Understanding Familial/Cultural Factors in Adolescent Depression: A Culturally-Competent Treatment for Working With Chinese American Families

A significant challenge for researchers and clinicians is in the process of determining culturally sensitive strategies to ensure treatment effectiveness with ethnic populations in the United States. This article highlights key aspects of treating Chinese American families where a child is struggling with adolescent depression. Relevant literatures associated with adolescent depression and effective treatment of Chinese Americans are reviewed and organized according to the dimensions of therapist knowledge, awareness, and skills. Therapist guidelines are provided using key aspects of cognitive behavioral therapy. Additional suggestions are presented for culturally competent therapy with Chinese American youth and their families.     

The influence of implicit theories and message frame on the persuasiveness of disease prevention and detection advocacies

This research investigates the effectiveness of health message framing (gain/loss) depending on the nature of advocacy (prevention/detection) and respondents’ implicit theories (entity/incremental). Three experiments demonstrate that for detection advocacies, incremental theorists are more persuaded by loss frames. For prevention advocacies, incremental theorists are more persuaded by gain frames. For both advocacies (detection and prevention), entity theorists are not differentially influenced by frame. However, entity theorists are message advocacy sensitive such that they are more persuaded by prevention than detection advocacies, regardless of the message frame. These results are robust for measured as well as manipulated implicit theories and for different health contexts.     

The Connection Between Happiness and Service Businesses: A Preliminary Study

Happiness may be one of the most important goals that many people pursue in the world. This study adopts a qualitative approach to investigate the determinants of happiness for Taiwanese/Chinese people. Further, we investigate related service opportunities for happiness via a field survey of 808 respondents. This study identifies four happiness segments for people in Taiwan/China: Influential & Outgoing, Adequately Settled, Pleasure Seeking, and Young & Restless. These four happiness segments differ markedly in terms of characteristics and potential service opportunities. The findings of this study have implications for researchers who are seeking to understand happiness in an Asian country.     

The Health Professional Ethics Rubric: Practical Assessment in Ethics Education for Health Professional Schools

A barrier to the development and refinement of ethics education in and across health professional schools is that there is not an agreed upon instrument or method for assessment in ethics education. The most widely used ethics education assessment instrument is the Defining Issues Test (DIT) I & II. This instrument is not specific to the health professions. But it has been modified for use in, and influenced the development of other instruments in, the health professions. The DIT contains certain philosophical assumptions (??Kohlbergian?? or ??neo-Kohlbergian??) that have been criticized in recent years. It is also expensive for large institutions to use. The purpose of this article is to offer a rubric??which the authors have named the Health Professional Ethics Rubric??for the assessment of several learning outcomes related to ethics education in health science centers. This rubric is not open to the same philosophical critiques as the DIT and other such instruments. This rubric is also practical to use. This article includes the rubric being advocated, which was developed by faculty and administrators at a large academic health science center as a part of a campus-wide ethics education initiative. The process of developing the rubric is described, as well as certain limitations and plans for revision.     

A factor-adjusted multiple testing procedure for ERP data analysis

Event-related potentials (ERPs) are now widely collected in psychological research to determine the time courses of mental events. When event-related potentials from treatment conditions are compared, often there is no a priori information on when or how long the differences should occur. Testing simultaneously for differences over the entire set of time points creates a serious multiple comparison problem in which the probability of false positive errors must be controlled, while maintaining reasonable power for correct detection. In this work, we extend the factor-adjusted multiple testing procedure developed by Friguet, Kloareg, and Causeur (Journal of the American Statistical Association, 104, 1406-1415, 2009) to manage the multiplicity problem in ERP data analysis and compare its performance with that of the Benjamini and Hochberg (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society B, 57, 289-300, 1995) false discovery rate procedure, using simulations. The proposed procedure outperformed the latter in detecting more truly significant time points, in addition to reducing the variability of the false discovery rate, suggesting that corrections for mass multiple testings of ERPs can be much improved by modeling the strong local temporal dependencies.     

Optimal sequences of trials for balancing practice and repetition effects

This paper describes procedures for generating trial sequences to balance out practice effects and intertrial repetition effects in experiments consisting of repeated trials. In the sequences presented, each stimulus appears an equal number of times, is preceded equally often by itself and by each other stimulus, and is distributed in a “balanced” manner throughout the block of trials. Two criteria for balance are employed. One criterion aims to equalize the average position of each stimulus in the sequence. The second criterion maintains, as much as possible, a uniform interval between appearances of each stimulus in the sequence. For each criterion, optimal or near-optimal sequences are presented for experiments involving from three to nine different stimulus conditions. Suggestions are included for extending (e.g., doubling or tripling) the length of the sequences.     

BOLD activation varies parametrically with corner angle throughout human retinotopic cortex

The Alternating Brightness Star (ABS) is an illusion that provides insight into the relationship between brightness perception and corner angle. Recent psychophysical studies of this illusion have shown that corner salience varies parametrically with corner angle, with sharp angles leading to strong illusory percepts and shallow angles leading to weak percepts. It is hypothesized that the illusory effects arise because of an interaction between surface corners and the shape of visual receptive fields: sharp surface corners may create hotspots of high local contrast due to processing by center-surround and other early receptive fields. If this hypothesis is correct, early visual neurons should respond powerfully to sharp corners and curved portions of surface edges. Indeed, the primary role of early visual neurons may be to localize the discontinuities along the edges of surfaces. If so, all early visual areas should show greater BOLD responses to sharp corners than to shallow corners. On the other hand, if corner processing is exclusively constrained to certain areas of the brain, only those specific areas will show greater responses to sharp vs shallow corners. To address this we explored the BOLD correlates of the ABS illusion in the human visual cortex using fMRI. We found that BOLD signal varies parametrically with corner angle throughout the visual cortex, offering the first neurophysiological correlates of the ABS illusion. This finding provides a neurophysiological basis for the previously reported psychophysical data that showed that corner salience varied parametrically with corner angle. We propose that all early visual areas localize discontinuities along the edges of surfaces, and that specific cortical corner-processing circuits further establish the specific nature of those discontinuities, such as their orientation.     

Grouping inhibits motion fading by giving rise to virtual trackable features

After prolonged viewing of a slowly drifting or rotating pattern under strict fixation, the pattern appears to slow down and then momentarily stop. The authors show that grouping can slow down the process of "motion fading," suggesting that cortical configural form analysis interacts with the computation of motion signals during motion fading. The authors determined that grouping slows motion fading because it can give rise to trackable features, such as virtual contour terminators not present in the image, that possess stronger motion signals than would occur in the absence of such trackable features. That a continuously rotating stimulus will eventually be perceived to stop, despite the presence of such trackable features, suggests that the motion-from-form system itself can be fatigued. The finding that stationary form can remain visible even after the motion signal has faded suggests that the neural bases of motion visibility and form visibility arise from different neuronal populations.