Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to Guide Exposure-Based Interventions for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

Exposure is considered one of the most effective interventions for PTSD. There is a large body of research for the use of imaginal and in vivo exposure in the treatment of PTSD, with prolonged exposure (PE) therapy being the most researched example. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) has sometimes been called an exposure-based treatment, but how exposure is implemented in ACT for PTSD has not been well articulated. Although support for the use of ACT in PTSD treatment is limited to a handful of case studies and open trials, research suggests ACT is particularly useful in flexibly targeting avoidance behavior—arguably the most important process in the continued maintenance of PTSD symptoms. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of exposure within ACT in PTSD treatment. Through an overview of PE and ACT, and with the use of case examples, we describe how ACT principles and techniques may inform exposure-based treatments for PTSD in order to create more flexible approaches. In addition, understanding exposure within an ACT framework may also contribute to clarifying processes of change.     

Music,identity, and musical ethnocentrism of young people in six Asian,Latin American,and Western cultures

Ethnomusicologists and sociologists have extensively discussed the symbolic role of music in the creation, maintenance, and expression of cultural and national identity, while the underlying social psychological processes remain unexplored. We elaborate psychological mechanisms of identity construction and identity expression through culture‐specific music preferences. We propose and test a model linking music preferences to national identity via musical ethnocentrism in six student samples from Brazil, Germany, Hong Kong, Mexico, New Zealand, and the Philippines. In each context, culture‐specific music styles were related to national identity of its listeners and musical ethnocentrism mediated these effects. This paper bridges culture‐specific and universal perspectives on music and identity by examining the underlying psychological processes in Asian, Latin, and Western cultures.     

Interactive effects of proactive personality and display rules on emotional labor in organizations

Emotional labor is the management of emotional displays that happens in the context of a work role. Past research has shown that organizational display rules (standards for emotions that should be shown and hidden from customers) influence emotional labor, but little research has examined the individual differences that make employees more or less responsive to these display rules. The present study draws on concepts from the control theory model of emotional labor to address this limitation by examining the moderating role of proactive personality. Results indicate that proactive individuals are highly responsive to different types of display rules that prompt the use of different emotional labor strategies, highlighting the importance of how display expectations are framed for employees.     

Abstract: An International Comparison of Private and Public Schools Using Multilevel Propensity Score Methods and Graphics

As can be seen from the recent Special Issue of MBR on propensity score analysis (PSA) methods, the use of PSA has gained increasing popularity for estimating causal effects in observational studies. However, PSA use with multilevel or clustered data has been limited, and to date there seems to have been no development of specialized graphics for such data. This paper introduces the multilevelPSA (http://multilevelPSA.r-forge.r-project.org) package for R that provides cluster-based functions for estimating propensity scores as well as graphics to exhibit results for multilevel data. This work extends to the multilevel case the framework for visualizing propensity score analysis introduced by Helmreich and Pruzek (2009). International data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2009) are comprehensively examined to compare private with public schools on reading, mathematics, and science outcomes after adjusting for covariate differences in the multilevel context.

Particularly for analyses of large data sets, focusing on statistical significance is limiting. As can readily be seen, overall results favor “private” over “public” schools, at least for end of secondary school math achievement. But the graphics provide a more nuanced understanding of the nature and magnitude of adjusted differences for countries. Furthermore, the graphics are readily interpreted by a nontechnical audience. Broadly speaking, it is seen that modern graphics can enhance and extend conventional numerical summaries by focusing on details of what data have to say for multilevel comparisons of many countries based on propensity score methods.     

Aggressive and Prosocial Behavior: Community Violence, Cognitive, and Behavioral Predictors Among Urban African American Youth

We use longitudinal multilevel modeling to test how exposure to community violence and cognitive and behavioral factors contribute to the development of aggressive and prosocial behaviors. Specifically, we examine predictors of self-, peer-, and teacher-reported aggressive and prosocial behavior among 266 urban, African American early adolescents. We examine lagged, within-person, between-person, and protective effects across 2 years. In general, results suggest that higher levels of violence exposure and aggressive beliefs are associated with more aggressive and less prosocial peer-reported behavior, whereas greater self-efficacy to resolve conflict peacefully is associated with less aggression across reporters and more teacher-reported prosocial behavior. Greater knowledge and violence prevention skills are associated with fewer aggressive and more prosocial teacher-reported behaviors. Results also suggest that greater self-efficacy and lower impulsivity have protective effects for youth reporting higher levels of exposure to community violence, in terms of teacher-reported aggressive behavior and peer-reported prosocial behavior. Differences among reporters and models are discussed, as well as implications for intervention.     

Weight Strain and Binge Drinking among Adolescents

Obesity and substance use are two common areas of research among adolescents. Interestingly, very little research examines the relationship between these two important health risk behaviors and the findings are inconsistent. Guided by Agnew’s general strain theory and using the Add Health data, we examine this neglected area of research. The current research has identified a link between weight strain and binge drinking and is supportive of the extant research on both general strain theory and the links between stigma, stress, and health. We also found some evidence that this relationship was gendered. Implications and future research directions are discussed.     

The relationship between multilevel models and non‐parametric multilevel mixture models: Discrete approximation of intraclass correlation,random coefficient distributions,and residual heteroscedasticity

Multilevel data structures are common in the social sciences. Often, such nested data are analysed with multilevel models (MLMs) in which heterogeneity between clusters is modelled by continuously distributed random intercepts and/or slopes. Alternatively, the non‐parametric multilevel regression mixture model (NPMM) can accommodate the same nested data structures through discrete latent class variation. The purpose of this article is to delineate analytic relationships between NPMM and MLM parameters that are useful for understanding the indirect interpretation of the NPMM as a non‐parametric approximation of the MLM, with relaxed distributional assumptions. We define how seven standard and non‐standard MLM specifications can be indirectly approximated by particular NPMM specifications. We provide formulas showing how the NPMM can serve as an approximation of the MLM in terms of intraclass correlation, random coefficient means and (co)variances, heteroscedasticity of residuals at level 1, and heteroscedasticity of residuals at level 2. Further, we discuss how these relationships can be useful in practice. The specific relationships are illustrated with simulated graphical demonstrations, and direct and indirect interpretations of NPMM classes are contrasted. We provide an R function to aid in implementing and visualizing an indirect interpretation of NPMM classes. An empirical example is presented and future directions are discussed.     

Efficient <Emphasis Type="Italic">n</Emphasis>-gram analysis in R with <Literal>cmscu</Literal>

We present a new R package, cmscu, which implements a Count-Min-Sketch with conservative updating (Cormode and Muthukrishnan Journal of Algorithms, 55(1), 58–75, 2005), and its application to n-gram analyses (Goyal et al. 2012). By writing the core implementation in C++ and exposing it to R via Rcpp, we are able to provide a memory-efficient, high-throughput, and easy-to-use library. As a proof of concept, we implemented the computationally challenging (Heafield et al. 2013) modified Kneser–Ney n-gram smoothing algorithm using cmscu as the querying engine. We then explore information density measures (Jaeger Cognitive Psychology, 61(1), 23–62, 2010) from n-gram frequencies (for n=2,3) derived from a corpus of over 2.2 million reviews provided by a Yelp, Inc. dataset. We demonstrate that these text data are at a scale beyond the reach of other more common, more general-purpose libraries available through CRAN. Using the cmscu library and the smoothing implementation, we find a positive relationship between review information density and reader review ratings. We end by highlighting the important use of new efficient tools to explore behavioral phenomena in large, relatively noisy data sets.     

The moderating role of subordinate political skill on supervisors' impressions of subordinate ingratiation and ratings of subordinate interpersonal facilitation

Nearly 2 decades ago, social influence theorists called for a new stream of research that would investigate why and how influence tactics are effective. The present study proposed that political skill affects the style of execution of influence attempts. It utilized balance theory to explain the moderating effect of employee political skill on the relationships between self- and supervisor-reported ingratiation. Additionally, supervisor reports of subordinate ingratiation were hypothesized to be negatively related to supervisor ratings of subordinate interpersonal facilitation. Results from a combined sample of 2 retail service organizations provided evidence that subordinates with high political skill were less likely than those low in political skill to have their demonstrated ingratiation behavior perceived by targets as a manipulative influence attempt. Also, when subordinates were perceived by their supervisors to engage in more ingratiation behavior, the subordinates were rated lower on interpersonal facilitation. Implications of these findings, limitations, and future research directions are provided.