Regional conferences—A capacity‐building mandate: Report on CRCP2011—Building Bridges and Building a Regional Structure

The Caribbean Regional Conference of Psychology was held in Nassau, The Bahamas, from 15 to 18 November 2011, under the auspices of the International Association of Applied Psychology (IAAP), the International Union of Psychological Science (IUPsyS), and the International Association for Cross‐Cultural Psychology (IACCP). The conference was hosted by the Bahamas Psychological Association, and organized by a committee chaired by Dr Ava Thompson, College of the Bahamas. The CRCP2011 attracted over 400 participants from 37 countries, including 20 nations/territories in the Caribbean. A broad scientific program, organized around six conference themes, addressed strengths and challenges to psychology in the region; the current state of psychological research, assessment, and intervention; historical, cultural, and language influences; and links between Caribbean and global models. Conference outcomes included planning for a series of publications to expand on conference themes and presentations, as well as establishment of a steering group to launch a regional organization to support the science and practice of psychology in the Caribbean.     

Individual and group CBT and IPT for Puerto Rican adolescents with depressive symptoms

This study compared individual (I) to group (G) formats of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) for the treatment of depression in adolescents. One hundred and 12 Puerto Rican adolescents were randomized to four conditions (CBT-I, CBT-G, IPT-I, IPT-G). Participants were assessed at pretreatment and posttreatment with structured interviews to establish diagnosis and with self-report measures to assess treatment outcome. The results suggest that CBT and IPT are robust treatments in both group and individual formats. However, CBT produced significantly greater decreases in depressive symptoms and improved self-concept than IPT. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Family Therapy Education and Higher Education Administration Policy: Facing New Challenges

Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT) education programs are not immune to the financial pressures associated with providing quality educational programs. In this article, the author discusses the current higher education economic environment, explores contemporary trends in higher education management, and considers their effect on MFT educational programs, an area that is virtually unaddressed in the literature. Finally, the author describes how one MFT training program is responding to the challenges brought forth by the fiscal complexities embedded in the contemporary higher education economic environment. The discussion offers useful and practical administrative policy information to MFT educational programs and their leaders.     

Categorizing words using ‘frequent frames’: what cross‐linguistic analyses reveal about distributional acquisition strategies

Mintz (2003 ) described a distributional environment called a frame, defined as the co‐occurrence of two context words with one intervening target word. Analyses of English child‐directed speech showed that words that fell within any frequently occurring frame consistently belonged to the same grammatical category (e.g. noun, verb, adjective, etc.). In this paper, we first generalize this result to French, a language in which the function word system allows patterns that are potentially detrimental to a frame‐based analysis procedure. Second, we show that the discontinuity of the chosen environments (i.e. the fact that target words are framed by the context words) is crucial for the mechanism to be efficient. This property might be relevant for any computational approach to grammatical categorization. Finally, we investigate a recursive application of the procedure and observe that the categorization is paradoxically worse when context elements are categories rather than actual lexical items. Item‐specificity is thus also a core computational principle for this type of algorithm. Our analysis, along with results from behavioural studies ( Gómez, 2002 ; Gómez and Maye, 2005 ; Mintz, 2006 ), provides strong support for frames as a basis for the acquisition of grammatical categories by infants. Discontinuity and item‐specificity appear to be crucial features.     

Culturally adapting an evidence-based parenting intervention for Latino immigrants: the need to integrate fidelity and cultural relevance

Latinos constitute the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. However, the cultural adaptation and dissemination of evidence-based parenting interventions among Latino populations continues to be scarce despite extensive research that demonstrates the long-term positive effects of these interventions. The purpose of this article is threefold: (1) justify the importance of cultural adaptation research as a key strategy to disseminate efficacious interventions among Latinos, (2) describe the initial steps of a program of prevention research with Latino immigrants aimed at culturally adapting an evidence-based intervention informed by parent management training principles, and (3) discuss implications for advancing cultural adaptation prevention practice and research, based on the initial feasibility and cultural acceptability findings of the current investigation.     

Two-year-olds compute syntactic structure on-line

Syntax allows human beings to build an infinite number of new sentences from a finite stock of words. Because toddlers typically utter only one or two words at a time, they have been thought to have no syntax. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we demonstrated that 2-year-olds do compute syntactic structure when listening to spoken sentences. We observed an early left-lateralized brain response when an expected verb was incorrectly replaced by a noun (or vice versa). Thus, toddlers build on-line expectations as to the syntactic category of the next word in a sentence. In addition, the response topography was different for nouns and verbs, suggesting that different neural networks already underlie noun and verb processing in toddlers, as they do in adults.     

A Balancing Act: Integrating Evidence‐Based Knowledge and Cultural Relevance in a Program of Prevention Parenting Research with Latino/a Immigrants

Family therapists have a unique opportunity to contribute toward the reduction of widespread mental health disparities impacting diverse populations by developing applied lines of research focused on cultural adaptation. For example, although evidence‐based prevention parent training (PT) interventions have been found to be efficacious with various Euro‐American populations, there is a pressing need to understand which specific components of PT interventions are perceived by ethnic minority parents as having the highest impact on their parenting practices. Equally important is to examine the perceived cultural relevance of adapted PT interventions. This qualitative investigation had the primary objective of comparing and contrasting the perceived relevance of two culturally adapted versions of the efficacious parenting intervention known as Parent Management Training, the Oregon Model (PMTO). According to feasibility indicators provided by 112 Latino/a immigrant parents, as well as findings from a qualitative thematic analysis, the core parenting components across both adapted interventions were identified by the majority of research participants as relevant to their parenting practices. Participants exposed to the culturally enhanced intervention, which included culture‐specific sessions, also reported high satisfaction with components exclusively focused on cultural issues that directly impact their parenting practices (e.g., immigration challenges, biculturalism). This investigation illustrates the relevant contributions that family therapy scholars can offer toward addressing mental health disparities, particularly as it refers to developing community‐based prevention interventions that achieve a balance between evidence‐based knowledge and cultural relevance.