Prepackaged Tour Versus Personal Journey: The Meaning of Informed Consent in the Context of the Teacher-study Group

This article discusses the specific ethical dilemma of obtaining informed consent and ensuring confidentiality and participant well-being while conducting a qualitative research study with novice ESL teachers in a Teacher Study Group. The discussion outlines their process of resolution of the ambiguities inherent in the research process – in essence the researchers’ personal journey of discovery. The article concludes with the broader implications for making the research process more transparent for other academic researchers working in the field of language-teacher cognition.     

Evaluating Personal Construct Group Work with Troubled Adolescents

The researchers assessed the effectiveness of personal construct group work done in 3 phases with troubled adolescents. The results provided evidence that personal construct group work was effective in bringing about changes in construing of themselves and others (Phase 1), was perceived by participants as effective (Phase 2), and was shown to be effective through the group processes (Phase 3). These findings and their clinical implications are discussed, together with some limitations in the study.     

Psychological Essentialism of Human Categories

ABSTRACT— Psychological essentialism is an ordinary mode of category representation that has powerful social-psychological consequences. This article reviews those consequences, with a focus on the distinctive ways people perceive, evaluate, and interact with members of human categories they essentialize. Why and when people engage in this mode of thinking remain open questions. Variability in essentialism across cultures, categories, and contexts suggests that this mode of representing human categories is rooted in a naturalistic theory of category origins, combined with a need to explain differences that cross category boundaries.     

Effects of pain acceptance and pain control strategies on physical impairment in individuals with chronic low back pain

Psychosocial treatments for chronic pain are effective. There is a need, however, to understand the processes involved in determining how these treatments contribute to behavior change. Control and acceptance strategies represent two potentially important processes involved in treatment, although they differ significantly in approach. Results from laboratory-based studies suggest that acceptance-oriented strategies significantly enhance pain tolerance and behavioral persistence, compared with control-oriented strategies. There is a need, however, to investigate processes of acceptance and control directly in clinical settings. The present study investigated the effects of three brief instructional sets (pain control, pain acceptance, continued practice) on demonstrated physical impairment in 74 individuals with chronic low back pain using an analogue experimental design. After controlling for baseline performance, the pain acceptance group demonstrated greater overall functioning on a set of 7 standardized physical tasks relative to the other two groups, which did not differ from one another. Further, the acceptance group exhibited a 16.3% improvement in impairment, whereas the pain control group worsened by 8.3% and the continued practice group improved by 2.5%. These results suggest that acceptance may be a key process involved in behavior change in individuals with chronic pain.     

Development of an abbreviated Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory (SPAI) using item response theory: the SPAI-23

An abbreviated version of the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory (SPAI) was developed using methods based in nonparametric item response theory. Participants included a nonclinical sample of 1,482 undergraduates (52% female, mean age = 19.4 years) as well as a clinical sample of 105 individuals (56% female, mean age = 36.4 years) diagnosed with either generalized (73%) or specific social phobia (27%). Twenty-three of the 45 SPAI items demonstrated good discrimination along the social anxiety continuum. In addition, option characteristic curves (OCCs) indicated that the SPAI's 7-point scale may generate errors in ranking individuals. Thus, options were collapsed to improve item performance. No gender differences emerged between any of the items' OCCs, suggesting that items function similarly among men and women. The abbreviated version also correlated highly with the original 45-item SPAI and exhibited similar patterns of correlations with measures of social anxiety. The SPAI-23 has considerable practical benefits, including a screening of both social and agoraphobic anxiety as well as decreased assessment and scoring time.     

The Effects of the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Nobody’s Perfect</Emphasis> Program on Parenting Resourcefulness and Competency

We conducted an evaluation of Nobody’s Perfect Program involving 71 participants from Peterborough County, Canada. Prior to the program, parents completed demographic information, along with self-report measures assessing the types of interactions with their children, parent resourcefulness, knowledge and use of resources, parent competency and self-efficacy, which were completed again after the program and at a two month follow-up testing. In comparison to parents not earning certificates, parents earning certificates were younger and more likely to have completed previous parenting programs. As well, parents earning certificates demonstrated and maintained an increase in parenting resourcefulness, warm/positive parent-child interactions, sense of parenting competency and satisfaction, and use of community resources. The more sessions parents attended, the better their parenting resourcefulness and warm/positive parent-child interactions on completion and at follow-up, and the less their angry and punitive parenting at follow-up. Parents who had attended parenting programs before had higher parenting resourcefulness scores at entry. They left the program with increased levels of parenting resourcefulness, better parent-child interactions, and more effective child management skills. A number of recommendations are suggested to help facilitators of the program enhance service delivery and improve parental outcomes.     

Consumer credit card use: the roles of creditor disclosure and anticipated emotion

In response to federal legislative reform aimed, in part, at reducing consumer bankruptcy filings, the authors conducted 2 experiments examining the role of affect in purchasing behavior. In Experiment 1, they examined consumer debtors, and in Experiment 2, they examined nondebtors. In both experiments, they investigated purchasing decisions made during a simulated online shopping trip, with some participants receiving standard disclosures of interest rates and money owed and with other participants receiving information under the new enhanced disclosure regulations. Results demonstrated support for the influence of anticipated affect in credit card use among both debtors and nondebtors and indicated that anticipated emotion may moderate the impact of the enhanced disclosure regulations.     

B. F. Skinner's Utopian Vision: Behind and Beyond Walden Two

This paper addresses B. F. Skinner's utopian vision for enhancing social justice and human well-being in his 1948 novel, Walden Two. In the first part, we situate the book in its historical, intellectual, and social context of the utopian genre, address critiques of the book's premises and practices, and discuss the fate of intentional communities patterned on the book. The central point here is that Skinner's utopian vision was not any of Walden Two's practices, except one: the use of empirical methods to search for and discover practices that worked. In the second part, we describe practices in Skinner's book that advance social justice and human well-being under the themes of health, wealth, and wisdom, and then show how the subsequent literature in applied behavior analysis supports Skinner's prescience. Applied behavior analysis is a measure of the success of Skinner's utopian vision: to experiment.