Professional Disclosure Statements and Formal Plans for Supervision: Two Strategies for Minimizing the Risk of Ethical Conflicts in Post‐Master's Supervision

Ethical conflicts related to the issues of informed consent, due process, competence, confidentiality, and dual relationships in supervision are discussed. Two strategies are proposed as ways to minimize the potential for ethical conflict in post‐master's supervision: the use of professional disclosure statements by supervisors and the development of formal plans for supervision.     

Collective Guilt and Shame as Motivation for White Support of Black Programs1

Two studies examined whether exposing Whites to collective guilt‐ and shame‐inducing stimuli would lead to heightened support for Black programs. White participants watched either a civil‐rights videotape or one of two control videos and then completed either a self‐affirmation task or a filler task. Support for Black programs was measured in a bogus second study. Those who watched the civil‐rights video and completed the filler task suppressed their support for Black programs, whereas those who watched the civil‐rights video and then self‐affirmed displayed the highest levels of Black program support. Findings suggest that Whites might react antisocially to guilt‐ and shame‐inducing situations, and react prosocially only after reaffirming their personal integrity.     

Test–Retest Reliability of Dominic Anxiety and Depression Items Among Young Children

Assessing anxiety and depressive symptoms through direct interviewing of young children has been found to be particularly difficult utilizing standard interview methods. Test–retest reliability of selected anxiety and depression items from the revised Dominic (Valla, Bergeron, Bidaut-Russell, St-Georges, & Gaudet, 1997), a cartoon-based questionnaire based on DSM diagnostic criteria, was investigated among two geographically diverse samples (Los Angeles and St. Louis; N = 37). Overall, kappas were higher for the anxiety items than for the depression items. In both cities the sample included clinic and non-clinic cases of African-American, Hispanic/Latino, and Caucasian children age 6–8; kappas for the anxiety and depression items were higher among the clinic cases than for the community cases. Given the need for psychometrically sound measures for culturally diverse samples of children, this initial report suggests that the use of selected Dominic items holds promise as a cartoon-based assessment of young children.     

A Review and Extension of Current Models of Dynamic Criteria

An important issue in personnel selection and test validation has been the nature of performance criteria and more specifically the existence of dynamic criteria. There is a continuing debate regarding the extent to which performance and validity coefficients remain stable over time. We examine research within work, laboratory, and academic settings and evaluate existing models of dynamic criteria. Building on previous models, we propose an integrative model of dynamic criteria that identifies important issues for ability and performance constructs and discusses how variables related to the task, job, and organization can affect the temporal stability of criterion performance and the ability-performance relationship.     

Community Violence and Youth: Affect, Behavior, Substance Use, and Academics

Community violence is recognized as a major public health problem (WHO, World Report on Violence and Health, 2002) that Americans increasingly understand has adverse implications beyond inner-cities. However, the majority of research on chronic community violence exposure focuses on ethnic minority, impoverished, and/or crime-ridden communities while treatment and prevention focuses on the perpetrators of the violence, not on the youth who are its direct or indirect victims. School-based treatment and preventive interventions are needed for children at elevated risk for exposure to community violence. In preparation, a longitudinal, community epidemiological study, The Multiple Opportunities to Reach Excellence (MORE) Project, is being fielded to address some of the methodological weaknesses presented in previous studies. This study was designed to better understand the impact of children’s chronic exposure to community violence on their emotional, behavioral, substance use, and academic functioning with an overarching goal to identify malleable risk and protective factors which can be targeted in preventive and intervention programs. This paper describes the MORE Project, its conceptual underpinnings, goals, and methodology, as well as implications for treatment and preventive interventions and future research.     

Image Manipulation as Research Misconduct

A growing number of research misconduct cases handled by the Office of Research Integrity involve image manipulations. Manipulations may include simple image enhancements, misrepresenting an image as something different from what it is, and altering specific features of an image. Through a study of specific cases, the misconduct findings associated with image manipulation, detection methods and those likely to identify such manipulations, are discussed. This article explores sanctions imposed against guilty researchers and the factors that resulted in no misconduct finding although relevant images clearly were flawed. Although new detection tools are available for universities and journals to detect questionable images, this article explores why these tools have not been embraced.

Categorization reduces the effect of context on hedonic preference

When moderately hedonically positive test stimuli are presented following better-liked context stimuli, preferences between the test stimuli are reduced. This reduction in preference, hedonic condensation, occurs in settings that also produce negative hedonic contrast?the phenomenon in which moderately hedonically positive test stimuli seem less positive when they follow better-liked context stimuli. Subjects who were instructed that the context and test stimuli were from different categories exhibited less hedonic condensation. Those categories have smaller hedonic ranges than does the full stimulus set. The increase in preference magnitude with reduction in size of the hedonic range is predicted by Parducci’s (1995) range-frequency model.     

Depressed mothers' and their infants' interactions with nondepressed partners

Twenty depressed adolescent mothers were videotaped interacting with their own infant and with the infant of a nondepressed mother. In addition, nondepressed mothers were videotaped with their own infant as well as with the infant of a depressed mother. Depressed mothers showed less facial expressivity than nondepressed mothers and received less optimal interaction rating scale scores (a summary score for state, physical activity, head orientation, gaze, silence during gaze aversion, facial expressions, vocalizations, infantized behavior, contingent responsivity, and gameplaying). This occurred independent of whether they were interacting with their own infant versus an infant of a nondepressed mother, suggesting that depressed mothers display less optimal behaviors to infants in general. The infants of both depressed and nondepressed mothers received better head orientation and summary ratings when they were interacting with another mother, perhaps because the other mother was more novel. Infants of nondepressed mothers, in particular, had better summary ratings (state, physical activity, head orientation, gaze, facial expressions, fussiness, and vocalizations) than the infants of depressed mothers when interacting with depressed mothers. Thus, it may be that infants of nondepressed mothers are generally better interaction partners than infants of depressed mothers. Another related possibility is that they persist longer in trying to elicit a response from mothers less responsive than their own, given that they have learned to expect a response to their behavior.     

Are we certain about which measure of intolerance of uncertainty to use yet?

Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) has been understood as a dispositional tendency to view the presence of negative events as unacceptable and threatening, regardless of the likelihood of those events occurring. The preference over the 12-item vs. 27-item of the IUS has been central to debate. The goals of the present study were to evaluate two competing models of measuring IU with model-fitting analyses and explore model invariance of gender (e.g. men vs. women). A sample of 980 individuals completed an online IUS survey. Results indicated that the two-factor short-form model provided better fit to the data compared to the full-length two-factor model proposed by. Results also indicated that the short-form IUS is gender invariant, suggesting acceptable use among men and women. These findings provide further support of a two-factor structure and suggest that the IUS is appropriate for men and women.