The Effectiveness of Functional Family Therapy in Reducing Adolescent Mental Health Risk and Family Adjustment Difficulties in an Irish Context

To evaluate the effectiveness of Functional Family Therapy (FFT) 42 cases were randomized to FFT and 55 to a waiting‐list control group. Minimization procedures controlled the effects of potentially confounding baseline variables. Cases were treated by a team of five therapists who implemented FFT with a moderate degree of fidelity. Rates of clinical recovery were significantly higher in the FFT group than in the control group. Compared to the comparison group, parents in the FFT group reported significantly greater improvement in adolescent problems on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and both parents and adolescents reported improvements in family adjustment on the Systemic Clinical Outcomes and Routine Evaluation (SCORE). In addition, 93% of youth and families in the treatment condition completed FFT. Improvements shown immediately after treatment were sustained at 3‐month follow‐up. Results provide a current demonstration of FFT's effectiveness for youth with behavior problems in community‐based settings, expand our understanding of the range of positive outcomes of FFT to include mental health risk and family‐defined problem severity and impact, and suggests that it is an effective intervention when implemented in an Irish context.     

Personality Correlates of Midlife Cardiometabolic Risk: The Explanatory Role of Higher‐Order Factors of the Five‐Factor Model

Varying associations are reported between Five‐Factor Model (FFM) personality traits and cardiovascular disease risk. Here, we further examine dispositional correlates of cardiometabolic risk within a hierarchical model of personality that proposes higher‐order traits of Stability (shared variance of Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, inverse Neuroticism) and Plasticity (Extraversion, Openness), and we test hypothesized mediation via biological and behavioral factors. In an observational study of 856 community volunteers aged 30–54 years (46% male, 86% Caucasian), latent variable FFM traits (using multiple‐informant reports) and aggregated cardiometabolic risk (indicators: insulin resistance, dyslipidemia, blood pressure, adiposity) were estimated using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The cardiometabolic factor was regressed on each personality factor or higher‐order trait. Cross‐sectional indirect effects via systemic inflammation, cardiac autonomic control, and physical activity were tested. CFA models confirmed the Stability “meta‐trait,” but not Plasticity. Lower Stability was associated with heightened cardiometabolic risk. This association was accounted for by inflammation, autonomic function, and physical activity. Among FFM traits, only Openness was associated with risk over and above Stability, and, unlike Stability, this relationship was unexplained by the intervening variables. A Stability meta‐trait covaries with midlife cardiometabolic risk, and this association is accounted for by three candidate biological and behavioral factors.     

The Varieties of Intrinsicality

Intrinsicality is a central notion in metaphysics that can do important work in many areas of philosophy. It is not widely appreciated, however, that there are in fact a number of different notions of intrinsicality, and that these different notions differ in what work they can do. This paper discusses what these notions are, describes how they are related to each other, and argues that each of them can be analysed in terms of a single notion of intrinsic aboutness that relates states of affairs to the things they are intrinsically about.     

The end of what? Phenomenology vs. speculative realism

Abstract

Phenomenology has recently come under attack from proponents of speculative realism. In this paper, I present and assess the criticism, and argue that it is either superficial and simplistic or lacks novelty.     

Prototypes are Key Heuristic Information in Insight Problem Solving

Evidence from a range of fields indicates that inventions are often inspired by drawing a parallel to solutions found in nature. However, the cognitive mechanism of this process is not well understood. The cognitive mechanism of heuristic prototype in scientific innovation was tested with 3 experiments. First, 84 historical accounts of important scientific innovations were collected and the prototype solution underlying them was extracted. Experiment 1 tested the validity of these materials and showed that knowledge of the prototype facilitated insight solutions. Experiment 2 and 3 suggested that activation of the prototype was indeed the critical element in the process of insight. Also, the mechanism of this activation was linked to the semantic similarity between the feature function of the prototype and the required function of the problem. In addition, Experiment 3 showed that participants who were better at excluding interference information more readily activated the relevant prototype. To sum up, the experiments suggested that activating a memory of the heuristic prototype was important in solving scientific innovation insight problems. Activating the feature function of right heuristic prototype and linking it by way of semantic similarity to the required function of the problem was the key mechanism people used to solve scientific insight problem.     

Moral violations reduce oral consumption

Consumers frequently encounter moral violations in everyday life. They watch movies and television shows about crime and deception, hear news reports of corporate fraud and tax evasion, and hear gossip about cheaters and thieves. How does exposure to moral violations influence consumption? Because moral violations arouse disgust and because disgust is an evolutionarily important signal of contamination that should provoke a multi-modal response, we hypothesize that moral violations affect a key behavioral response to disgust: reduced oral consumption. In three experiments, compared with those in control conditions, people drank less water and chocolate milk while (a) watching a film portraying the moral violations of incest, (b) writing about moral violations of cheating or theft, and (c) listening to a report about fraud and manipulation. These findings imply that “moral disgust” influences consumption in ways similar to core disgust, and thus provide evidence for the associations between moral violations, emotions, and consumer behavior.     

Leveraging social media content to support engagement in positive interventions

A key challenge for positive psychology interventions is promoting sustained engagement to improve long-term outcomes. One way to increase engagement is to introduce variety to reduce hedonic adaptation. Here, we propose supplementing intervention prompts with items from a person’s social media archive to add variety. Through a one-week pilot study of six positive psychology activities via a Facebook application, we explore whether Facebook content is useful to keep people engaged in activities and what attributes of content make it most useful. A total of 260 participants used our application, and analysis of usage showed that displaying content is engaging. By looking at which content was marked as useful by participants, we find that useful content is in itself meaningful and engaging (photos, longer texts, and content about close friends). We also find that certain intervention activities are more engaging and better suited for making use of Facebook content than others.     

Ideology and Gender: Observers’ System Justification and Targets’ Gender as Interactive Predictors of Citizenship Expectations

We integrate system justification and social role theory to explain how observers’ system justification and target employees’ gender interact to predict observers’ expectations of targets’ sportsmanship citizenship behaviors. In contrast with social role theory predictions, observers did not expect greater levels of sportsmanship from women compared to men. Yet observers expected more sportsmanship from women (a) when observers were ideologically motivated by gender-specific beliefs (gender-specific system justification; Study 1) and (b) when system justification was cued experimentally (Study 2). A heretofore-unexamined aspect, observers’ ideology, modifies their expectations of sportsmanship citizenship across target genders. This has implications for system justification, social role, and organizational citizenship theoretical perspectives.     

Optimistic Naturalism: Scientific Advancement and the Meaning of Life

Naturalist theories of the meaning of life are sometimes criticised for not setting the bar high enough for what counts as a meaningful life. Tolstoy’s version of this criticism is that Naturalist theories do not describe really meaningful lives because they do not require that we connect our finite lives with the infinite. Another criticism of Naturalist theories is that they cannot adequately resolve the Absurd—the vast difference between how meaningful our actions and lives appear from subjective and objective viewpoints. This article proposes a novel view, Optimistic Naturalism, in order to refute these criticisms. Optimistic Naturalism is the view that scientific and technological advancement might allow us to lead Truly Meaningful lives in a purely physical universe by enabling our actions, which we find meaningful partly because they might have particular infinite consequences, to actually have infinite consequences for life. The central tenets of Optimistic Naturalism are Infinite Consequence and Scientific Optimism. By explaining how the correct connection of the subjective and objective meaning of actions can result in True Meaning, Infinite Consequence provides a theoretical blueprint for resolving the Absurd. Scientific Optimism provides reason to think that it is possible to follow that blueprint in a purely physical universe. Therefore, when taken together, these two principles provide relatively plausible reasons to think that at least one kind of Naturalist theory can connect the finite with the infinite in a meaningful way and resolve the Absurd.