Resilience to Interpersonal Trauma and Decreased Risk for Psychopathology in an Epidemiologic Sample

Quantitative measures of psychological resilience related to discrete stressors, such as interpersonal (IP) trauma, are lacking. The current study examined whether a novel, quantitative measure of resilience was related to decreased risk for a broad range of lifetime DSM-IV axis I disorders in an epidemiologic sample. Resilience was defined as the residual resulting from the difference between the individual’s predicted and observed PTSD symptom count, based on their cumulative exposure to IP traumatic events. Participants were 6288 adults (59.5% women; M _age  = 46.9, SD = 14.5) from the National Epidemiologic Study on Alcohol and Related Conditions endorsing at least one lifetime IP traumatic event. Logistic regressions were conducted to examine the relationship between resilience and axis I diagnoses, covarying for age, sex, education level, social support, and recent stressful life events. Greater resilience scores were associated with decreased likelihood of major depression (OR = .64, p < .001), generalized anxiety disorder (OR = .65, p < .001), social anxiety disorder (OR = .74, p < .001), panic disorder (OR = .65, p <. 001), and alcohol dependence (OR = .85, p < .001). Discrepancy between expected and observed PTSD symptom severity based on IP trauma load may represent a useful, quantitative measure of resilience.     

Commitment and Partialism in the Ethics of Care

It is plausible to think that practices of caring are partly constituted by a caregiver's commitment to a cared‐for. However, discussions of caring often contain no explicit discussion of such commitments, and do not attempt to draw any philosophical conclusions from the nature of caring relations as committed. A discussion of caring practices that emphasizes the importance of commitment therefore has the potential to generate important new insights for our understanding of caring. This essay begins that project by arguing that a commitment‐centric conception of caring entails the truth of moral partialism. Although many care‐ethicists are sympathetic to partialism, the arguments in its defense remain controversial. As I show in this article, however, partialism is necessarily true given the committed nature of caring. This is because the concept of commitment is itself a necessarily partial one: to say that we are equally committed to everyone or everything is equivalent to saying that we are not committed to anything. Thus, when viewed as a species of commitment, it is part of the concept of caring that it requires us to put the needs of those we care for before the needs of those unknown to us.     

Examining Self-Concealment within the Framework of Psychological Inflexibility and Mindfulness: A Preliminary Cross-Sectional Investigation

Although self-concealment has been a central topic in the field of personality and applied psychologies, it remains somewhat unclear how it should be conceptualized. The present study investigated self-concealment within the framework of psychological inflexibility and mindfulness, two major emotion/behavior regulation processes integrated into contemporary cognitive behavioral models of behavioral health. One-thousand sixty college undergraduates (77 % female; n = 816) completed a web-based survey that included the measures of interest. Results revealed that psychological inflexibility was positively and uniquely associated with self-concealment. The association between mindfulness and self-concealment was moderated by gender; higher levels of self-concealment predicted lower levels of mindfulness for women only and were associated with sexual-minority men, but self-concealment did not vary for women as a function of sexual orientation status. Additional results and future directions are also discussed.     

Motivational Interviewing in the Reciprocal Engagement Model of Genetic Counseling: a Method Overview and Case Illustration

Motivational Interviewing is a well-described counseling method that has been applied to a broad range of health behavior encounters. Genetic counseling is an emerging area of utilization for the method of Motivational Interviewing. The relational and technical elements of the MI method are described within the context of genetic counseling encounters. Case excerpts will be used to illustrate incorporation of MI methods into the Reciprocal Engagement Model of the genetic counseling encounter.     

Blunted amygdala activity is associated with depression severity in treatment-resistant depression

Up to 50% of individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) do not recover after two antidepressant medication trials, and therefore meet the criteria for treatment-resistant depression (TRD). Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is one promising treatment; however, the extent to which MBCT influences clinical outcomes relative to baseline neural activation remains unknown. In the present study we investigated baseline differences in amygdala activation between TRD patients and healthy controls (HCs), related amygdala activation to depression symptoms, and examined the impacts of MBCT and amygdala activation on longitudinal depression outcomes. At baseline, TRD patients (n = 80) and HCs (n = 37) participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging task in which they identified either the emotion (affect labeling) or the gender (gender labeling) of faces, or passively viewed faces (observing). The TRD participants then completed eight weeks of MBCT or a health enhancement program (HEP). Relative to HCs, the TRD patients demonstrated less amygdala activation during affect labeling, and marginally less during gender labeling. Blunted amygdala activation in TRD patients during affect labeling was associated with greater depression severity. MBCT was associated with greater depression reductions than was HEP directly following treatment; however, at 52 weeks the treatment effect was not significant, and baseline amygdala activation across the task conditions predicted depression severity in both groups. TRD patients have blunted amygdala responses during affect labeling that are associated with greater concurrent depression. Furthermore, although MBCT produced greater short-term improvements in depression than did HEP, overall baseline amygdala reactivity was predictive of long-term clinical outcomes in both groups.     

Theorizing Critical Placemaking as a Tool for Reclaiming Public Space

As economic inequality and segregation continue to grow in the U.S., psychology has an important role to play in exploring and promoting processes that can disrupt social injustice. This paper identifies the privatization of public space as a social problem that contributes to the entrenchment of social, economic, and racial inequality, and advances “critical placemaking” as a tool for reclaiming public space for public use. Drawing from key concepts in environmental psychology, narrative psychology, and community psychology, the proposed framework seeks to theorize the processes by which placemaking may contribute to transforming community narratives and building more inclusive, participatory, and democratic communities. Policy implications and future directions for empirical work are discussed.     

What Happens After the Demonstration Phase? The Sustainability of Canada's At Home/Chez Soi Housing First Programs for Homeless Persons with Mental Illness

This research examined the sustainability of Canada's At Home/Chez Soi Housing First (HF) programs for homeless persons with mental illness 2 years after the end of the demonstration phase of a large (more than 2000 participants enrolled), five‐site, randomized controlled trial. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 142 participants (key informants, HF staff, and persons with lived experience) to understand sustainability outcomes and factors that influenced those outcomes. Also, a self‐report HF fidelity measure was completed for nine HF programs that continued after the demonstration project. A cross‐site analysis was performed, using the five sites as case studies. The findings revealed that nine of the 12 HF programs (75%) were sustained, and that seven of the nine programs reported a high level of fidelity (achieving an overall score of 3.5 or higher on a 4‐point scale). The sites varied in terms of the level of systems integration and expansion of HF that were achieved. Factors that promoted or impeded sustainability were observed at multiple ecological levels: broad contextual (i.e., dissemination of research evidence, the policy context), community (i.e., partnerships, the presence of HF champions), organizational (i.e., leadership, ongoing training, and technical assistance), and individual (i.e., staff turnover, changes, and capacity). The findings are discussed in terms of the implementation science literature and their implications for how evidence‐based programs like HF can be sustained.     

The Effects of Phonological Short-Term Memory and Speech Perception on Spoken Sentence Comprehension in Children: Simulating Deficits in an Experimental Design

The roles of phonological short-term memory (pSTM) and speech perception in spoken sentence comprehension were examined in an experimental design. Deficits in pSTM and speech perception were simulated through task demands while typically-developing children (N \(=\) 71) completed a sentence-picture matching task. Children performed the control, simulated pSTM deficit, simulated speech perception deficit, or simulated double deficit condition. On long sentences, the double deficit group had lower scores than the control and speech perception deficit groups, and the pSTM deficit group had lower scores than the control group and marginally lower scores than the speech perception deficit group. The pSTM and speech perception groups performed similarly to groups with real deficits in these areas, who completed the control condition. Overall, scores were lowest on noncanonical long sentences. Results show pSTM has a greater effect than speech perception on sentence comprehension, at least in the tasks employed here.