Treatment Engagement: Building Therapeutic Alliance in Home-Based Treatment with Adolescents and their Families

Client engagement is an essential yet challenging ingredient in effective therapy. Engaged clients are more likely to bond with therapists and counselors, endorse treatment goals, participate to a greater degree, remain in treatment longer, and report higher levels of satisfaction. This study explored the process of engaging high-risk youth and their parents in a unique home-based family therapy intervention. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 19 families who completed family therapy sessions that included a core component aimed at increasing treatment engagement. Parents’ and youths’ perceptions of engagement suggest the importance of developing therapeutic alliance with therapists, who facilitated building a shared alliance among family members. Implications for improving client engagement are discussed within the context of alliance building with the therapist and among family members.     

At first glance: Accessibility of the physical attractiveness stereotype

This research investigated two related questions. First, do stereotyped attribute judgments emerge based on attractiveness information presented under severely restricted viewing conditions? Second, will similar biased judgments be obtained for the same targets when subjects are permitted unrestricted viewing time? Experiment 1 found that male and female Caucasian college students were able to differentiate between levels of attractiveness of both males and females on the basis of cue information contained in a single brief glance (100 ms) at a target. Subjects made stereotyped attribute judgments of targets' femininity/masculinity, job suitability, and cooperativeness based on this information under restricted and unrestricted (Experiment 2) conditions. Subjects' eye fixation patterns, recorded during the second experiment, revealed that men and women differed in the way they explored targets, but their differing search strategies had no significant effect on physical attractiveness stereotyping. Results suggest that perception of differential attractiveness occurs automatically with the initial encoding of sensory data.     

The neonate brain's sensitivity to repetition-based structure: Specific to speech?

Newborns are able to extract and learn repetition-based regularities from the speech input, that is, they show greater brain activation in the bilateral temporal and left inferior frontal regions to trisyllabic pseudowords of the form AAB (e.g., “babamu”) than to random ABC sequences (e.g., “bamuge”). Whether this ability is specific to speech or also applies to other auditory stimuli remains unexplored. To investigate this, we tested whether newborns are sensitive to regularities in musical tones. Neonates listened to AAB and ABC tones sequences, while their brain activity was recorded using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS). The paradigm, the frequency of occurrence and the distribution of the tones were identical to those of the syllables used in previous studies with speech. We observed a greater inverted (negative) hemodynamic response to AAB than to ABC sequences in the bilateral temporal and fronto-parietal areas. This inverted response was caused by a decrease in response amplitude, attributed to habituation, over the course of the experiment in the left fronto-temporal region for the ABC condition and in the right fronto-temporal region for both conditions. These findings show that newborns’ ability to discriminate AAB from ABC sequences is not specific to speech. However, the neural response to musical tones and spoken language is markedly different. Tones gave rise to habituation, whereas speech was shown to trigger increasing responses over the time course of the study. Relatedly, the repetition regularity gave rise to an inverted hemodynamic response when carried by tones, while it was canonical for speech. Thus, newborns’ ability to detect repetition is not speech-specific, but it engages distinct brain mechanisms for speech and music.

Research Highlights

• The ability of newborns’ to detect repetition-based regularities is not specific to speech, but also extends to other auditory modalities.
• The brain mechanisms underlying speech and music processing are markedly different.

     

Women, Motivation, and Achievement

Women's educational and occupational achievements are crucial to the economic productivity and prosperity of the nation, as well as to the mental health of women and their families. In this article we review psychological research on motivation and on educational achievement, focusing on gender and the contributions that have been made by feminist researchers. Feminist psychologists noted the sex bias and methodological flaws in traditional research on achievement motivation and proposed vastly improved models, such as Eccles's expectancy x value model of achievement behavior. Contrary to stereotypes, gender similarities are typically found in areas such as mathematics performance. Policymakers should be concerned about gender bias in the SAT and about the Female Underprediction Effect. Additional threats to girls' and women's achievements include stereotype threat and peer sexual harassment in the schools.     

We are not a Healthcare Business: Our Inadvertent Vow of Poverty

Psychology has been fractionated from mainstream healthcare delivery and this schism has resulted in huge costs to psychologists and our intended customers. Psychology has also been naïve economically. The authors suggest three revolutions: (1) for clinical psychology to be better integrated into the healthcare delivery system; (2) for psychologists to better understand healthcare economics and business; and (3) for psychologists to become more entrepreneurial, i.e., see needs in healthcare (such as those of the elderly, obesity, improved access and value through ehealth) and systematically fill these. We note high quality businesses help many individuals (customers, family members, employees) not typically recognized by anti-business psychologists.     

Activating children's thinking skills (ACTS): The effects of an infusion approach to teaching thinking in primary schools

Background Recent interest in the teaching of thinking skills within education has led to an increase in thinking skills packages available to schools. However many of these are not based on scientific evaluation ( DfEE, 1999 ). This paper endeavours to examine the effectiveness of one approach, that of infusion, to teaching thinking. Aims To investigate the impact of an infusion methodology, activating children's thinking skills (ACTS), on the cognitive, social, and emotional development of children in Year 4–6 in primary schools. This is a sister project to research being conducted in Northern Ireland ( McGuinness, 2006 ). Sample The study involved 404 children from 8 primary schools in one local authority. These were divided into 160 in the experimental group and 244 in the waiting list control group. Methods A quasi‐experimental design was used with pre‐, post‐, and delayed post‐tests to ascertain changes in children's cognitive abilities, self‐perceptions, and social/behavioural skills using quantitative measures. In addition qualitative techniques were used with pupils and teachers to evaluate effectiveness. Results The experimental group made significantly greater gains in cognitive ability skills over a 2 year period compared to the waiting list control. Qualitative data demonstrated a positive impact on children's social and emotional development. In addition teacher professional development was reported to be enhanced. Conclusions This research indicated that children's cognitive abilities can be developed following a 2 year period of the ACTS infusion intervention. While some positive effects were evidenced on the social and emotional development of children, further study will be necessary to examine these in more detail.