How Animals Classify Friends and Foes

A model of stimulus equivalence, which describes how non-similarity-based categories are formed, is used to describe aspects of animal social and communicative interactions such as kinship, friendship, coalitions, territorial behavior, and referential calling. Although this model was originally designed to deal with stimulus relations in linguistic behavior, it can be readily applied to understanding the cognitive mechanisms that underlie social as well as nonsocial categorizations in numerous taxa. This approach provides a new, parsimonious, and experimentally based understanding of how animals without language deal with problems of classification in their environment.     

Psychological distance reduces the effect of internalized stigma on mental health treatment decisions

Although stigma is a major barrier to treatment for those with mental health concerns, it is poorly understood when stigma is more or less influential in mental health treatment decisions. In the current work, we examined whether psychological distance—the removal of an event from direct experience—reduced the influence of internalized stigma on willingness to seek treatment. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that psychological distance versus proximity (e.g., seeking treatment in three months vs. in two days, respectively) decreases the negative influence of stigma on willingness to seek treatment. We focused on a population for whom mental health treatment decisions are personally-relevant: individuals who had previously sought mental health treatment. Experiment 1 showed that the extent to which these individuals internalized (i.e., personally endorsed) stigma about mental illness predicted lower intentions to make an appointment with a mental health care provider for themselves (but not another person). Experiment 2 replicated this result using a different measure of psychological distance (temporal distance) and extended this finding to behavior (time spent reading mental health resources). Overall, this research demonstrated that internalized stigma disrupts mental health treatment-seeking intentions and behaviors when they are psychologically proximal, but not when they are distant. Potential applications of these results are discussed.     

Does Mastery of ABLA Level 6 Make it Easier for Individuals with Developmental Disabilities to Learn to Name Objects?

Level 6 of the Assessment of Basic Learning Abilities (ABLA) assesses the ease or difficulty with which persons with developmental disabilities are able to learn a two-choice auditory-visual discrimination. We investigated whether participants who passed ABLA Level 6 (Group 1) would more readily learn object naming (vocal tacts) than those who failed ABLA Level 6 (Group 2). The groups were matched on the Communication Subscale of the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale. Results indicated that Group 1 met mastery criterion for a significantly larger number of naming responses and in significantly fewer trials than Group 2. The implications for language training are discussed.     

On leveraged learning in lexical acquisition and its relationship to acceleration

Children at about age 18 months experience acceleration in word learning. This vocabulary explosion is a robust phenomenon, although the exact shape and timing vary from child to child. One class of explanations, which we term collectively as leveraged learning , posits that knowledge of some words helps with the learning of others. In this framework, the child initially knows no words and so learning is slow. As more words are acquired, new words become easier and thus it is the acquisition of early words that fuels the explosion in learning. In this paper we examine the role of leveraged learning in the vocabulary spurt by proposing a simple model of leveraged learning. Our results show that leverage can change both the shape and timing of the acceleration, but that it cannot create acceleration if it did not exist in the corresponding model without leveraging. This model is then applied to the Zipfian distribution of word frequencies, which confirm that leveraging does not create acceleration, but that the relationship between frequency and the difficulty of learning a word may be complex.     

The Role of Lay Health Advisors in Cardiovascular Risk Reduction: A Review

Interventions are needed to reduce the negative impact of cardiovascular disease. The combination of health risks for disease, disability, and mortality, particularly among underserved populations, might be best addressed with programs designed to enhance awareness and development of resources within a context of community support. The objectives of this review were to: (1) provide a comprehensive review and evaluation of the roles, evaluation, and effectiveness of LHA in community-based programs with an emphasis on cardiovascular risk reduction; and (2) provide recommendations for future research involving LHA in such programs. Computer and manual searches were conducted of articles in the English-language literature from 1980 to 2007. Twenty articles were evaluated, which emphasized the role of the LHA in cardiovascular risk reduction. A review of research literature provides a starting point for determining salient approaches for intervention and evaluation, issues related to program implementation and sustainability, and strengths and limitations of existing approaches.     

A feminist psychotherapeutic approach to working with women who eat compulsively1

Feminist psychoanalytic theorists argue that eating problems demonstrate ways in which conscious and unconscious gendered feelings about women are split off and projected on to their bodies. As such, they are complex ways in which women attempt to negotiate and express their identities within their paradoxical social position in contemporary western society. They are not just consumers but also objects of consumption. This paper explores material from a feminist psychodynamic therapy group for women with a variety of eating problems, focusing on how interweaving both discursive and unconscious approaches to understanding the gendered function of weight can facilitate change. Feminist psychodynamic therapists work with the concept that the body is an interface between conscious and unconscious mind within both an internal and a social world. This framework enables the client to understand the connections between socially constructed frameworks of femininity, emotions and bodily sensations, rather than to act on them through some form of bodily abuse. This approach is based on my adaptation of Susie Orbach's (1978) ‘Fat is a Feminist Issue’ therapeutic model for working with compulsive eaters. While arguing that a feminist psychoanalytic framework is crucial in this type of work, I suggest that it is essential to combine this with cognitive and behavioural therapeutic interventions in order to provide a pedagogic structure in which food, eating and body size come to be seen as meaningful.     

Long-term perceptual specificity effects in recognition memory: the transformed pictures paradigm.

The effects of a study/test mismatch in the viewing mode of natural scenes on recognition memory performance were examined. At both encoding and retrieval, scenes were presented either by being divided into quarters that were displayed in a sequential cumulative fashion or by scrolling the images through the screen, thereby gradually revealing the content of the images. Half of the participants were tested immediately after encoding and the other half after 48 hours. For both the immediate and delayed retrieval conditions, better recognition memory was demonstrated when viewing modes matched across study and test than when they mismatched. Implications for current processing and multiple systems views of memory are discussed.     

Resilience-Based Intervention with Underserved Children: Impact on Self-Regulation in a Randomized Clinical Trial in Schools

Resilience and emotion regulation are crucial for optimal psychosocial functioning in children. This study assessed whether a group-based intervention, the Resilience Builder Program (RBP), improved student report of emotion regulation when administered in elementary schools. Sixty-seven students aged 9–12 years (M = 10.50, SD =.74; 82.1% male, 98.5% ethnic/racial minority) were randomly assigned to receive the RBP intervention immediately or following a semester delay. Participants reported their emotional control using the How I Feel scale. Students who received the RBP reported a significant increase in their emotional control and a significant decrease in negative emotion compared to those students in the delayed treatment sample who had not yet received the intervention. Further, students indicated a strongly positive perception of the therapy.     

Substance Use Research with Indigenous Communities: Exploring and Extending Foundational Principles of Community Psychology

Many Indigenous communities are concerned with substance use (SU) problems and eager to advance effective solutions for their prevention and treatment. Yet these communities also are concerned about the perpetuation of colonizing, disorder‐focused, stigmatizing approaches to mental health, and social narratives related to SU problems. Foundational principles of community psychology—ecological perspectives, empowerment, sociocultural competence, community inclusion and partnership, and reflective practice—provide useful frameworks for informing ethical community‐based research pertaining to SU problems conducted with and by Indigenous communities. These principles are explored and extended for Indigenous community contexts through themes generated from seven collaborative studies focused on understanding, preventing, and treating SU problems. These studies are generated from research teams working with Indigenous communities across the United States and Canada—inclusive of urban, rural, and reservation/reserve populations as well as adult and youth participants. Shared themes indicate that Indigenous SU research reflects community psychology principles, as an outgrowth of research agendas and processes that are increasingly guided by Indigenous communities. At the same time, this research challenges these principles in important ways pertaining to Indigenous–settler relations and Indigenous‐specific considerations. We discuss these challenges and recommend greater synergy between community psychology and Indigenous research.