Exploring the effect of therapists' treatment practices on client attendance in community-based care for children

Sustained treatment attendance has been reported to be poor in publicly funded community-based clinic settings serving children and families. Several child and family characteristics have been shown to predict attendance in community-based care, but virtually no research has been conducted to examine how experiences in care, including psychotherapists' within-session practices, influence client attendance. The goal of this exploratory study was to examine how observed practice within sessions, in particular the extent to which therapists delivered elements consistent with evidence-based practices, impacts total number of sessions attended, while accounting for an array of other potential predictors. Participants include 181 children ages 4-13 and their parents entering a new episode of care for disruptive behavior problems in publicly funded clinics. Data sources include administrative billing records on treatment attendance; coded videotaped treatment sessions; and self-reports from children, parents, and therapists. Results indicate that parent education, service funding source, parent alliance with therapist, and therapist experience predicted number of sessions attended; intensity of evidence-based treatment techniques delivered to children was marginally associated with attendance (p = .059). Implications for improving engagement in community-based care are discussed.     

A telehealth intervention for veterans on antiviral treatment for the hepatitis C virus

The standard treatment for chronic hepatitis C (pegylated interferon and ribavirin) causes challenging physical and psychological side effects. The current pilot study evaluated the efficacy of a brief, telephone-based, cognitive-behavioral self-management intervention designed to address mood and quality of life within a sample of veterans on antiviral treatment for hepatitis C. Results from this pilot study support the feasibility of this telehealth intervention, showing that veterans were highly satisfied with the content of the intervention and compliant with the telephone calls. Findings further indicate that symptoms of depression and anxiety and mental health quality of life either remained stable or improved in those participants who received the brief telephone intervention, while those receiving usual care showed significant declines in mood and mental health quality of life. The findings from this study provide evidence that a brief, clinician-administered phone intervention may help individuals on antiviral therapy for hepatitis C to cope more effectively with the negative treatment side effects.     

Recognizing prosody across modalities, face areas and speakers: examining perceivers' sensitivity to variable realizations of visual prosody

Prosody can be expressed not only by modification to the timing, stress and intonation of auditory speech but also by modifying visual speech. Studies have shown that the production of visual cues to prosody is highly variable (both within and across speakers), however behavioural studies have shown that perceivers can effectively use such visual cues. The latter result suggests that people are sensitive to the type of prosody expressed despite cue variability. The current study investigated the extent to which perceivers can match visual cues to prosody from different speakers and from different face regions. Participants were presented two pairs of sentences (consisting of the same segmental content) and were required to decide which pair had the same prosody. Experiment 1 tested visual and auditory cues from the same speaker and Experiment 2 from different speakers. Experiment 3 used visual cues from the upper and the lower face of the same talker and Experiment 4 from different speakers. The results showed that perceivers could accurately match prosody even when signals were produced by different speakers. Furthermore, perceivers were able to match the prosodic cues both within and across modalities regardless of the face area presented. This ability to match prosody from very different visual cues suggests that perceivers cope with variation in the production of visual prosody by flexibly mapping specific tokens to abstract prosodic types.     

Implicit Science Stereotypes Mediate the Relationship between Gender and Academic Participation

While the gender gap in mathematics and science has narrowed, men pursue these fields at a higher rate than women. In this study, 165 men and women at a university in the northeastern United States completed implicit and explicit measures of science stereotypes (association between male and science, relative to female and humanities), and gender identity (association between the concept “self” and one’s own gender, relative to the concept “other” and the other gender), and reported plans to pursue science-oriented and humanities-oriented academic programs and careers. Although men were more likely than women to plan to pursue science, this gap in students’ intentions was completely accounted for by implicit stereotypes. Moreover, implicit gender identity moderated the relationship between women’s stereotypes and their academic plans, such that implicit stereotypes only predicted plans for women who strongly implicitly identified as female. These findings illustrate how an understanding of implicit cognitions can illuminate between-group disparities as well as within-group variability in science pursuit.     

A factor analytic investigation of the BASC-2 Behavioral and Emotional Screening System Parent Form: psychometric properties, practical implications, and future directions

The Behavior Assessment System for Children, Second Edition (BASC-2) Behavioral and Emotional Screening System Parent Form (BESS Parent; Kamphaus & Reynolds, 2007) is a recently developed instrument designed to identify behavioral and emotional risk in students. To describe the underlying factor structure for this instrument, exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) were conducted utilizing two subsets of a large, nationally-representative sample. The results of the EFA suggested that the BESS Parent contained a four-factor latent structure (i.e., Externalizing, Internalizing, Adaptive Skills, and Inattention), which was supported by CFA. Results support further investigation into utilizing four subscales in addition to an overall risk score; distributional and reliability information for the BESS Parent subscales is provided. Practical implications for school psychologists interested in early identification and directions for future research are discussed.     

Training assessors in Therapeutic Assessment

This article focuses on the use of the comprehensive Therapeutic Assessment training model (Finn, 2007) with a child and his mother. The mother observed the child's testing sessions and was actively involved in a family intervention session as a way of translating assessment results into practice. One psychologist administered the psychological tests with the child, and 2 other clinicians worked with the mother throughout the process. We offer ideas about learning and training in the context of our case in Therapeutic Assessment. We investigate the parallel process between the way in which parents learn about their child's perspective and the way in which clinicians learn about the family's perspective. We discuss our discoveries in the context of planning case interventions. We explore the impact of trauma and ways of holding and containing this difficult work within our community and with each other.     

Classification versus inference learning contrasted with real-world categories

Categories are learned and used in a variety of ways, but the research focus has been on classification learning. Recent work contrasting classification with inference learning of categories found important later differences in category performance. However, theoretical accounts differ on whether this is due to an inherent difference between the tasks or to the implementation decisions. The inherent-difference explanation argues that inference learners focus on the internal structure of the categories—what each category is like—while classification learners focus on diagnostic information to predict category membership. In two experiments, using real-world categories and controlling for earlier methodological differences, inference learners learned more about what each category was like than did classification learners, as evidenced by higher performance on a novel classification test. These results suggest that there is an inherent difference between learning new categories by classifying an item versus inferring a feature.     

The flexible use of inductive and geometric spatial categories

The present study examined the flexibility with which people can adopt different category schemes in the spatial domain. In a location memory task, participants viewed and estimated the locations of four kinds of objects that were spatially grouped by object identity. This identity-based arrangement was either congruent or incongruent with the perceptually based, geometric categories that have been reported in previous research. Four experiments examined the conditions under which these different category schemes are used to inform estimates of locations. The results showed that use of identity information depended on the number of objects to be remembered during a trial: When one or two objects were remembered at a time, only geometric categories affected estimates, but when four objects were to be remembered, both geometric categories and identity groupings affected estimates. As memory load increases, participants rely on additional sources to inform their estimates of location.     

How we Became the Schmams: Conceptualizations of Fairness in the Decision-Making Process for Latina/O Children

The current study examines 16 Latina/o fifth grade children's desires for a decision-making structure within a youth participatory action research (yPAR) program. When given the choices of consensus, majority rule, authoritarian rule, delegation, and random choice models, children chose random choice. Procedural, distributive and emotional justice were heavily weighted in their reasoning around fairness and decision making. Many thought random choice offered the best alternative because it flattened power hierarchies so that each child would, at some point, have the power to make a decision. Additionally, children argued that the neutrality of random choice allowed them to sidestep interpersonal tensions. Implications include how social identities inform definitions of fairness and how yPAR programs should work with youth around how they will make decisions.