Challenges and opportunities in moving toward a public health approach in school mental health

These three outstanding papers are important for the discipline of school psychology, the field of school-based mental health, and more generally for systems of education and mental health for children and adolescents. As the authors emphasize, there is an unprecedented focus on improving programs that remove barriers to learning and enhance development, health, and mental health in youth, in the most universal natural setting—the schools. The authors also correctly highlight that school psychology is uniquely positioned to play a leading role in this reform and change effort. Two interconnected themes of the public health approach—applying the evidence base and moving toward preventive and population-focused interventions—are emphasized in these papers, and while they focus on school psychology, the issues discussed are generalizable to the many disciplines that operate within educational and mental health systems. In the following discussion, I react to the papers' two major themes, discuss realities that should be addressed for progress to be made, and comment on their implications for school psychology.     

Putting personality in social context: extraversion, emergent leadership, and the availability of rewards

The present research tested relations between extraversion and emergent leadership among men in situations that differed in potential reward availability. Four-person groups of men engaged in a Leaderless Group Discussion (LGD) task and were randomly assigned to be evaluated by an attractive female observer, an attractive male observer, or not be evaluated. Evolutionary theories suggest that impressing a female evaluator in an intrasexually competitive situation should hold greater reward potential for men than impressing either a male evaluator or no evaluator. Accordingly, more extraverted men (who are more sensitive to reward cues) should display more group leadership when being evaluated by a woman than either a man or no one. Self-and peer ratings confirmed that more extraverted men were significantly more likely to emerge as leaders, but only in the female-evaluator condition. The results are discussed in terms of the interplay between personality, situational factors, and evolutionary principles.     

Computational models of the hippocampal region: linking incremental learning and episodic memory

The hippocampal region, a group of brain structures important for learning and memory, has been the focus of a large number of computational models. These tend to fall into two groups: (1) models of the role of the hippocampal region in incremental learning, which focus on the development of new representations that are sensitive to stimulus regularities and environmental context; (2) models that focus on the role of the hippocampal region in the rapid storage and retrieval of episodic memories. Rather than being in conflict, it is becoming apparent that both approaches are partially correct and might reflect the different functions of substructures of the hippocampal region. Future computational models will help to elaborate how these different substructures interact.     

Decoding digit symbol: speed,memory, and visual scanning

The authors evaluated the relative contributions of speed, memory, and visual scanning to Digit Symbol score in a sample of young adults (N = 87). Speed (Symbol Copy) explained 35% of Digit Symbol variance; only half of this was attributable to graphomotor speed (Name Printing), implying a role for perceptual speed. Visual-scanning tests (e.g., Symbol Scan) explained (on average) 34% of Digit Symbol variance, much of which was independent of perceptual-motor speed, establishing an important role for visual-scanning efficiency in Digit Symbol performance. By contrast, memory tests (on average) explained only 4% to 5% of Digit Symbol variance: statistically significant but clearly subsidiary, although a visual memory composite correlated more strongly with Digit Symbol. The Digit Symbol incidental learning procedures did, however, correlate moderately with other memory measures, suggesting that they are valid memory screening devices.     

Facilitation and helplessness: The interaction of perceived difficulty and importance of a task

Experimentally induced failure sometimes produces helplessness and sometimes facilitation on subsequent tasks. A model which accounts for this in terms of variations in perceived task difficulty and importance and variations in the cost of effort is proposed. Predictions from the model were confirmed in two experiments using the finger shuttlebox. When subjects expected the test task to be easy, importance of test outcome did not affect performance. However, when they expected the test task to be difficult, low outcome importance led to debilitation, and high importance to facilitation. If, in this condition, subjects experienced initial failure on the task perceived as difficult and important, helplessness rather than facilitation was observed. The model proposed may account for some of the conflicting results obtained in laboratory studies of human helplessness.     

On the self-perpetuating nature of stereotypes about women and men

An experiment was conducted to investigate an interpersonal process that contributes to the perpetuation of stereotyped beliefs about women and men. Male-female pairs of unacquainted individuals interacted to negotiate a division of labor on a series of work-like tasks (that differed in their sex-role connotations) in a situation that permitted control over the information that male perceivers received about the apparent sex of female targets. The perceivers' beliefs about the sex of their targets initiated a chain of events that resulted in targets providing behavioral confirmation for perceivers' beliefs about their sex. Targets believed by perceivers to be male chose tasks relatively masculine in nature, and targets believed by perceivers to be female chose tasks relatively feminine in nature. Although this behavioral confirmation effect was initially elicited as reactions to overtures made by perceivers, it persevered so that eventually targets came to initiate behaviors “appropriate” to the sex with which they had been labeled by perceivers. The specific roles of perceivers and targets in the behavioral confirmation process are examined. Implications of these findings for the perpetuation of stereotyped beliefs about the sexes are discussed.     

Capuchin monkeys learn to use information equally well from individual exploration and social demonstration

Animal Cognition - The limited evidence of complex culture in non-human primates contrasts strikingly with human behaviour. This may be because non-human primates fail to use information acquired...