Community-Based Participatory Research for Improved Mental Health

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) focuses on specific community needs, and produces results that directly address those needs. Although conducting ethical CBPR is critical to its success, few academic programs include this training in their curricula. This article describes the development and evaluation of an online training course designed to increase the use of CBPR in mental health disciplines. Developed using a participatory approach involving a community of experts, this course challenges traditional research by introducing a collaborative process meant to encourage increased participation by special populations and narrow the parity gap in effective mental health treatment and services delivery.     

Psychiatry Residents' Attitudes on Ethics and Professionalism: Multisite Survey Results

Recent studies show that psychiatry residents express a relatively greater need for ethics curricula than their colleagues in other specialties. Such studies have been limited in their generalizability because they were conducted at one site. This study of 151 psychiatry residents at seven U.S. psychiatry programs aims to address that limitation. Residents were surveyed on issues pertaining to ethics and professionalism education. Participants were found to support such curricula during training and to value its relevance to the practice of psychiatry. Gender differences and the influence of the “hidden curriculum” on such results merit further study.     

Changes in Primary Process Thinking of a Prepsychotic Adolescent in Psychotherapy

The main goal of this study was to measure longitudinally change in thought processes and reality testing of a prepsychotic adolescent undergoing psychotherapy. The Holt scoring system for measuring primary process from Rorschach responses was the main measuring instrument. Four Rorschachs were administered over a period of three years. The results of the latter were compared with the clinical ratings of two psychiatrists. While clinical change in response to treatment was slight, there did appear to be a shift from primary to more secondary forms of formal thought processes as determined by the Rorschach.     

Neuropsychological impairments on the NEPSY-II among children with FASD

Background: We examined the pattern of neuropsychological impairments of children with FASD (compared to controls) on NEPSY-II measures of attention and executive functioning, language, memory, visuospatial processing, and social perception.

Methods: Participants included 32 children with FASD and 30 typically developing control children, ranging in age from 6 to 16 years. Children were tested on the following subtests of the NEPSY-II: Attention and Executive Functioning (animal sorting, auditory attention/response set, and inhibition), Language (comprehension of instructions and speeded naming), Memory (memory for names/delayed memory for names), Visual-Spatial Processing (arrows), and Social Perception (theory of mind). Groups were compared using MANOVA.

Results: Children with FASD were impaired relative to controls on the following subtests: animal sorting, response set, inhibition (naming and switching conditions), comprehension of instructions, speeded naming, and memory for names total and delayed, but group differences were not significant on auditory attention, inhibition (inhibition condition), arrows, and theory of mind. Among the FASD group, IQ scores were not correlated with performance on the NEPSY-II subtests, and there were no significant differences between those with and without comorbid ADHD.

Conclusions: The NEPSY-II is an effective and useful tool for measuring a variety of neuropsychological impairments among children with FASD. Children with FASD displayed a pattern of results with impairments (relative to controls) on measures of executive functioning (set shifting, concept formation, and inhibition), language, and memory, and relative strengths on measures of basic attention, visual spatial processing, and social perception.     

Young Children's Trust in Overtly Misleading Advice

The ability of 3‐ and 4‐year‐old children to disregard advice from an overtly misleading informant was investigated across five studies (total n = 212). Previous studies have documented limitations in young children's ability to reject misleading advice. This study was designed to test the hypothesis that these limitations are primarily due to an inability to reject specific directions that are provided by others, rather than an inability to respond in a way that is opposite to what has been indicated by a cue. In Studies 1 through 4, a puppet identified as The Big Bad Wolf offered advice to participants about which of two boxes contained a hidden sticker. Regardless of the form the advice took, 3‐year olds performed poorly by failing to systematically reject it. However, when participants in Study 5 believed they were responding to a mechanical cue rather than the advice of the Wolf, they were better able to reject misleading advice, and individual differences in performance on the primary task were systematically correlated with measures of executive function. Results are interpreted as providing support for the communicative intent hypothesis, which posits that children find it especially difficult to reject deceptive information that they perceive as being intentionally communicated by others.     

The Relationship Between Blood Lead,Bone Lead and Child Intelligence

We report associations between serial measures of blood lead and intelligence in children age 10–12 years, half heavily exposed to lead from the prenatal period onward, and half relatively unexposed. For a subsample, we examine bone lead-IQ associations, comparing them with blood lead associations. Both blood and bone lead levels were associated with intelligence decrements, small relative to the contribution of social factors. For each doubling of Tib-Pb, Full Scale, Performance, and Verbal IQ decreased by an estimated 5.5, 6.2, and 4.1 points, respectively. Bone lead-IQ associations were stronger than those for blood lead, which nonetheless provide robust analogues. Current BPb, easy to obtain, provides a useful means for assessing Pb exposure/IQ associations.     

The principle of recombination and the principle of distinctness: A puzzle for Armstrong's theory of modality

Book Information Agency and Responsibility: A Common-Sense Moral Psychology. Agency and Responsibility: A Common-Sense Moral Psychology Jeanette Kennett New York Oxford University Press 2001 viii + 229 Hardback US$45 By Jeanette Kennett. Oxford University Press. New York. Pp. viii + 229. Hardback:US$45,     

BEYOND THE PALE: Jewish identity,radical politics and feminist art in the United States

Historians have not yet recognized how the cultural legacy of East European Jews helped change the status of women artists in the United States. Immigrant Jewish women in general reacted to institutionalized patriarchy with a desire for social change and the will to act to that end. Jewish women who were artists had professional reasons to embrace feminism, given women's virtual exclusion from professional notice. This article focuses on two pioneering feminist artists — Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro — and demonstrates the importance of their Jewish heritage, showing how and why they set in motion important changes in the tumultuous 1970s that continue to resonate in the art world today. An unusually large number of American feminist artists of the 1970s were Jewish. Their heritage resembles that of the Jewish feminist activist Betty Friedan, whose father emigrated from Eastern Europe. Once we examine the linked roles played by Jewish identity and leftist politics in the formation of the feminist art movement in the United States, it becomes evident that activism in the community of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and the values that they passed on to the next generations made a significant contribution to the success of this movement.     

Interpersonal loss in the context of family caregiving: Implications of communal relationships theory

Abstract

Much is known about the emotional costs of providing care to an ill or disabled family member. However, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to investigating how caregiver distress is related to interpersonal loss (i.e., reactions to changes in the typical day-to-day support behaviors that formerly characterized the caregiver–care recipient relationship). Drawing on the theory of communal relationships (e.g., Clark & Mills, 1979, 1993), this study proposes that the magnitude of interpersonal loss that caregivers experience, as well as its contributions to depressed affect, both directly and indirectly (through impact of interpersonal loss on perceived caregiving burden) are likely to depend on the type of relationship that existed between caregiver and care recipient prior to the onset of illness or disability. In this context, several hypotheses and directions for further research are proposed. It is hoped that future researchers will incorporate loss measures into their research and consider how aspects of preexisting relationships influence associations among interpersonal loss and variables (e.g., burden, social support) known to predict caregiver well-being.