Effectiveness Research: Transporting Interpersonal Psychotherapy for Depressed Adolescents (IPT-A) From the Lab to School-Based Health Clinics

This paper describes the process of modifying and transporting an evidence-based treatment, Interpersonal Psychotherapy for Depressed Adolescents (IPT-A), from a university setting to school-based health clinics. It addresses conceptual issues involved in the shift from efficacy to effectiveness research as well as operational issues specific to the transport of IPT-A into school-based health clinics. Consideration is given to the rationale for an IPT-A effectiveness study, methodological concerns, and the timing of the move from the lab to the community. The authors identify challenges and barriers to initiating effectiveness and transportability research and provide suggestions for overcoming these barriers. Recommendations for conducting research in school-based practice settings are provided.     

Haptic processing of the location of a known property: does knowing what you've touched tell you where it is?

The relationship between knowing where a haptic property is located and knowing what it is was investigated using a haptic-search paradigm. Across trials, from one to six stimuli were presented simultaneously to varying combinations of the middle three fingertips of both hands. Participants reported the presence/absence of a target or its location for four perceptual dimensions: rough/smooth, edge/no edge, relative position (right/left), and relative orientation (right/left). Reaction time data were plotted as a function of set size. The slope data indicated no difference in processing load for location as compared to identity processing. However, the intercept data did reveal a cost associated with processing location information. Location information was not obtained for "free" when identity was processed. The data also supported a critical distinction between material and edge dimensions versus geometric dimensions, as the size of the cost associated with processing location was larger for spatial than for intensive stimuli.     

An analysis of initial acquisition and maintenance of sight words following picture matching and copy cover, and compare teaching methods

This study compared the copy, cover, and compare method to a picture-word matching method for teaching sight word recognition. Participants were 5 kindergarten students with less than preprimer sight word vocabularies who were enrolled in a public school in the Pacific Northwest. A multielement design was used to evaluate the effects of the two interventions. Outcomes suggested that sight words taught using the copy, cover, and compare method resulted in better maintenance of word recognition when compared to the picture-matching intervention. Benefits to students and the practicality of employing the word-level teaching methods are discussed.     

Reactions to counterstereotypic behavior: the role of backlash in cultural stereotype maintenance

Social and economic sanctions for counterstereotypical behavior have been termed the backlash effect. The authors present a model of the role of backlash in cultural stereotype maintenance from the standpoint of both perceivers and actors. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants lost a competition to either atypical or typical men or women and subsequently showed greater tendency to sabotage deviants. Moreover, undermining deviants was associated with increased self-esteem, suggesting that backlash rewards perceivers psychologically. Experiment 3 showed that gender deviants who feared backlash resorted to strategies designed to avoid it (e.g., hiding, deception, and gender conformity). Further, perceivers who sabotaged deviants (Experiment 2) or deviants who hid their atypicality (Experiment 3) estimated greater stereotyping on the part of future perceivers, in support of the model's presumed role for backlash in stereotype maintenance. The implications of the findings for cultural stereotypes are discussed.     

Brief training to promote the use of less intrusive prompts by nursing assistants in a dementia care unit

We evaluated the efficacy of a brief staff-training procedure to increase the use of graduated prompting by 2 certified nursing assistants (CNAs) while they helped to dress 3 persons with dementia in a seven-bed dementia care unit. The multiple baseline design across participants showed that CNAs dressed residents with minimal resident involvement during baseline observations. Following brief in-service training, CNAs provided graduated prompts and praise appropriately, suggesting that CNAs can promote active involvement in personal care routines by older adults with dementia.     

Mothers' Overreactive Discipline and Their Encoding and Appraisals of Toddler Behavior

The relations of observed overreactive discipline with mothers' tendencies to notice negative, relative to positive, child behavior (preferential negative encoding), and mothers' negative appraisals of neutral and positive child behavior (negative appraisal bias), were examined in mothers of toddlers. The mothers rated both their own children's and unfamiliar children's behavior. Negative appraisal bias with respect to mothers' own (but not unfamiliar) children was related to mothers' overreactivity, independent of child misbehavior. Overreactivity was not related to mothers' preferential negative encoding either of their own or of unfamiliar children's behavior. However, in the case of mothers' own children, preferential negative encoding moderated the relation between negative appraisal bias and overreactive discipline, such that the negative appraisal bias-overreactivity relation was significant only in the context of high preferential negative encoding.     

Framing social judgment: self-ingroup comparison and perceived discrimination

Members of disadvantaged groups often report that they are less vulnerable to discrimination than is the average member of their group. In two experiments, we examined how the framing of self-ingroup comparisons moderates this phenomenon. In Experiment 1, participants estimated the relative likelihood that either they, compared to the average member of their ingroup, would experience discrimination or that the average member of their ingroup, compared to themselves, would experience discrimination. In Experiment 2, a direct manipulation of self-ingroup similarity was added to this framing manipulation. Across the experiments, the results demonstrated that conditions highlighting differences between the individual and the group led participants to perceive themselves as much less vulnerable to discrimination than their group, relative to conditions highlighting similarities between the individual and the group.     

Now you feel it, now you don't: frontal brain electrical asymmetry and individual differences in emotion regulation

Recent theoretical accounts of emotion regulation assign an important role in this process to the prefrontal cortex, yet there is little relevant data available to support this hypothesis. The current study assessed the relation between individual differences in asymmetric prefrontal activation and an objective measure of uninstructed emotion regulation. Forty-seven participants 57 to 60 years old viewed emotionally arousing and neutral visual stimuli while eyeblink startle data were collected. Startle probes were also presented after picture presentation to capture the persistence or attenuation of affect following the offset of an emotional stimulus. Subjects with greater relative left-sided anterior activation in scalp-recorded brain electrical signals displayed attenuated startle magnitude after the offset of negative stimuli. This relation between resting frontal activation and recovery following an aversive event supports the idea of a frontally mediated mechanism involved in one form of automatic emotion regulation.     

The abbreviated multidimensional acculturation scale: empirical validation with two Latino/Latina samples

Two studies were conducted to develop and examine internal consistencies and validate the Abbreviated Multidimensional Acculturation Scale. Study 1 participants were 156 Latino/Latina college students. Findings indicated good internal reliabilities for all 3 subscales. Adequate concurrent validity was established with length of residence in the United States. The scale also showed adequate convergent and discriminant validity. Study 2 participants were 90 Latino/Latina community members. The subscales were also reliable and showed adequate concurrent validity with length of residence in the United States. Convergent and discriminant validity were also adequate. Construct validity was further demonstrated through factorial analyses of the combined samples (N = 246). Three separate factors emerged: cultural identity, language competence, and cultural competence.