight into interview faking, and the link between personality and interview faking.     

The academic outcomes of working memory and metacognitive strategy training in children: A double‐blind randomized controlled trial

Working memory training has been shown to improve performance on untrained working memory tasks in typically developing children, at least when compared to non‐adaptive training; however, there is little evidence that it improves academic outcomes. The lack of transfer to academic outcomes may be because children are only learning skills and strategies in a very narrow context, which they are unable to apply to other tasks. Metacognitive strategy interventions, which promote metacognitive awareness and teach children general strategies that can be used on a variety of tasks, may be a crucial missing link in this regard. In this double‐blind randomized controlled trial, 95 typically developing children aged 9–14 years were allocated to three cognitive training programmes that were conducted daily after‐school. One group received Cogmed working memory training, another group received concurrent Cogmed and metacognitive strategy training, and the control group received adaptive visual search training, which better controls for expectancy and motivation than non‐adaptive training. Children were assessed on four working memory tasks, reading comprehension, and mathematical reasoning before, immediately after, and 3 months after training. Working memory training improved working memory and mathematical reasoning relative to the control group. The improvements in working memory were maintained 3 months later, and these were significantly greater for the group that received metacognitive strategy training, compared to working memory training alone. Working memory training is a potentially effective educational intervention when provided in addition to school; however, future research will need to investigate ways to maintain academic improvements long term and to optimize metacognitive strategy training to promote far‐transfer. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/-7MML48ZFgw     

Perceiving personal discrimination: the role of group status and legitimizing ideology

It was hypothesized that relative group status and endorsement of ideologies that legitimize group status differences moderate attributions to discrimination in intergroup encounters. According to the status-legitimacy hypothesis, the more members of low-status groups endorse the ideology of individual mobility, the less likely they are to attribute negative outcomes from higher status group members to discrimination. In contrast, the more members of high-status groups endorse individual mobility, the more likely they are to attribute negative outcomes from lower status group members to discrimination. Results from 3 studies using 2 different methodologies provide support for this hypothesis among members of different high-status (European Americans and men) and low-status (African Americans, Latino Americans, and women) groups.     

The Experience of the Holy: A Relational Psychoanalytic Analysis

The title of this paper, The Experience of the Holy is a direct reference to Rudolf Otto's book Das Heilige. The paper begins with Otto because he lays out many of the important issues involved in a psychological investigation of the experience of the holy, especially the question of whether the sacred is a unique object of experience, or a characteristic of our experience of ordinary objects. The paper then discusses three contemporary relational psychoanalysts (D.W. Winnicott, Hans Loewald, and Christopher Bollas), and the ways in which their theorizing illuminates the psychology of the sacred.     

The length of the retention interval,forgetting, and subjective similarity

A long retention interval tends to result in the poor retention known as forgetting. A high subjective similarity between stimuli frequently produces their poor retention. Thus, a long retention interval may increase the subjective similarity between stimuli (the RIISS hypothesis), and this increase may produce forgetting. To examine this hypothesis, college students made speeded same-different discriminations between two lines or tones of different lengths or frequencies that were 400 ms or 3,300 ms apart, and they rated the similarity of these stimuli. The long interval produced poorer overall performance as expected, but also produced poorer performance on different than same stimuli, implying that it increased the subjective similarity between the initial and subsequent stimuli, and it also increased rated similarity, in support of the RIISS hypothesis. The position that stored stimuli lose less common information than distinctive information explains RIISS evidence better than does perturbation theory.     

Talking facilitates cognitive-emotional processes of adaptation to an acute stressor

The authors examined the influence of talking and the social context of talking on cognitive-emotional processes of adjustment to stressors. Two hundred fifty-six undergraduates viewed a stressful stimulus and were then assigned to a no-talk control condition or 1 of 3 talk conditions: talk alone, talk to a validating confederate, or talk to an invalidating confederate. Two days later, they were reexposed to the stressor. Compared with individuals in the no-talk condition, those in the talk alone and validate conditions had a lower level of intrusive thoughts in the 2-day interim, and they had lower perceived stress when reexposed to the stressor. The effects of talking and validation on perceived stress appeared to be mediated by lowered intrusions. The benefits of talking were diluted when disclosures were invalidated. These findings suggest that talking about acute stressors can facilitate adjustment to stressors through cognitive resolution.