Can priming your self lead to punishing others?

Previous research has shown that priming the individual self can increase the accessibility of individual self-cognitions. In turn, we hypothesized that blame for immoral behaviors also would increase, leading to higher assignments of punishment, but that the size of this effect would depend on whether the behaviors violated perfect or imperfect duties. To test these hypotheses, participants assigned yearly bonus penalties to employees who had performed dishonest, disloyal, unfriendly, or uncharitable acts. As expected, the individual prime increased punishments, and this effect was accentuated for violations of perfect duties relative to violations of imperfect duties.     

Counselor Professional Identity: Findings and Implications for Counseling and Interprofessional Collaboration

This exploratory, qualitative study examined the professional identity of 238 practicing counselors and how they perceived counseling as distinct from psychology and social work. Participants' professional identities seemed to be grounded in a developmental, prevention, and wellness orientation toward helping. Participants also seemed to embrace a unified professional identity. Psychology was perceived as emphasizing testing and social work as focusing on systemic issues. Findings and implications for the counseling profession and interprofessional collaboration are discussed.     

Lesbians With Physical Disabilities: A Qualitative Study of Their Experiences With Counseling

The authors interviewed 25 lesbians with physical disabilities about their counseling experiences. Using a phenomenological qualitative approach, the authors identified 9 themes. Five themes addressed participants' perceptions of their counselors: general satisfaction or dissatisfaction, counselors' general effectiveness, counselors' awareness and education regarding sexual orientation and/or disability, discrimination and bias, and counselor identity. Three themes related to the participants' attempts to negotiate the counseling process: coming out or self‐disclosure, self‐advocacy, and accessibility/accommodations. The final theme related to depression.     

Mental health matters: a multi-family framework for mental health intervention

This paper reports a collaborative project, developed jointly by a group of community mental health workers in association with a specialist team commissioned to initiate family work throughout a central London mental health provider. The result of this project – The 'Mental Health Matters Workshops'– was a series of day workshops for patients who had experienced a major mental illness, and their families, carers and mental health workers. The positive impact of the workshops on attenders is reported, as well as the development of a 'multi-family' and social network culture.     

Multisensory executive functioning

To better understand the prefrontal circuitry that putatively supports executive functions, such as those involved in switching tasks, we asked whether a current task set is open equally to receiving information from any sensory modality or if it is to some degree modality-specific. Subjects were presented with a sequence of digits to be classified as either odd/even or greater/less than five. The digits were either auditory or visual, with the modality varying randomly. Results demonstrated a reaction time (RT) cost associated with switching between tasks and also an unexpected cost of switching between modalities. When both modality and task switched, the two costs were greater than either of the costs alone, but significantly less than predicted simply by summing the two costs together (i.e., they were underadditive). These data indicate that the frontal mechanisms that allow for a switch in task are only partially modality-specific. Current theories of executive function must be adapted to account for this finding. We also suggest that the present paradigm is amenable to future research aimed at determining precisely how modalities are linked within a task set.     

The DIAGNOSER project: Combining assessment and learning

DIAGNOSER is an Internet-based tool for classroom instruction. It delivers continuous formative assessment and feedback to high school physics students and their teachers about the correct and incorrect concepts and ideas the students may hold regarding physical situations. That is, it diagnoses misconceptions that underlie wrong answers of students, such as a confusion of velocity with acceleration. We use data about patterns of student responses, particularly consistency of errors from question to question, to improve the system’s understanding of student concepts.     

Self-report bias and underreporting of depression on the BDI-II

One problem in identifying and treating depression is underreporting of symptoms by individuals. Previous research suggests that there may be systematic sex differences in self-report bias,with men tending to minimize their depressive symptoms more than women. This study used an experimental design with a sample of 238 community members to test whether disguising the purpose of the Beck Depression Inventory-II would significantly reduce self-report bias, especially in men. We found a main effect of condition such that both men and women reported significantly more core depressive symptoms in the covert condition, suggesting that surveys of community samples may underestimate the prevalence of depression.     

Inhibition of return: Dissociating attentional and oculomotor components

Inhibition of return (IOR) describes a performance decrement for stimuli appearing at recently cued locations. Both attentional and motor processes have been implicated in the IOR effect. The present data reveal a double dissociation between the attentional and motor components of IOR whereby the motor-based component of IOR is present when the response is oculomotor, and the attention-based component of IOR is present when the response is manual. These 2 distinct components should be considered and studied separately, as well as in relation to each other, if a comprehensive theory of IOR is to be achieved. ((c) 2003 APA, all rights reserved)     

Brief Parenting Interventions for Children at Risk of Externalizing Behavior Problems: A Systematic Review

We systematically reviewed the evidence for the efficacy and effectiveness of brief parenting interventions, defined as <8 sessions in duration, in reducing child externalizing behaviors. While there is significant evidence to support the efficacy of parenting interventions of 8–12 sessions in duration, the public health benefit of these interventions is limited by low participation rates, high attrition rates and the lack of implementation by a wide range of practitioners. Brief parenting interventions have the potential to extend the reach and impact of parenting interventions and steer children away from a trajectory of life course persistent behavior problems. A search of four electronic databases was undertaken to identify RCTs conducted on brief parenting interventions. The primary outcome was child externalizing behaviors and secondary outcomes included parenting skills, parental self-efficacy, parental mental health and partner relationship functioning. The heterogeneity of included studies prevented a meta-analysis but characteristics of the studies were described. Nine papers summarising the results of eight studies with 836 families in five countries met inclusion criteria. All studies found significant improvements in parent-rated child externalizing behaviors, parenting skills and parenting self-efficacy, relative to control or comparison groups, with findings maintained at follow-up. Less consistent findings emerged for parental mental health and partner relationship functioning. This review provides initial evidence that brief parenting interventions may be sufficient to reduce child externalizing behavior problems for some families, however further research is needed.