A Pilot Study of Transformational Leadership and College Counseling Outcomes

This pilot study explores the relationship between perceived transformational leadership skills of college counselors and outcomes in counseling. College students receiving counseling (n = 46) were given a revised version of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ), the Working Alliance Inventory, Short Form (WAI-S), and the Counseling Center Assessment of Psychological Symptoms (CCAPS-34). Results yielded significant relationships between improvement in areas of client functioning and subscales measuring aspects of transformational leadership in counselors as perceived by clients. In addition to significant correlations between alliance and subscales of the MLQ, there were strong negative relationships between social anxiety and management by exception (active); academic distress and idealized influence (behavior); and alcohol use and management by exception (passive).     

The influence of spatial context and the role of intentionality in the interpretation of animacy from motion

We present three experiments investigating how spatial context influences the attribution of animacy to a moving target. Each of our displays contained a moving object (the target) that might, depending on the way it moved, convey the impression that it was alive (animate). We investigated the mechanisms underlying this attribution by manipulating the nature of the spatial context surrounding the target. In Experiment 1, the context consisted of a simple static dot (the foil), whose position relative to the target's trajectory was manipulated. With some foil positions--for example, when the foil was lying along the path traveled by the target--animacy judgments were elevated relative to control foil locations, apparently because this context supported the impression that the target was "reacting to" or was in some other way mentally influenced by the foil. In Experiment 2, contexts consisted of a static oriented rectangle (the "paddle"). On some trials, the target collided with the paddle in a way that seemed to physically account for the target's motion pattern (in the sense of having imparted momentum to it); this condition reduced animacy ratings. Experiment 3 was similar, except that the paddles themselves were in motion; again, animacy attribution was suppressed when the target's motion seemed to have been caused by a collision with the paddle. Hence, animacy attributions can be either elevated or suppressed by the nature of the environment and the target's interaction with it. Animacy attribution tracks intentionality attribution; contrary to some earlier proposals, we conclude that attributing animacy involves, and may even require, attributing to the target some minimal mental capacity sufficient to endow the target with intentionality.     

Information entropy analysis of discrete aiming movements

Information entropy and mutual information were investigated in discrete movement aiming tasks over a wide range of spatial (20-160 mm) and temporal (250-1250 ms) constraints. Information entropy was calculated using two distinct analyses: (1) with no assumption on the nature of the data distribution; and (2) assuming the data have a normal distribution. The two analyses showed different results in the estimate of entropy that also changed as a function of task goals, indicating that the movement trajectory data were not from a normal distribution. It was also found that the information entropy of the discrete aiming movements was lower than the task defined indices of difficulty (ID) that were selected for the congruence with Fitts' law. Mutual information between time points of the trajectory was strongly influenced by the average movement velocity and the acceleration/deceleration segments of the movement. The entropy analysis revealed structure to the variability of the movement trajectory and outcome that has been masked by the traditional distributional analyses of discrete aiming movements.     

Obstacle avoidance in novel visual environments improved by variable practice training

Motor performance on simple tasks improves after training in variable practice. We asked if locomotor skill during an obstacle-avoidance task in a novel sensorimotor environment improved through training in variable practice on other complex tasks. 40 normal adults practiced gross motor skills while wearing either sham lenses, one of several visual distortion lens (constant practice), or three different visual distortion lenses (variable practice). Posttests on obstacle avoidance with novel lenses showed significantly better scores with variable practice and one of the constant groups vs sham lenses. Constant and variable practice groups did not differ. Thus, performance in a novel environment improves after training on similar type novelty, even when practice and test conditions differ. Constant practice was effective only if the subjects used the lens efficacious in training. Variable practice increases the likelihood of efficacious training when adaptive performance is required in a novel environment.     

Spirituality,Culture and Mental Health: Prospects and Risks for Contemporary Psychology of Religion

This paper asks whether: (1) psychology of religion is doing what it is supposed to do, (2) the contemporary psychological attention to religion and spirituality is perhaps of a transgressive nature, and (3) conceptualizations of spirituality in psychological publications are biased. It makes a plea for phenomenologically well-informed research on real forms of religion and spirituality, from a perspective that is as broad as psychology at present has become, with due regard for both the cultural make-up of the phenomena and the unavoidable limits of psychologists' professional competence.     

Electronic Diaries: A Feasible Method of Assessing Emotional Experiences in Youth?

The primary goal of this study was to examine whether electronic diaries are a feasible method of monitoring transitory emotional states with a school-age, community sample of youth. A second goal was to examine preliminary relations between indices of emotional functioning captured via electronic diaries and other measures of child emotional and psychological functioning. Participants included 38 youth between the ages of 7 and 12 (51% males, M age = 9 [1.52] years and 49% females, M age = 9 [1.94] years) and their mothers (M age = 39 years) and fathers (M age = 42 years). Children were prompted to indicate the intensity of their current emotion four times a day for 1 week using Palm Tungsten E2s. Youth also completed self-report measures of emotion intensity, awareness, and dysregulation. Parents completed measures of child emotion regulation and symptoms of externalizing and internalizing psychopathology. Sixty percent of the prompts were answered as intended. Higher levels of positive emotion intensity based on electronic diary ratings were negatively related to parent reports of adaptive emotion regulation and were positively related to youths’ reports of emotion dysregulation and poor emotion awareness. Given that the electronic diary data offered unique information on youth emotional functioning, strategies to increase compliance with the diaries are suggested.