Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment: Organizational Change and Quality of Care

Substance abuse treatment agencies serving youth face unique barriers to providing quality care. Interviews with 17 adolescent programs found that family engagement, community involvement, and gender and diversity issues affected treatment delivery. Programs report organizational change efforts with implications for future process improvement initiatives.     

Co-activation of syntax in bilingual language production

We report four experiments that examined whether bilinguals’ production of one language is affected by the syntactic properties of their other language. Greek–English and English–Greek highly proficient fluent bilinguals produced sentence completions following subject nouns whose translation had either the same or different number. We manipulated whether participants produced completions in the same language as the subject (the source language; one-language production) or the other language (the non-source language; two-language production), and whether they used only one language or both languages within the experimental session. The results demonstrated that the grammar systems of both languages were activated during both one-language and two-language production. The effects of the non-source language were particularly enhanced in two-language utterances, when both languages were used in the experiment, and when it was the bilinguals’ native language. We interpret our results in terms of a model of bilingual sentence production.     

Comparing the Psychometric Characteristics of Ratings of Face‐to‐Face and Videotaped Structured Interviews

Videotaped interviews are used for both research and for making selection decisions in organizations. However, little research has examined the extent to which the psychometric characteristics of ratings of videotaped interviews are comparable with those of ratings made on the basis of face‐to‐face (FTF) interviews. Within a simulated selection setting, we compared ratings of interviewers who conducted FTF structured interviews to ratings of interviewers who viewed videotapes of those interviews. Results revealed that FTF ratings were significantly higher than video ratings of the same interviewees. We also found that the two sets of interviewers rated the relative performance of interviewees differently. For example, the correlation between FTF and video ratings (r=.31) was significantly smaller than the correlation between ratings of interviewers who conducted FTF panel interviews with the same interviewees (r=.73). Overall results suggest that researchers and practitioners should be cautious about generalizing research findings and selection decisions made on the basis of videotaped interviews to FTF interviews.     

Recapturing the power of ritual to enhance community in aging

Ritual returns us to the center of who we are. In times of transition, loss, disconnection, and loneliness, ritual offers transformative power. It can provide a language for expression, stability, serve an integrating force in community, mediate tradition, and offer emotional support. This article explores the need for ritual in coping with late life changes, the relationship of ritual to suffering, value of ritual in storytelling and mourning, and explains the role of witness facilitated through community. Therapeutic functions of ritual are addressed and a framework for ritual design is suggested.     

A review of environmental enrichment as treatment for problem behavior maintained by automatic reinforcement

We reviewed studies that used environmental enrichment as treatment for problem behavior maintained by automatic reinforcement. A search of behavior analytic journals produced 71 publications with a total of 265 applications of environmental enrichment used alone or in conjunction with alternative behavior manipulations (e.g., prompting, reinforcement) and problem behavior manipulations (e.g., blocking, restraint). Environmental enrichment, as a sole intervention, was efficacious in 41% of the sample. Alternative behavior manipulations, problem behavior manipulations, and a combination of both improved the overall efficacy of environmental enrichment. We discuss factors that may influence the efficacy of environmental enrichment, current trends in research on this topic, and implications for both practitioners and researchers.     

Searching for Feminism: An Analysis of Community Psychology Literature Relevant to Women's Concerns

Articles published in both the American Journal of Community Psychology and Journal of Community Psychology, from their inception in 1973 through 1997, were content analyzed for women relevance, diversity, feminism, and historical change. Overall, 9.8% of the articles reviewed ($of1$N = 2,178) were considered women relevant, 4% recognized diversity among women, and 3% were considered feminist. There was an average yearly increase in women-relevant and feminist articles from 7.3 pre-1990 to 11.2 post-1990, and 1.6 pre-1990 to 4.6 post-1990, respectively. Overall, mental health and motherhood were the most addressed content areas. Among feminist articles, gender roles and violence against women were most salient. Race and SES were the most noted issues of diversity in both women-relevant and feminist articles. While an increase in feminist publications by both journals is promising, stereotypes of women and other oppressed groups continue to be perpetuated.     

Not all narrative shifts function equally

Readers of narratives keep track of narrative events and the information associated with these events. Does some of this associated information help structure the processing of and memory for the narrative? In three experiments, we examined the role of basic event building blocks (character, time, and location) in event indexing during text comprehension. These three experiments dealt with perceived coherence, perceived cohesion, and on-line processing, respectively. The results indicated that characters are more likely to serve as event indexes. Although the findings with respect to indexing were similar in all three experiments, interesting differences emerged as a function of the level of text comprehension examined (coherence, cohesion, or on-line processing).     

Feeling at home in one's school: a first look at a new measure

We report on the development of the Hospitality Scale, which measures two aspects of adolescents' perception of social capital in school-the extent to which they perceive that they have social capital and the extent to which they provide social capital to others. The scale was developed in reference to the literature exploring adolescent social isolation and social tolerance, as well as constructs developed in research on adults, especially related to psychological sense of community and collective efficacy. We examine the reliability of the scale and the association between scale scores and behavioral factors that may reflect social isolation.     

Converted patients and clinic patients as control cases: a comparison with implications for psychoanalytic training

All twenty-eight respondents to a recent poll of the thirty institutes affiliated with the American Psychoanalytic Association reported that they now accept cases converted from psychotherapy to psychoanalysis as control cases. This study was designed to compare converted cases to clinic cases systematically with respect to patient characteristics, treatment, and the educational experience of the treating candidate. The study followed twenty-four candidates entering analytic training between 1992 and 1995, who treated thirty-four clinic cases and forty-three converted cases between February 1993 and July 2000. Clinic and converted patients were comparable with regard to demographics, prior treatment histories, structural diagnoses, and Axis I diagnoses. In addition, the two groups of cases were indistinguishable with respect to the rate at which candidates received credit toward graduation requirements. Candidates treating converted cases earned approximately dollars 7,600 per patient per year, compared to candidates treating clinic cases, who earned nothing. Eighty-four percent of converted patients diagnosed with a mood disorder by the treating candidate were on medication, in contrast to only 20% of clinic patients with the same diagnosis. Similar differences were seen in the case of anxiety disorders. Given the prevalence of affective and anxiety disorders in control cases and the availability of a variety of medications and psychotherapies with documented efficacy in treating these disorders, candidates should be trained to discuss treatment options with patients who present with Axis I disorders.     

Thematic processing of adjuncts: Evidence from an eye-tracking experiment

We investigated thematic processing in sentences containing a prepositional phrase that was ambiguous between a locative and a temporal interpretation. We manipulated context (temporal or locative), target sentence (temporal or locative), and whether or not the main verb of the target and the context was repeated. Results showed that context dictated the participants' thematic expectations. Thematically, congruent target and context pairs were read faster than incongruent pairs. This effect was not modulated by verb repetition. We argue that wh-words cause readers to lodge semantically vacuous thematic roles in their discourse representation that bias a reader's interpretation of subsequent thematically ambiguous adjuncts in their discourse representation.