Psychologists' role in family-centered approach to practice, training, and research with young children

Family-centered, community-based, coordinated care for children with special needs is presented as the best practice model for providing services to children and families. Psychologists must learn to play an active role in this frame-work that both integrates psychology with other health and education disciplines and uses the broad spectrum of psychological knowledge about families, development, community organization, and intervention strategies. Key principles of family-centered child psychology affect practice research and training. The psychologist becomes part of a team created to support families as the primary care-givers of their children. Training programs must reorganize the types of experiences both in the classroom and the field to train new psychologists within this model. As mandates for family-centered care affect policies at the state and federal levels, research will remain a critical factor in understanding the effects of these policy shifts on child and family functioning and the delivery of services.     

Homelessness in the United States. An ecological perspective.

This article presents an ecological perspective on homelessness that emphasizes the context in which homeless people live and the complex interactions between personal, social, economic, and service system resources that affect their well-being. The ecological perspective encourages researchers and program developers to assess the problems of homelessness at multiple levels of analysis, to view homelessness as a result of contextual factors that interact with individual and family vulnerabilities, and to assess carefully the social contexts in which researchers and program developers operate. Four ecological principles are described as a heuristic for research, intervention, and policy development. The implications of an ecological perspective for psychologists who wish to get involved in dealing with homelessness are discussed.     

Cognitive motivation and drug use: a 9-year longitudinal study.

The predictive precedence of expectancy constructs, operationally defined as cognitive motivations, and drug use was investigated over a 9-year period from adolescence to adulthood. Alternative predictions from three different classes of theories of expectancy-behavior relations, including expectancy theory, a Skinnerian approach, and a reciprocal determinism perspective, were evaluated. The results are most consistent with the notion based in expectancy theory that cognitive motivations are nonspurious and possibly functionally autonomous influences on the use and abuse of drugs. More limited support is found for the view that drug use leads to cognitive motivations, as postulated in other theoretical perspectives. Other findings reveal the presence of expectancy generalization processes consistent with Rotter's (1954) expectancy theory, as well as the unique status of cognitive motivations for alcohol as an independent predictor of problem drug use.     

Processing of threat-related information in rape victims

We investigated selective processing of threat information in persons with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by using a modified Stroop procedure. Subjects were 15 rape victims with PTSD, 13 rape victims without the disorder, and 16 nontraumatized control subjects. They were asked to name the color of four types of words: specific threat (rape-related) words, general threat (related to physical harm and death) words, neutral words, and nonwords. Rape victims with PTSD evidenced a longer response latency for color naming of rape-related words than for other target-word types. Response latencies of non-PTSD victims and nonvictim control subjects did not differ across word types. Possible mechanisms underlying the selective processing of threat material are considered, and clinical implications are discussed.     

A theory of visual interpolation in object perception

We describe a new theory explaining the perception of partly occluded objects and illusory figures, from both static and kinematic information, in a unified framework. Three ideas guide our approach. First, perception of partly occluded objects, perception of illusory figures, and some other object perception phenomena derive from a single boundary interpolation process. These phenomena differ only in respects that are not part of the unit formation process, such as the depth placement of units formed. Second, unit formation from static and kinematic information can be treated in the same general framework. Third, spatial and spatiotemporal discontinuities in the boundaries of optically projected areas are fundamental to the unit formation process. Consistent with these ideas, we develop a detailed theory of unit formation that accounts for most cases of boundary perception in the absence of local physical specification. According to this theory, discontinuities in the first derivative of projected edges are initiating conditions for unit formation. A formal notion of relatability is defined, specifying which physically given edges leading into discontinuities can be connected to others by interpolated edges. Intuitively, relatability requires that two edges be connectable by a smooth, monotonic curve. The roots of the discontinuity and relatability notions in ecological constraints on object perception are discussed. Finally, we elaborate our approach by discussing related issues, some new phenomena, connections to other approaches, and issues for future research.     

Coping within couples: adjustment two years after forced geographic relocation

Is our understanding of how individuals adjust to stressful life events increased when we analyze their adjustment in ways that recognize that these individuals are also married couples? The data used to answer this question came from a unique “natural experiment” occasioned by the forced evacuation of the Israeli settlement of Ophira under the terms of the Camp David Accords. We found that the adjustment of individuals within couples became more similar across the relocation, that is, couples adapted as a “family system.” This occurred because the coping skills of one member of the couple “drove” the adjustment of both partners.     

Sleep in Alzheimer's disease and other dementing disorders

It is estimated that up to 10% of the elderly population have clinically significant cognitive deficits. The neuronal pathologies that underlie the dementing disorders cause both cognitive dysfunction and disturbances in normal sleep/wake patterns. Here we report the changes in sleep/wake patterns seen with increasing severity of Alzheimer's disease, probably the most common dementing disorder. In addition, studies examining sleep/wake patterns in a number of other dementing disorders are reviewed.     

Occupation and handedness: an examination of architects and mail survey biases

Handedness among architects was determined by mail survey. Contrary to previous reports, no evidence was found of an excess of left-handers among a sample of 236 fully qualified male architects and 78 male architectural students. A second study examined whether the use of mail surveys systematically biases the returns of handedness questionnaires. For this, questionnaires were sent to 1,017 university students. No evidence was found for a bias amongst those who did and did not reply to the initial questionnaire. These results strengthen the findings of the first study.     

The role of articulation in the parsing and retention of letter strings in tachistoscopic free recall

In Mewhort and Campbell's (1981) model of visual word recognition, a scan-parse mechanism transfer information from a character buffer to a short-term store and is largely responsible for the familiarity effects observed in tachistoscopic free recall. Although Mewhort and Campbell do not elaborate on the role of articulation in this task, they do suggest that the scan-parse mechanism acts prior to any involvement of articulatory processes (see Mewhort & Campbell, 1980). However, proponents of working memory (see Baddeley, 1986) are clear that articulation is necessary for the transfer of visual information to a phonological short-term store. In order to clarify the role of articulation in the parsing and retention of letter string, we asked subjects to undertake a tachistoscopic free-recall task, involving first- and fourth-order letter strings, with and without articulatory suppression and/or unattended speech. Unattended speech was observed to interfere with recall, but only when subjects were free to articulate the strings. This implies that subjects were retrieving information from the phonological store and that articulation is necessary for the registration of visual information in this store. The lack of interaction between order-of-approximation and suppression supports the view that the scan-parse mechanism acts independently of articulation. It appears, therefore, that letter strings are parsed at a stage preceding their transfer of the pharmacological store. Finally, the results indicate that subjects are able to draw directly on a representation of the parsed components of a letter string and may do so when phonological storage is difficult.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)