Differences in the Manifest Dream Content of Anglo-American,Mexican-American,and African-American College Women

This study compares the manifest dream content of African-American college women with that of their Anglo-American and Mexican-American peers. The dream elements examined are characters, emotions, environmental press, achievement outcomes, and social interactions that are aggressive, friendly, or sexual. The results show a statistically significant difference on only one measure: environmental press. That is, the dreams of African Americans reveal a significantly stronger perception of themselves as victims of their fate rather than directors of it.     

Treating Inpatients With Comorbid Depression and Alcohol Use Disorders: A Comparison of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Versus Treatment as Usual

The Psychological Record - Inpatients involuntarily committed to a chemical dependency unit and exhibiting a co-occurring depressive disorder received either individual sessions of acceptance and...     

XV—Self-Interest and Self-Sacrifice

Stephen Darwall has recently suggested (following work by Mark Overvold) that theories which identify a person's good with her own ranking of concerns do not properly delimit the 'scope' of welfare, making self-sacrifice conceptually impossible. But whether a theory of welfare makes self-sacrifice impossible depends on what self-sacrifice is. I offer an alternative analysis to Overvold's, explaining why self-interest and self-sacrifice need not be opposed, and so why the problems of delimiting the scope of welfare and of allowing for self-sacrifice are distinct. If my analysis is correct, desire theories may allow for self-sacrifice however they delimit the scope of welfare.     

Young Children's Reports of When Events Occurred: Do Event Type and Assessment Method Matter?

Studying young children's reporting about when various events occurred informs about the development of episodic memory and metacognition. In two experiments, 55 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children participated in two activity sessions, a week apart. During the activity sessions, they learned novel animal facts and body movements, and they coloured animal pictures and posed for body movement photos. Immediately after the second activity session, children were interviewed about when they experienced the various events. Overall, children were as accurate about learning events as physical events, but they were more accurate when asked temporal distance (e.g. ‘Which did you learn a longer time ago, “X” or “Y”?’) than temporal location questions (e.g. ‘Which did you learn before today, “X” or “Y”?’). The results suggest that young children's apparent difficulty recognizing new learning is not due to a rapid ‘remember‐to‐know shift’. Rather, the way we ask young children about when they experienced various events determines their accuracy. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Home environmental influences on children's language and reading skills in a genetically sensitive design: Are socioeconomic status and home literacy environment environmental mediators and moderators?

This twin study examined how family socioeconomic status (SES) and home literacy environment (HLE) contributes to Chinese language and reading skills. It included 312 Chinese twin pairs aged 3 to 11. Children were individually administered tasks of Chinese word reading, receptive vocabulary and reading‐related cognitive skills, and nonverbal reasoning ability. Information on home environment was collected through parent‐reported questionnaires. Results showed that SES and HLE mediated shared environmental influences but did not moderate genetic influences on general language and reading abilities. Also, SES and HLE mediated shared environmental contributions to receptive vocabulary and syllable and rhyme awareness, but not orthographic skills. The findings of this study add to past twin studies that focused on alphabetic languages, suggesting that these links could be universal across languages. They also extend existing findings on SES and HLE's contributions to reading‐related cognitive skills.     

ADHD Symptoms in Post-Institutionalized Children Are Partially Mediated by Altered Frontal EEG Asymmetry

Individual differences in the propensity for left versus right frontal electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetry may underlie differences in approach/withdrawal tendencies and mental health deficits. Growing evidence suggests that early life adversity may shape brain development and contribute to the emergence of mental health problems. The present study examined frontal EEG asymmetry (FEA) following the transition to family care in children adopted internationally from institutional care settings between 15 and 36 months of age (N = 82; 46 female, 36 male). Two comparison groups were included: an international adoption control consisting of children adopted from foster care with little to no institutional deprivation (N = 45; 17 female, 28 male) and a post-adoption condition control consisting of children reared in birth families of the same education and income as the adoptive families (N = 48; 23 female, 25 male). Consistent with evidence of greater approach and impulsivity-related behavior problems in post-institutionalized (PI) children, PI status was associated with greater left FEA than found in the other two groups. In addition, left FEA served as a mediator between institutionalization and age 5 ADHD symptoms for girls. Age at adoption and other preadoption factors were examined with results suggesting that earlier adoption into a supportive family resulted in a more typical pattern of brain functioning. Findings support the idea that the capacity of brain activity to evidence typical functioning following perturbation may differ in relation to the timing of intervention and suggest that the earlier the intervention of adoption, the better.     

Trauma‐Informed Supervision: Clinical Supervision of Substance Use Disorder Counselors

Substance use disorder counselors are at risk of experiencing burnout, vicarious trauma, and secondary traumatic stress. These phenomena can lead to counselor impairment. The authors describe how trauma‐informed supervision can mitigate the risks of impairment for substance use disorder counselors.     

Person theories: their temporal stability and relation to intertrait inferences

This article tests whether individual differences in inferring one trait from another (intertrait inferences) can be linked to lay beliefs about the malleability of personality (person theories). It finds that holding the belief that personality is malleable (incremental theory) rather than fixed (entity theory) at the time of inferences is associated with less extreme inferences involving semantically related (but not unrelated) traits. Although person theories have been assumed to be stable over time, existing short-term test-retest coefficients do not capture their instability over a longer period. These results can illuminate interrater discrepancies in assessments of personality pathology and job performance, enrich understanding of such phenomena as stereotyping and impression formation, refine the interpretation of past research involving person theories, and inform research planning.     

In search of subtypes of Chinese developmental dyslexia

The dual-route model offers a popular way to classify developmental dyslexia into phonological and surface subtypes. The current study examined whether this dual-route model could provide a framework for understanding the varieties of Chinese developmental dyslexia. Three groups of Chinese children (dyslexics, chronological-age controls, and reading-level controls) were tested on Chinese exception character reading, pseudocharacter reading (analogous to English nonword reading), novel word learning, and some phonological and orthographic skills. It was found that Chinese exception character reading and pseudocharacter reading were highly correlated and that orthographic skills was a better predictor of both Chinese exception character and pseudocharacter reading than was phonological skills. More than half (62%) of the children in the dyslexia sample were classified as belonging to the surface subtype, but no children were classified as belonging to the phonological subtype. These results suggested that the lexical and sublexical routes in Chinese are highly interdependent or that there may be only one route from print to speech as suggested by the connectionist models. Chinese dyslexic children generally are characterized as having delays in various phonological and orthographic skills, but some, such as those identified as surface dyslexics in the current study, are more severely impaired.