Potential for Suicide and Aggression in Delinquents at Juvenile Court in a Southern City

Because juvenile delinquents rarely communicate their wishes for suicide or homicide appropriately to busy caretakers, some means to identify those juveniles at greatest risk of acting out was sought. Psychological examiners in a Southern city individually questioned 263 Juvenile Court offenders about whether they wished to be dead, to kill themselves, or to kill others; and also about their existential experiences, thoughts and feelings. Taking the data associated with each wish, we used stepwise multiple logistic regression to pinpoint experiences, such as substance abuse, that were associated with a high likelihood of verbalizing a wish for destructive behavior. These results included sexual abuse as a risk factor and the presence of a mother or grandmother as a protective factor, and led to recommending education of caretakers and forming a screening test.     

Age differences in overlapping-task performance: evidence for efficient parallel processing in older adults

Two psychological refractory period (PRP) experiments were conducted to examine overlapping processing in younger and older adults. A shape discrimination task (triangle or rectangle) for Task 1 (T1) and a lexical-decision task (word or nonword) for Task 2 (T2) were used. PRP effects, response time for T2 increasing as stimulus onset synchrony (SOA) decreased, were obtained for both age groups. The effect of word frequency on T2 was smaller at the short SOA than at the long SOA, reflecting slack effects, which were larger for older than younger adults in both experiments. These results suggest that older adults can perform lexical access of T2 in parallel with the processing of T1 at least as efficiently as younger adults.     

Adapting Group Therapy to Address Real World Problems: Insights from Groups Offered in the Bahamas

This article presents a cultural adaptation of a group therapeutic approach that is being offered in the Bahamas. “The Family: People Helping People” project was designed as an intervention to improve socialization in New Providence, the Bahamian capital and its most heavily populated city. “The Family” group model offers support and training to improve communication in relationships and to encourage constructive emotional expression. This article will provide an overview of “The Family,” address key elements of this approach that are culturally tailored, and offer clinical examples and note implications for group therapy training. This cultural adaptation offers helpful insights for addressing community problems, such as violence and societal fragmentation, and may inform the development of community-based group interventions in other settings.     

On the nature of international sales and sales management research: a social network–analytic perspective

This research uses a combination of text mining, co-word analysis, and social network analysis (SNA) to review 132 international sales and sales management (ISSM) articles published between 1980 and 2017. The study provides a unique view of the past and future of ISSM research and provides three principal contributions. First, from a social network–analytic perspective, it offers a unique examination of the ways ISSM research topics are interconnected, as reflected by keyword network structure. Second, by conducting SNA across two periods (1980–1999 and 2000–2017) and examining the changes in network centrality measures, the study offers initial insights into the evolving nature of the ISSM literature. Third, the study reports keyword network disconnections (i.e., structural holes) to propose a fruitful agenda for future ISSM research. Taken together, this research offers a current perspective of the ISSM research domain's evolving nature.     

Electrophysiological evidence of different loci for case-mixing and word frequency effects in visual word recognition

Do word frequency and case mixing affect different processing stages in visual word recognition? Some studies of online reading have suggested that word frequency affects an earlier, perceptual-encoding stage and that case mixing affects a later, central decision stage (e.g., Reingold, Yang, & Rayner, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 36:1677-1683 2010); others have suggested otherwise (e.g., Allen, Smith, Lien, Grabbe, & Murphy, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 31:713-721 2005; Besner & McCann, 1987). To determine the locus of the word frequency and case-mixing effects, we manipulated word frequency (high vs. low) and case type (consistent lower case vs. mixing case) in a lexical-decision paradigm. We measured two event-related-potential components: the N170 (an early peak occurring 140-240 ms after stimulus onset, related to structural encoding) and the P3 (a late peak occurring 400-600 ms after stimulus onset, related to stimulus categorization). The critical finding was that the N170 amplitude was sensitive to case mixing, but the P3 amplitude was sensitive to word frequency and lexicality. These results suggest that case mixing affects an earlier processing stage than does word frequency, at least with respect to lexical-decision processes.