Early impact of the BEST intervention for parents stressed by adolescent substance abuse

Youth involvement in substance abuse can be a source of considerable distress for their parents. Unilateral family interventions have been advocated as one means by which concerned family members can be supported to assist substance‐abusing family members. To date there has been little research examining the impact of unilateral family interventions on the directly participating family members. In this study the early impact of an 8‐week parent‐group programme known as Behavioural Exchange Systems Training (BEST) was evaluated using a quasi‐experimental, waiting list control design. The professionally led programme had been developed to support and assist parents in their efforts to cope with adolescent substance abuse. Subjects were 66 parents (48 families) accepted for entry into the programme between 1997 and 1998. Comparison was made between 46 parents offered immediate entry into the programme and 20 parents whose entry to the programme was delayed by an 8‐week waiting list. At the first assessment 87% of parents showed elevated mental health symptoms on the General Health Questionnaire. Evidence suggested exposure to the intervention had a positive impact on parents. Compared to parents on the waiting list, parents entered immediately into the intervention demonstrated greater reductions in mental health symptoms, increased parental satisfaction, and increased use of assertive parenting behaviours. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Attributing “Third World Poverty” in Australia and Malawi: A Case of Donor Bias?1

Causal attributions for poverty in the developing world were examined from the perspectives of “actors” living in a “developing country” (Malawi) and “observers” living in a “developed country” (Australia). Ninety‐eight Malawian and 100 Australian weekend shoppers responded to the Causes of Third World Poverty Questionnaire (CTWPQ) and the Just World Scale (JWS), with Australian participants also providing information about their frequency of donating to foreign‐aid charities. Consistent with the actor–observer bias, Australians were more likely than were Malawians to attribute poverty to dispositional characteristics of the poor, rather than to situational factors. Among the Australians, situational attributions were in turn associated with frequency of donation behavior. The finding of a donor bias in this sample has important implications for the social marketing of foreign aid to Western donor publics.     

Prompt comprehension in UNIX command production

We hypothesize that a cognitive analysis based on the construction-integration theory of comprehension (Kintsch, 1988) can predict what is difficult about generating complex composite commands in the UNIX operating system. We provide empirical support for assumptions of the Doane, Kintsch, and Polson (1989, 1990) construction-integration model for generating complex commands in UNIX. We asked users whose UNIX experience varied to produce complex UNIX commands, and then provided help prompts whenever the commands that they produced were erroneous. The help prompts were designed to assist subjects with respect to both the knowledge and the memory processes that our UNIX modeling efforts have suggested are lacking in less expert users. It appears that experts respond to different prompts than do novices. Expert performance is helped by the presentation of abstract information, whereas novice and intermediate performance is modified by presentation of concrete information. Second, while presentation of specific prompts helps less expert subjects, they do not provide sufficient information to obtain correct performance. Our analyses suggest that information about the ordering of commands is required to help the less expert with both knowledge and memory load problems in a manner consistent with skill acquisition theories.     

Undecidability,incompleteness and Arnol'd problems

We present some recent technical results of us on the incompleteness of classical analysis and then discuss our work on the Arnol'd decision problems for the stability of fixed points of dynamical systems.Partially supported by FAPESP and CNP_q (Brazil, Philosophy Section).     

California psychologists' religiosity and psychotherapy

Forty-seven randomly selected California clinical psychologists were surveyed to examine the effect religious or spiritual orientation has on the practice of psychotherapy. This included an assessment of ideology, attitudes toward religiosity, affiliation with organized religion, dimensions of religiousness, and use of clinical interventions of a religious nature. The majority of these psychologists were found to address religious and spiritual issues in their personal lives, to respect the function religion serves in peoples' lives, and to address religious and spiritual issues in professional practice. The majority of these psychologists use interventions of a religious nature. Very limited training occurs respective of religious and spiritual concerns; 81% reported that religious or spiritual issues were rarely or never discussed in the course of their graduate education and training.This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Los Angeles in August 1985.     

Depth adjacency and the rod-and-frame illusion

The effects of psychological set on perception of first and second pain were determined for 20 subjects. Percutaneous electrical shock intensities (6–8 mA, 3 msec) sufficient to evoke double pain responses were used in all subjects. Psychological sets included PAST (“Place yourself in a previous experience that was free of any significant emotional tone”), PRESENT (“Feel your foot that will be shocked”), and FUTURE (“Think to yourself that you are about to be shocked”). Perception of second pain was never perceived in PAST and FUTURE sets but was always perceived in the PRESENT set. Furthermore, at minimal rates of stimulation ( > 1/3 sec), summation of second pain occurred in the PRESENT set but not in the FUTURE set. All subjects startled in the FUTURE set and did not startle in PAST or PRESENT sets. Each subject reported that the aversiveness of the shock related to painful sensations in PAST and PRESENT sets and to ones own body responses in the FUTURE set.     

Crossbreeding and special handling of genetically nervous dogs

In studies of a healthy (A) and a nervous (E) genetic strain of pointer dogs, two techniques were utilized to determine environmental and hereditary influences. These were (1) reciprocal crossbreeding to females from each strain, and (2) split litters with special handling and human attention to one-half of each litter of nervous strain origin from birth through age six months. It is not possible to attribute the nervous behavior to an environmental mother effect since crossbred AE and EA offspring were highly similar on behavior tests of brief exploratory activity, rigid posturing to a loud noise and human avoidance behavior. Furthermore, special handling had almost no success in normalizing the responses of the nervous dogs in the behavior tests or in heart rate response to Effect-of-Person procedures. The results show that the biologic origin of the dogs is the most likely source of the nervousness; this has placed severe limits thus far on attempts to attenuate the condition.