Facilitated Disclosure Versus Clinical Accommodation of Infidelity Secrets: An Early Pivot Point in Couple Therapy. Part 2: Therapy Ethics,Pragmatics, and Protocol

In couple therapy, one partner's private disclosure of infidelity presents a potentially polarizing issue involving the therapist's decision to facilitate disclosure or accommodate non-disclosure. Some therapists may assume accommodating an infidelity secret is the most compassionate and efficient option. We consider this decision in the context of therapy ethics of equal advocacy and confidentiality, implications for individual and relationship healing, and pragmatic aspects of conducting therapy. We conclude that measured disclosure of infidelity, determined by the aggrieved spouse, best resolves the potential collision of multilateral advocacy with confidentiality and offers the best prospects for a working therapy alliance and couple healing and renewal. A clinical protocol for facilitating disclosure of infidelity secrets is presented.     

Training Considerations for MFTs in Couple and Financial Counseling

Evidence suggests that many couples attending marital therapy report that financial concerns have a significant impact on their distress. Despite the complaint, many Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT) training programs do not offer courses that teach therapists how to properly address financial concerns as a part of their training or curriculum, leaving many practitioners unaware of the processes associated with remediating the distress. The authors address the concepts of financial literacy and financial problems, and suggest a training curriculum to guide therapists in decisions about treating financial concerns for couples. Suggestions of future research and core competencies are discussed.     

Emergent Motivation to Read in Prekindergarten Children

This study aimed to develop and validate a measure of emergent reading motivation designed for prekindergarten children, called the Emergent Reading Motivation Scale (ERMS). The development of the ERMS was to overcome the limitation that current existing reading motivation measures are not developmentally appropriate for young children. Fifty-six native-English speaking children who were enrolled in a prekindergarten program participated in the study. The ERMS had 17 items that were drawn from reading self-concept, reading performance goal, and reading learning goal. The scale was administered through two sock puppets. For each item, the puppets represented contrasting behaviors regarding reading motivation. The children were asked to choose the puppet that was most like themselves. Results suggested that the ERMS is an age-appropriate reading motivation measure for prekindergarten children and has a three-factor structure as assumed even though its internal consistency is moderate and is of limited predictive power of emergent literacy skills.     

The Relationship Between Academic Oral Proficiency and Reading Performance: A Comparative Study Between English Learners and English-Only Students

This study investigates the relationship between oral proficiency and reading proficiency in English-learning children (L2 students) and native English-speaking children (NE students). A set of oral activities measuring students’ academic oral skills in science classes was developed and administered to 61 fourth graders. Both the meaning-related aspects and the formal aspects of the students’ academic oral proficiency were compared between strong and struggling readers and between NE and L2 students. The study thus used a 2 × 2 factorial design (Strong/Struggling Readers × NE/L2 Students). After controlling for the students’ nonverbal analytic and reasoning skills, this study found that strong and struggling readers showed different levels of performance with respect to the meaning-related aspects of oral academic language but not with respect to the formal aspects of language. Conversely, differences between NE and L2 students were found in components related to the formal aspects but not in those related to the meaning aspects of oral language.     

Expect the Unexpected? Variations in Question Type Elicit Cues to Deception in Joint Interviewer Contexts

We examined the effect of (i) a second interviewer's demeanour and (ii) asking expected and unexpected questions on cues to deception. We predicted that liars compared with truth tellers would provide more detail to expected questions and less detail to unexpected questions, particularly when the second interviewer is supportive. Liars prepare answers for expected questions, and a supportive interviewer will encourage them to provide more detail. By definition, liars have not prepared answers for unexpected questions, and their answers to such questions will be less detailed. Participants (N = 168) appeared before two interviewers: The first asked all the questions, and the second remained silent. The second interviewer exhibited either a supportive or a neutral demeanour. As predicted, liars provided more detail to expected questions and less detail to unexpected questions, particularly when the second interviewer was supportive. In conclusion, a supportive second interviewer elicits cues to deceit. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Interactive effects in transfer-appropriate processing for event-based prospective memory: The roles of effort, ongoing task, and PM cue properties

Past studies (e.g., Marsh, Hicks, & Cook Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 31:68–75, 2005; Meiser & Schult European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 20:290–311, 2008) have shown that transfer-appropriate processing (TAP) effects in event-based prospective memory (PM) depend on the effort directed toward the ongoing task. In the present study, we addressed mixed findings from these studies and examined monitoring in TAP and transfer-inappropriate processing (TIP) conditions. In two experiments, a semantic or orthographic ongoing task was paired with a PM cue that either was matched in processing (TAP) or did not match in processing (TIP). Within each condition, effort was varied across trials. The results indicated that PM accuracy was higher in TAP than in TIP conditions, regardless of effort condition, supporting the findings reported by Meiser and Schult. Ex-Gaussian functions were fit to the mean reaction times (cf. Brewer Journal of Psychology 219:117–124, 2011) in order to examine monitoring across conditions. The analysis of distributional skew (τ parameter) showed sensitivity to ongoing task instructions and properties of the PM cues. These results support Meiser and Schult’s suggestion that TIP conditions require more attentional processing, and they also afford novel discussion on the interactive effects of ongoing task condition, PM cue properties, and manipulations of effort.     

Discrepancies Between Parent and Adolescent Beliefs About Daily Life Topics and Performance on an Emotion Recognition Task

Parents and children and adolescents commonly disagree in their perceptions of a variety of behaviors, including the family relationship and environment, and child and adolescent psychopathology. To this end, numerous studies have examined to what extent increased discrepant perceptions—particularly with regard to perceptions of the family relationship and environment—predict increased child and adolescent psychopathology. Parents’ and children and adolescents’ abilities to decode and identify others’ emotions (i.e., emotion recognition) may play a role in the link between discrepant perceptions and child and adolescent psychopathology. We examined parents’ and adolescents’ emotion recognition abilities in relation to discrepancies between parent and adolescent perceptions of daily life topics. In a sample of 50 parents and adolescents ages 14-to-17 years (M?=?15.4 years, 20 males, 54 % African-American), parents and adolescents were each administered a widely used performance-based measure of emotion recognition. Parents and adolescents were also administered a structured interview designed to directly assess each of their perceptions of the extent to which discrepancies existed in their beliefs about daily life topics (e.g., whether adolescents should complete their homework and carry out household chores). Interestingly, lower parent and adolescent emotion recognition performance significantly related to greater parent and adolescent perceived discrepant beliefs about daily life topics. We observed this relation whilst accounting for adolescent age and gender and levels of parent-adolescent conflict. These findings have important implications for understanding and using informant discrepancies in both basic developmental psychopathology research and applied research in clinic settings (e.g., discrepant views on therapeutic goals).     

Race and Ethnicity: An 11‐Year Content Analysis of Counseling and Values

Using the Dimensions of Personal Identity Model proposed by Arredondo and Glauner (as cited in Arredondo et al., 1996 ), the authors reviewed the last 11 years of the Association for Spiritual, Ethical, and Religious Values in Counseling's journal, Counseling and Values, specifically regarding the “A” dimensions of race and ethnicity. Twenty‐five of the 235 articles reviewed (11%) contained a multicultural perspective defined in these terms. Other aspects of cultural inclusion, such as authorship and type of study, were also considered.     

Brief pitch-priming facilitates infants’ discrimination of pitch-evoking noise: Evidence from event-related potentials

Pitch is derived by the auditory system through complex spectrotemporal processing. Pitch extraction is thought to depend on both spectral cues arising from lower harmonics that are resolved by cochlear filters in the inner ear, and on temporal cues arising from the pattern of action potentials contained in the cochlear output. Adults are capable of extracting pitch in the absence of robust spectral cues, taking advantage of the temporal cues that remain. However, recent behavioral evidence suggests that infants have difficulty discriminating between stimuli with different pitches when resolvable spectral cues are absent. In the current experiments, we used the mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the event related potential derived from electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings to examine a cortical representation of pitch discrimination for iterated rippled noise (IRN) stimuli in 4- and 8-month-old infants. IRN stimuli are pitch-evoking sounds generated by repeatedly adding a segment of white noise to itself at a constant delay. We created IRN stimuli (delays of 5 and 6 ms creating pitch percepts of 200 and 167 Hz) and high-pass filtered them to remove all resolvable spectral pitch cues. In experiment 1, we did not find EEG evidence that infants could detect the change in the pitch of these IRN stimuli. However, in Experiment 2, after a brief period of pitch-priming during which we added a sine wave component to the IRN stimulus at its perceived pitch, infants did show significant MMN in response to pitch changes in the IRN stimuli with sine waves removed. This suggests that (1) infants can use temporal cues to process pitch, although such processing is not mature and (2) that a short amount of pitch-priming experience can alter pitch representations in auditory cortex during infancy.