A comparative outcome study of behavioral social-skills training, interpersonal-problem-solving and non-directive control treatments with child psychiatric outpatients

The purpose of the present study was to compare the short- and long-term efficacy of behavioral social-skills training and interpersonal-problem-solving with a control condition (non-directive treatment) with a clinical population of 61 socially-maladjusted outpatient boys. Treatment consisted of 12 weekly 1-hr sessions, with follow-up conducted at 12 months. A comprehensive assessment strategy was employed which included direct behavioral observations, parent, teacher, peer, self-report and academic performance measures. The results of this social-skills comparative outcome study indicated that the behavioral and interpersonal treatments resulted in changes on parent, teacher, self-report and peer sociometric ratings at post-treatment. At the 1-yr follow-up, the behavioral treatment maintained it's gains and continued to show modest improvement. Conversely, the interpersonal treatment manifested significant declines, as did the control group. These findings and implications for future research are discussed.     

Development and psychometric properties of the Children's Assertive Behavior Scale

The purpose of this paper is to present the psychometric properties and individual items comprising the Children's Assertive Behavior Scale (CABS). The CABS is a behaviorally designed self-report instrument for children which measures general and specific social skills and covers many socially relevant situations which are problematic for children. Acceptable psychometric properties of the 27-item test were obtained in several independent investigations across both geographical regions and grade levels. The CABS showed significant concurrent validity with peer, parent, and teacher measures of social competency. The CABS also discriminated trained versus untrained children participating in social skills versus a placebo discussion group. The instrument is presented, along with recommendations for future applications and research.Both authors share equal responsibility for the development and evaluation of the Children's Assertive Behavior Scale.     

A case-controlled field study evaluating ICD-11 proposals for relational problems and intimate partner violence

Background/Objective: Intimate partner relationship problems and intimate partner abuse and neglect — referred to in this paper as “relational problems and maltreatment” — have substantial and well-documented impact on both physical and mental health. However, classification guidelines, such as those found in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), are vague and unlikely to support consistent application. Revised guidelines proposed for ICD-11 are much more operationalized. We used standardized clinical vignette conditions with an international panel of clinicians to test if ICD-11 changes resulted in improved classification accuracy. Method: English-speaking mental health professionals (N = 738) from 65 nations applied ICD-10 or ICD-11 (proposed) guidelines with experimentally manipulated case presentations of presence or absence of (a) individual mental health diagnoses and (b) relational problems or maltreatment. Results: ICD-11, compared with ICD-10, guidelines resulted in significantly better classification accuracy, although only in the presence of co-morbid mental health problems. Clinician factors (e. g., gender, language, world region) largely did not impact classification performance. Conclusions: Despite being considerably more explicated, raters’ performance with ICD-11 guidelines reveals training issues that should be addressed prior to the release of ICD-11 in 2018 (e. g., overriding the guidelines with pre-existing archetypes for relationship problems and physical and psychological abuse).     

Self and other obedience estimates: biases and moderators

The authors conducted 2 studies regarding behavior perceptions of "self" and "typical other" in hypothetical replications of S. Milgram's (1963) obedience experiment. In Study 1, participants' knowledge about Milgram's actual results was manipulated. Regardless of knowledge, results demonstrated several specific social and perceptual biases (e.g., the self-other bias; J. D. Brown, 1986), in addition to several general, fundamental lessons of social psychology (e.g., the perseverance of lay dispositionism). Study 2 was designed to explore the possibility that participants' own academic interests and worldview could influence the biases explicated in Study 1. The authors assessed perceptions of both criminal-justice majors and non-criminal-justice majors regarding their perceptions of behaviors of self and typical other. The criminal-justice students' self-other obedience estimates were significantly higher than those of the non-criminal-justice students. Further, the self-other discrepancy for criminal-justice students was significantly smaller than the difference reported by non-criminal-justice majors, suggesting that the criminal-justice students demonstrated the self-other bias significantly less than non-criminal-justice students in this context. The findings indicate that specific social-perceptual biases may have been moderated by career interest and worldview.     

Cognitive control and parsing: Reexamining the role of Broca’s area in sentence comprehension

A century of investigation into the role of the human frontal lobes in complex cognition, including language processing, has revealed several interesting but apparently contradictory findings. In particular, the results of numerous studies suggest that left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG), which includes Broca’s area, plays a direct role in sentence-level syntactic processing. In contrast, other brain-imaging and neuropsychological data indicate that LIFG is crucial for cognitive control—specifically, for overriding highly regularized, automatic processes, even when a task involves syntactically undemanding material (e.g., single words, a list of letters). We provide a unifying account of these findings, which emphasizes the importance of general cognitive control mechanisms for the syntactic processing of sentences. On the basis of a review of the neurocognitive and sentence-processing literatures, we defend the following three hypotheses: (1) LIFG is part of a network of frontal lobe subsystems that are generally responsible for the detection and resolution of incompatible stimulus representations; (2) the role of LIFG in sentence comprehension is to implement reanalysis in the face of misinterpretation; and (3) individual differences in cognitive control abilities in nonsyntactic tasks predict correlated variation in sentence-processing abilities pertaining to the recovery from misinterpretation.