The Impact of College Education on Rape Myth Acceptance,Alcohol Expectancies,and Bystander Attitudes

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of education on rape myth acceptance, alcohol expectancies, and bystander attitudes. A sample of 126 community members and college students who had consumed alcohol within the past 90 days were administered surveys. College experience was unrelated to rape myth acceptance, alcohol expectancies, and bystander intentions. In line with previous research, two rape myth subscales were inversely related to bystander attitudes. In regard to alcohol expectancies and bystander attitudes, only one subscale was marginally significant. Ancillary analysis indicated that rape myth acceptance varied as a function of age, with older individuals less likely to support rape myths.     

Effects of Prevent-Teach-Reinforce on Academic Engagement and Disruptive Behavior

This study assessed the effectiveness of prevent-teach-reinforce (P-T-R), a functional behavioral assessment-based intervention for students with behavior problems, using an A-B-A-B design with follow-up. Participants included three students in kindergarten, fourth grade, and fifth grade in a rural Midwestern school district. P-T-R interventions were implemented with fidelity by all teachers and P-T-R was associated with mean decreases in disruptive behavior for all participants with Tau-U effect sizes ranging from minimal to strong. All three participants demonstrated mean increases in academic engagement with strong effect sizes. P-T-R interventions were associated with moderate to high levels of perceived social validity. Implications for consistent and efficient FBA-based interventions in schools are discussed.     

Eye movements and morphological segmentation of compound words: There is a mouse in mousetrap

In two experiments, readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences containing compound words. In Experiment 1, the frequency of the first and second morpheme was manipulated in compound words of low whole word frequency. Experiment 2 compared pairs of low frequency compounds with high and low frequency first morphemes but identical second morphemes that were embedded in the same sentence frames. The results showed significant effects of the frequency of both morphemes on gaze duration and total fixation time on the compound words. Regression analyses revealed an influence of whole word frequency on the same measures. The results suggest that morphemic constituents of compound words are activated in the course of retrieving the representation of the whole compound word. The fact that the frequency effects were not confined to fixations on the morphemic constituents themselves implies that saccadic eye movements are implemented before morphemic retrieval has been completed. The results highlight the importance of developing more precise models of the perceptual processes underlying reading and how they interact with the processes involved in lexical retrieval and comprehension.     

Moral Injury: A Mechanism for War-Related Psychological Trauma in Military Family Members

Recent research has provided compelling evidence of mental health problems in military spouses and children, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), related to the war-zone deployments, combat exposures, and post-deployment mental health symptoms experienced by military service members in the family. One obstacle to further research and federal programs targeting the psychological health of military family members has been the lack of a clear, compelling, and testable model to explain how war-zone events can result in psychological trauma in military spouses and children. In this article, we propose a possible mechanism for deployment-related psychological trauma in military spouses and children based on the concept of moral injury, a model that has been developed to better understand how service members and veterans may develop PTSD and other serious mental and behavioral problems in the wake of war-zone events that inflict damage to moral belief systems rather by threatening personal life and safety. After describing means of adapting the moral injury model to family systems, we discuss the clinical implications of moral injury, and describe a model for its psychological treatment.     

The culture‐negotiation link.

Scholars have only recently begun to assess the strength with which culture affects negotiator communication, as compared with contextual or structural features of business negotiations. Although prior studies reveal important cross‐cultural differences in national negotiating style, they may not help us understand intercultural (mixed‐culture) settings. The crucial question is how heavily are international negotiators influenced by their own cultural values? When negotiating with a culturally disparate partner, what are the separate and cumulative effects of culture and contextual variables on negotiator communication? To answer these questions, the effect of culture (here, individualism‐collectivism) on integrative (information exchange) and distributive (fixed‐sum errors) negotiating is assessed in 32 intercultural dyads. In addition, the contextual effects of role (buyer vs. seller), preconceptions about negotiating (anticipated competition), and mutual adaptation (interdependence in information exchange) are examined. Preliminary results suggest that role requirements influence negotiators more heavily than culture. Supplemental analyses point to some potentially interesting buyer‐seller differences and suggest that information exchange is more a function of reciprocity than of cultural values.     

Clinical expertise and reasoning with uncertain categories

Expert clinical psychologists, clinical psychology graduates, and nonclinical graduate students were presented with clinical and nonclinical cases in which the diagnosis or category membership of a character was uncertain; they then made feature predictions about the character. For each case, there was a diagnosis or category that was highly probable and a less likely alternative that either did (relevant condition) or did not (neutral condition) alter predictions. For clinical cases, clinical experts and graduate clinicians gave different predictions for the relevant and neutral conditions, indicating that they had considered the uncertain nature of the diagnosis in their predictions. Although they acknowledged that the diagnosis was uncertain, nonclinical students ignored the less likely diagnostic alternatives when making predictions. For the nonclinical cases, all three groups made predictions based on only the most likely category alternative. The results showed that clinical training and/or experience promote multiple-category reasoning, but that this effect is domain specific.     

Cognitive content-specificity in future expectancies: role of hopelessness and intolerance of uncertainty in depression and GAD symptoms

The present study examined cognitive content-specificity in future-event predictions associated with symptoms of depression and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). College undergraduates (N=284) completed measures of depression, GAD, and rated their certainty that a given set of positive and negative outcomes were or were not likely to happen in their future. Participants also completed measures of hopelessness and intolerance of uncertainty (IU). Individuals (N=263) completed the same measures again 6 weeks later. Certainty in an absence of positive future outcomes was associated with symptoms of depression but not GAD, and hopelessness mediated this relationship - concurrently and when examining change scores over 6 weeks. Certainty in negative outcomes was concurrently associated with both symptoms of depression and GAD, and hopelessness partially mediated these relationships. IU predicted concurrent increases in depression and GAD symptoms, and negative-outcome certainty partially mediated the IU-depression but not the IU-GAD symptom relationship. Change in certainty did not mediate the relationship between changes in IU and GAD symptoms but partially mediated the relationship between change in IU and depression symptoms over time. Hopelessness appears to play a unique role in the relationship between reduced anticipation of positive future outcomes and depression. Although less clearly suggested by the data, IU may contribute to both depression and GAD symptoms but may do so through different pathways.