Cross-fertilization versus transmission: Recommendations for developing a bidirectional approach to psychotherapy dissemination research

Psychotherapy researchers are increasingly engaged in collaborations with clinical practitioners and mental health administrators. Each party brings its own perspectives, values, and agendas to bear in these encounters. Viable research—practice collaborations depend on understanding and negotiating some of the tensions in these relationships. In this article, we discuss the contexts that prevail for various participants in a psychotherapy dissemination study as well as the values, goals, costs, and benefits related to research participation. This article is a collaboration among the researchers, mental health administrators, therapists, and clients involved in an ongoing treatment dissemination study. Our recommendations for research—practice collaborations are based on our experiences and dialogues over the course of this study.     

Psychological Masculinity amid Femininity: Relationship to Striving and Self-Concept in the Achievement and Interpersonal Domains

The relative influences of gender and individual differences in psychological masculinity and femininity on the achievement and interpersonal strivings, abilities, and self-concepts of 176 male and female college students were investigated. The results indicate that psychological masculinity and femininity are better predictors of strivings and self-concepts in the achievement and interpersonal domains than gender. Only with respect to subjects' expected and ideal financial responsibilities, an area which is governed by strong societal sex role norms, does the influence of gender surpass that of psychological masculinity and femininity. The results are discussed in terms of the personality strengths and social competencies that derive from masculine and feminine personality traits.     

Young children interpret number gestures differently than nonsymbolic sets

Researchers have long been interested in the origins of humans’ understanding of symbolic number, focusing primarily on how children learn the meanings of number words (e.g., “one”, “two”, etc.). However, recent evidence indicates that children learn the meanings of number gestures before learning number words. In the present set of experiments, we ask whether children's early knowledge of number gestures resembles their knowledge of nonsymbolic number. In four experiments, we show that preschool children (n = 139 in total; age M = 4.14 years, SD = 0.71, range = 2.75–6.20) do not view number gestures in the same the way that they view nonsymbolic representations of quantity (i.e., arrays of shapes), which opens the door for the possibility that young children view number gestures as symbolic, as adults and older children do. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/WtVziFN1yuI

Highlights

• Children were more accurate when enumerating briefly-presented number gestures than arrays of shapes, with a shallower decline in accuracy as quantities increased.
• We replicated this finding with arrays of shapes that were organized into neat, dice-like configurations (compared to the random configurations used in Experiment 1).
• The advantage in enumerating briefly-presented number gestures was evident before children had learned the cardinal principle.
• When gestures were digitally altered to pit handshape configuration against number of fingers extended, children overwhelmingly based their responses on handshape configuration.