The Network Structure of Childhood Psychopathology in International Adoptees

International adoptees are at an increased risk of emotional and behavioral problems, especially those who are adopted at an older age. We took a new approach in our study of the network structure and predictability of emotional and behavioral problems in internationally adopted children in Finland. Our sample was from the on-going adoption study and comprised 778 internationally adopted children (387 boys and 391 girls, mean age 10.5 (SD 3.4) years). Networks were estimated using Gaussian graphical models and lasso regularization for all the children, and separately for those who were adopted at different ages. The results showed that anxiety/depressive symptoms, social problems, and aggressiveness were the most central symptom domains. Somatic symptoms were the least central and had the weakest effect on the other domains. Similarly, aggressiveness, social problems, and attention problems were high in terms of predictability (73–65%), whereas internalizing problems were relatively low (28–56%). There were clear but local age-group differences in network structure, symptom centrality, and predictability. According to our findings, network models provide important additional information about the centrality and predictability of specific symptom domains, and thus may facilitate targeted interventions among international adoptees.     

Deadly combinations: how leadership contexts undermine the activation and enactment of followers’ high core self-evaluations in performance

Employees with high core self-evaluations (CSE) generally perform well in their jobs. The enactment of CSE in performance occurs within contexts, and leadership is one form of context that influences the activation and expression of CSE. Drawing on theories of CSE and leader–member exchange (LMX), we characterized the leadership context as the interaction between leader CSE and LMX quality. Examination of 173 followers and their 31 leaders in a manufacturing organization showed a positive association between follower CSE and performance when the context comprised high leader CSE and high LMX. Conversely, leadership contexts comprising high leader CSE and low LMX, or low leader CSE and high LMX, resulted in a negative relationship between follower CSE and performance. We also show that low CSE followers have relatively high performance under some circumstances. Thus, we contribute to understanding how some leadership contexts undermine high CSE followers’ performance and promote low CSE followers’ performance.     

Modelling the effect of worship attendance and personal prayer on spiritual well-being among 9- to 11-year-old students attending Anglican church schools in Wales

This study employs a modified form of the Fisher 16-item Feeling Good, Living Life measure of spiritual well-being (assessing quality of relationships across four domains: self, family, nature and God) among a sample of 1,328 students drawn from year five and year six classes within Church in Wales primary schools, alongside measures of frequency of worship attendance and frequency of personal prayer. The data demonstrate frequency of personal prayer is a much stronger predictor than frequency of worship attendance in respect of spiritual well-being. This finding is consistent with the view that personal prayer is a key factor in the formation of individual spirituality.     

Learning and growing from ‘communities of practice’: autoethnographic narrative vignettes of an aspiring educational researcher’s experience

This is an autoethnographic study that inquiries into my own journey as an aspiring educational researcher throughout the second course of my Master’s Program at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. My experiences take place in the context of a group of real educational researchers and their on-going research project at the faculty of education called ‘Beyond Plant Blindness: Seeing the importance of plants for a sustainable world’ (BPB). All of the experiences included in this study are expressed in the form of chronologically ordered narrative vignettes. In order to bring theoretical meaning to these experiences, the vignettes were critically reflected upon and interpreted through the concept Communities of Practice (CoP), which is central to situated learning theory. Through this conceptual lens, my experiences revealed that an aspiring educational researcher may feel emotional and intellectual growth as a newcomer who is granted legitimate peripheral participation in the ‘real’ researcher CoP. Consequently, this study sheds light on ways that real researchers may play a part in shaping the identities of aspiring educational researchers through learning experiences. However, more generally, this study may facilitate fresh conversations about the complexities of learning, identity, and inclusion in the field of educational research.     

First‐line therapy for post‐traumatic stress disorder: A systematic review of cognitive behavioural therapy and psychodynamic approaches

Background

Despite evidence supporting cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)‐based interventions as the most effective approach for treating post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in randomised control trials, alternative treatment interventions are often used in clinical practice. Psychodynamic (PDT)‐based interventions are one example of such preferred approaches, this is despite comparatively limited available evidence supporting their effectiveness for treating PTSD.

Aims

Existing research exploring effective therapeutic interventions for PTSD includes trauma‐focused CBT involving exposure techniques. The present review sought to establish the treatment efficacy of CBT and PDT approaches and considers the potential impact of selecting PDT‐based techniques over CBT‐based techniques for the treatment of PTSD.

Results

The evidence reviewed provided examples supporting PDT‐based therapy as an effective treatment for PTSD, but confirmed CBT as more effective in the treatment of this particular disorder. Comparable dropout rates were reported for both treatment approaches, suggesting that relative dropout rate should not be a pivotal factor in the selection of a PDT approach over CBT for treatment of PTSD.

Conclusion/Implications

The need to routinely observe evidence‐based recommendations for effective treatment of PTSD is highlighted and factors undermining practitioner engagement with CBT‐based interventions for the treatment of PTSD are identified.     

Validation of a questionnaire for measuring psychosocial factors associated with pharmaceutical care in Spanish community pharmacists

Pharmacotherapy follow-up (PTF) is the professional practice in which the pharmacist takes charge of the needs of the patients related to their drugs. OBJECTIVE: To validate a questionnaire to measure the ASE psychosocial determinants (attitude, social influence, self-efficacy) of PTF and the Prochaska & DiClemente's stage of change in Spanish community pharmacists. METHOD: Postal survey to 482 Asturian community pharmacists (test and retest). Validity was estimated in 134 pharmacists answering the test. Stability was estimated in 85 pharmacists answering the test and retest. Exploratory factorial analysis was used to investigate construct validity and produced 4 factors and 104 items. Those factors had high reliability (Cronbach's a between 0,87 and 0,96). DISCRIMINANT VALIDITY: Pharmacists in extreme stages of change showed significant differences of attitude, motivation and self-efficacy. Repeatability was good and the questionnaire appears valid and reliable.     

Imitation of hierarchical action structure by young children

To provide the first systematic test of whether young children will spontaneously perceive and imitate hierarchical structure in complex actions, a task was devised in which a set of 16 elements can be modelled through either of two different, hierarchically organized strategies. Three-year-old children showed a strong and significant tendency to copy whichever of the two hierarchical approaches they witnessed an adult perform. Responses to an element absent in demonstrations, but present at test, showed that children did not merely copy the chain of events they had witnessed, but acquired hierarchically structured rules to which the new element was assimilated. Consistent with this finding, children did not copy specific sequences of actions at lower hierarchical levels.     

The cognitive substrate of subjective probability

The prominent cognitive theories of probability judgment were primarily developed to explain cognitive biases rather than to account for the cognitive processes in probability judgment. In this article the authors compare 3 major theories of the processes and representations in probability judgment: the representativeness heuristic, implemented as prototype similarity, relative likelihood, or evidential support accumulation (ESAM; D. J. Koehler, C. M. White, & R. Grondin, 2003); cue-based relative frequency; and exemplar memory, implemented by probabilities from exemplars (PROBEX; P. Juslin & M. Persson, 2002). Three experiments with different task structures consistently demonstrate that exemplar memory is the best account of the data whereas the results are inconsistent with extant formulations of the representativeness heuristic and cue-based relative frequency.     

Color term knowledge does not affect categorical perception of color in toddlers

Categorical perception of color is shown when colors from the same category are discriminated less easily than equivalently spaced colors that cross a category boundary. The current experiments tested various models of categorical perception. Experiment 1 tested for categorical responding in 2- to 4-year-olds, the age range for the onset establishment of color term knowledge. Experiment 2 tested for categorical responding in Himba toddlers, whose language segments the color space differently from the way in which the English language does so. Experiment 3 manipulated the conditions of the task to explore whether the categorical responding in Experiments 1 and 2 was equivalent to categorical perception. Categorical perception was shown irrespective of naming and was not stronger in those children with more developed color term knowledge. Cross-cultural differences in the extent of categorical perception were not found. These findings support universalistic models of color categorization and suggest that color term knowledge does not modify categorical perception, at least during the early stages of childhood.     

A longitudinal, microgenetic study of the emergence of false belief understanding and inhibition skills

Two theories that attempt to explain the relationship between false belief understanding and inhibition skills were investigated: (1) theory of mind development improves self-control, and (2) executive control is necessary for developing a theory of mind. A microgenetic approach was adopted, with a group of 21 children completing a battery of inhibition and false belief understanding tasks every four weeks for six phases of testing. The results showed that the majority of children were able to perform well on a test of executive inhibition before having a good understanding of false beliefs, thus supporting theory (2). The results also illustrated that while the children's inhibition skills developed relatively gradually, their understanding of false beliefs progressed from a consistent lack of understanding through a period of unstable performance, during which some children failed tests that they had previously passed.