Managing Elder Suicide: A Profile of American and Canadian Crisis Prevention Centers

Suicides among older adults in the United States and Canada in the last decade have accounted for an increasing share of all suicides. In both countries the use of firearms among older adults has steadily increased. Despite these trends, little is known about the extent to which crisis centers are prepared to prevent elder suicide. A survey of AAS-listed crisis prevention centers examined the training, knowledge, and current practices relevant to elder suicide among personnel in 321 crisis prevention centers in both countries. Results revealed insufficient training, a lack of familiarity with recent suicide trends, and limited outreach to older adults.     

Facets of country image and brand equity: Revisiting the role of product categories in country‐of‐origin effect research

The country‐of‐origin effect is a topic central to the field of international marketing. Country of origin has been found to exert a particularly potent effect on consumer evaluation in situations where there is a strong link between a country and a particular product category. The present study provides further insight into how this particular effect can be understood. Drawing on a novel conceptualization of how country image and product categories interact, this study tested the relative evaluative relevance of product category with respect to estimates of brand equity across a variety of product categories. The findings suggest that facets of a country's image that are more closely related to the evaluation situation exert a greater influence on the evaluation of brands. This result encourages scholars as well as practitioners to re‐evaluate which situations might cause the country of origin effect to hold managerial relevance and paves the way for new paths toward a more comprehensive understanding of the effect. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Therapeutic Contract Program: preliminary report on a behavioral alternative to the token economy

The token economy has been the primary model for the behavioral management of inpatient populations. However, this basically operant approach seldom emphasizes the development of cognitive-coping skills to help patients more effectively manage stressors that result in hospitalization. The Therapeutic Contract Program (TCP) is described as an inpatient-treatment strategy that is designed to help foster such cognitive-coping and self-control skills. While external structure is provided by components of this program, subprograms of the TCP have as their goal the development of internally-attributed coping skills and self-perceptions of competence. This preliminary report describes the structure of the TCP, as well as planned and in-progress measures of program participation and treatment outcome.     

Integration of stereo and texture cues in the formation of discontinuities during three-dimensional surface interpolation

A series of stereograms are presented which demonstrate that texture boundaries can strongly influence the perception of discontinuities between neighbouring three-dimensional (3-D) surfaces portrayed by means of stereo cues. In these demonstration figures, no stereo information is available in the immediate vicinity of the boundary between the two 3-D stereo surfaces because all texture in that region is removed in one eye's view. On the other hand, various forms of texture boundary information are provided in the resulting monocular region. This stimulus paradigm is used to explore the question: what influence does texture boundary information have on the nature of the perceived 3-D surface that is interpolated between two stimulus regions which carry stereo cues? It is shown that if a clear-cut texture boundary is present in the monocular region then this is used by the human visual system to fix the perceived location of 3-D crease and step surface discontinuities between the stereo regions. Collett (1985) explored this issue with a similar methodology and reported weak and unreliable assistance from monocular texture boundaries in helping shape 3-D stereo surface discontinuities. The strong and robust phenomena demonstrated here seem to rely on two main differences between the present stimuli and those of Collett. In the present stimuli, figurally continuous textures containing strong texture boundaries are used, together with a technique for minimising the complications, including binocular rivalry, that arise from the borders of the stimulus regions present in only one half of each stereogram.