The effectiveness of UK student counselling services: an analysis using the CORE System

Despite concern surrounding the mental health of students, brought about by the government's policy of widening participation and increasing demands upon students, the effectiveness of student counselling has been a neglected research area. This study examines data from seven UK student counselling services using the CORE System in the routine evaluation of their services. Results indicate that counselling is effective, with 70% (service range 67% to 83%) of clients with outcome measures available showing reliable improvement on the CORE-OM from pre- to post-therapy. However, students who complete a course of counselling show significantly greater improvement, according to practitioner pre- and post-therapy severity ratings of depression and anxiety, than those clients who drop out or have an unplanned therapy ending (effect size 1.03, 0.85, respectively). The stage at which students drop out of therapy is important, with those students dropping out of therapy before the third session being the most vulnerable. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Conditional advice and inducements: are readers sensitive to implicit speech acts during comprehension?

Conditionals can implicitly convey a range of speech acts including promises, tips, threats and warnings. These are traditionally divided into the broader categories of advice (tips and warnings) and inducements (promises and threats). One consequence of this distinction is that speech acts from within the same category should be harder to differentiate than those from different categories. We examined this in two self-paced reading experiments. Experiment 1 revealed a rapid processing penalty when inducements (promises) and advice (tips) were anaphorically referenced using a mismatching speech act. In Experiment 2 a delayed penalty was observed when a speech act (promise or threat) was referenced by a mismatching speech act from the same category of inducements. This suggests that speech acts from the same category are harder to discriminate than those from different categories. Our findings not only support a semantic distinction between speech act categories, but also reveal pragmatic differences within categories.     

Parental Knowledge and Substance Use Among African American Adolescents: Influence of Gender and Grade Level

Parental knowledge is defined as parental awareness and information about a child’s activities, whereabouts, and associations that is obtained through parental monitoring, parental solicitation, or self-disclosure. Increased parental knowledge is generally associated with lower adolescent substance use; however, the influence of various contextual factors, such as adolescent gender and grade level is not well understood, particularly for different racial or ethnic groups. In the present study, we used Hierarchical Generalized Linear Modeling analyses to examine the longitudinal relationship of parental knowledge to adolescent substance use in the context of adolescent gender and grade level among 207 urban African American adolescents in grades 6–11. Results indicated that increased parental knowledge is associated with a concurrent lower likelihood of substance use across all types of substances examined (alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, other drug use, and any drug use), but it did not predict changes in substance use 1 year later for the entire sample. However, analyses by gender and grade level showed that for boys and middle school youth, parental knowledge was a protective factor for increases in substance use across 1 year. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for prevention and health promotion interventions for adolescent substance use among African American youth.     

Invisible or Involved Fathers? A Content Analysis of Representations of Parenting in Young Children��s Picturebooks in the UK

Although gender-role stereotyping in children??s books is a consistent focus of research, the study of the gender role stereotyping of parenting in particular is less common, despite a developing academic interest in the changing social meanings of fathering and mothering in contemporary societies. Previous analysis has suggested that fathers are under-represented in children??s books and when present, are less likely than mothers to be featured expressing affection towards, or caring for, children. This paper reports the results of a content analysis of a sample of best-selling young children??s picturebooks in the UK which feature representations of parents. It was predicted that fathers would feature less often, particularly at home, and be less likely to be depicted sharing physical contact with other family members, involved in domestic chores or childcare activity, or expressing emotion. The results upheld a number of the hypotheses, indicating that fathers remain ??invisible?? in an important sense. However scenes featuring fathers with children, some forms of physical contact, or caring for children were not significantly less likely to feature in these picturebooks than equivalent scenes featuring mothers; perhaps reflecting a more progressive portrayal of ??involved?? fatherhood. The findings are discussed in terms of their methodological, social, and political implications.     

Risk and protective factors associated with patterns of antisocial behavior among nonmetropolitan adolescents

This study used latent class analysis (LCA) to identify patterns of antisocial behavior (ASB) in a sample of 1,820 adolescents in a nonmetropolitan region of the Northeast. Self-reported ASBs including stealing, fighting, damaging property, and police contact were assessed. LCA identified four classes of ASB including a non-ASB class, a mild, a moderate, and a serious ASB class. Multinomial logistic regression indicated that parent-child relationships served as a protective factor against engaging in ASB and peer, school, and community risk and protective factors differentiated mild patterns of ASB from more intense patterns of involvment. These findings suggest utility in using the LCA to better understand predictors of adolescent ASB to inform more effective prevention and intervention efforts targeting youth who exhibit different patterns of behavior.     

Spontaneous Response Generalization During Whole Word Instruction: Reading to Spell and Spelling to Read

The bulk of the existing literature emphasizes the use of phonemic/phonetic based instruction to enhance generalization between reading and written language. However, phonetically irregular words are common in English and may require the use of whole word approaches. This study examined generalization between from reading to spelling and from spelling to reading following whole word based instruction using a delayed prompt procedure. The total instructional time was equated across conditions. Students exhibited substantial but incomplete generalization with the degree of generalization varying somewhat across responses and students. The most striking finding was that oral spelling instruction in which the printed word was neither presented nor produced resulted in substantial generalization to reading. These data illustrate a model for examining response generalization in instructional contexts.     

A high-field functional MRI study of quadri-lingual subjects

We assessed six multilingual subjects by functional MRI using a Noun Verb Generation task in four different languages. We hypothesised that the degree of proficiency in each language would be related to the extent of functional activity measured in a region of interest analysis. Proficiency in each language was quantified using two neuropsychological tests. All four languages activated overlapping brain areas, corresponding to the major language regions. The number of activated voxels correlated with proficiency, so that the activated volume increased for languages in which a subject had poorer proficiency. Activation did not appear to be dependent on the age at which the language was learnt.     

Emotional support from parents early in life, aging, and health

The purpose of this study is to estimate the relationship between receiving emotional support from parents early in life and an individual's health in adulthood. Analysis of data from a nationally representative sample of adults ages 25-74 years suggests that a lack of parental support during childhood is associated with increased levels of depressive symptoms and chronic conditions in adulthood. These associations between early parental support and adult health persist with increasing age throughout adulthood. Personal control, self-esteem, and social relationships during adulthood account for a large portion of these long-term associations. These findings underscore the importance of adopting a life course perspective in studying the social determinants of health among adults.     

Family, School, and Community Factors and Relationships to Racial–Ethnic Attitudes and Academic Achievement

This study examined family, school, and community factors and the relationships to racial–ethnic attitudes and academic achievement among 98 African American fourth-grade children. It has been posited that young people who feel better about their racial–ethnic background have better behavioral and academic outcomes, yet there is a need for more empirical tests of this premise. Psychometric information is reported on measures of parent, teacher, and child racial–ethnic attitudes. Path analysis was used to investigate ecological variables potentially related to children's racial–ethnic attitudes and achievement. Parental education and level of racial–ethnic pride were correlated and both were related to children's achievement though in the final path model, only the path from parental education level was statistically significant. Children whose teachers exhibited higher levels of racial–ethnic trust and perceived fewer barriers due to race and ethnicity evidenced more trust and optimism as well. Children living in communities with higher proportions of college-educated residents also exhibited more positive racial–ethnic attitudes. For children, higher racial–ethnic pride was related to higher achievement measured by grades and standardized test scores, while racial distrust and perception of barriers due to race were related to reduced performance. This study suggests that family, school, and community are all important factors related to children's racial–ethnic attitudes and also to their academic achievement.