Developing comprehensive,individualized community-based services for children and youth with emotional and behavior disorders: Direct service providers' perspectives

Increased attention to the plight of children and youth with emotional or behavioral disorders (EBD) and their families has led to innovations in the manner in which these individuals are served. Two such innovations have been the development of public systems of comprehensive, community-based care and individualized wraparound services. This study was part of one community's attempt to merge these two innovations and provide individualized wraparound services to children and youth with EBD through the auspices of public agencies. Direct service providers were surveyed to gather their input into how such services could best be developed and implemented. The survey focused on existing barriers to providing services and specific service priorities for system development. Methods and results are presented. Implications for the local system and future research needs are discussed.     

Personal goals of older adults: issues in assessment and prediction.

This study identifies dimensions of individual difference in the content of older adults' personal goals and examines demographic, loss-related, and contextual influences on these goals. Results are based on the responses of 179 elders to a 112-item inventory designed to tap achievement, maintenance, disengagement, and coping goals in 16 life domains. Factor analyses yielded 10 dimensions that describe themes of global motivation, concerns about support and desired pace, and complexity of life. Demographic disadvantages and age-related transitions were related to greater desire for disengagement, support, and stability. Elders who were married and healthy were more likely to report a desire for an energetic life-style. Results are discussed in terms of implications for future research on elders' goals as a context for understanding the meaning of self-evaluation and environmental influences on aging.     

Sex Differences on Affective Dimensions: Continuing Examination

This study was designed to explore sex differences along several affective dimensions. A sample of 455 undergraduate students was administered several affective scales. A discriminant analysis was performed using the affective scales as discriminating variables and sex as the group variable. Significant sex differences were found on only two of nine affective scales, and the substantive significance of these differences seems to he minimal. The authors concluded that the promotion of faulty stereotypical beliefs should be abandoned in favor of increasingly complex inquiry in this area.     

Luria's Neuropsychological Evaluation in the Nordic Countries

The publication of Luria's Neuropsychological Investigation (LNI) by Christensen in 1975 introduced Luria's evaluation procedures to worldwide neuropsychology. The LNI demonstrated the benefit of a thorough qualitative analysis of an individual patient's functioning as well as the usefulness of a comprehensive theory of brain functioning. This article reviews the experiences that led to the development of the LNI, discusses its use and extension in Scandinavian countries, and presents clinical and research applications of the LNI in diagnosis and rehabilitation. A series of case examples provides justification and validity for the continued use of the LNI and related procedures. Discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the LNI and consideration of possible modifications of the procedures and interpretative methods provide the rationale for continued development of Luria's approach.     

Responsibility and Self-Expression

I present two different models of moral responsibility -- two different accounts of what we value in behavior for which the agent can legitimately be held morally responsible. On the first model, what we value is making a certain sort of difference to the world. On the second model, which I favor, we value a certain kind of self-expression. I argue that if one adopts the self-expression view, then one will be inclined to accept that moral responsibility need not require alternative possibilities.     

Differences in the severity of disturbance of behaviors in children receiving inpatient and outpatient psychiatric treatment.

This study was conducted to determine if there are differences in the severity of disturbance of behaviors exhibited by children receiving inpatient psychiatric treatment and those receiving outpatient psychiatric treatment based on their parents' judgments of the frequency of occurrence of those behaviors. The same behaviors were found to exist in both treatment groups, but the severity of disturbance of those behaviors in the inpatient sample was significantly greater than in the outpatient sample. The scale used in this study was found to be a valid and useful instrument for predicting inpatient and outpatient status of children. Pratice and research implications of this study are also discussed.     

Individualized assessment and phenomenological psychology

Although there is growing openness to tailoring of assessment procedures and reports to the particular client, these efforts typically have been sporadic and incomplete. This article reviews a systematic approach to individualized assessment, one whose practices are referred to as collaborative, contextual, and interventional. Clinical examples of these practices are presented in terms of their grounding in phenomenological psychology. Prior to that, themes such as intentionality, situatedness, dialectics, structuralism, and hermeneutics are introduced briefly. Phenomenological psychology as such is not seen here as necessary for all individualized practices, but it is seen as a critical touchpoint for development of theory and further practices.     

How many hindsight biases are there?

The answer is three: questioning a conceptual default assumption in hindsight bias research, we argue that the hindsight bias is not a unitary phenomenon but consists of three separable and partially independent subphenomena or components, namely, memory distortions, impressions of foreseeability and impressions of necessity. Following a detailed conceptual analysis including a systematic survey of hindsight characterizations in the published literature, we investigated these hindsight components in the context of political elections. We present evidence from three empirical studies that impressions of foreseeability and memory distortions (1) show hindsight effects that typically differ in magnitude and sometimes even in direction, (2) are essentially uncorrelated, and (3) are differentially influenced by extraneous variables. A fourth study found similar dissociations between memory distortions and impressions of necessity. All four studies thus provide support for a separate components view of the hindsight bias. An important consequence of such a view is that apparent contradictions in research findings as well as in theoretical explanations (e.g., cognitive vs. social-motivational) might be alleviated by taking differences between components into account. We also suggest conditions under which the components diverge or converge.