Bidirectional Links Between Teachers’ Disciplinary Practices,Students’ Peer Status,and Students’ Aggression in Kindergarten

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - This study examined bidirectional links between teachers’ disciplinary practices (punitive and educational), students’ peer status in...     

mMotiv8: A smartphone‐based contingency management intervention to promote smoking cessation

Cigarette smoking is the leading preventable cause of death and illness in the United States. We tested the usability, acceptability, and efficacy of a smartphone‐based contingency management treatment to promote cessation. We used a nonconcurrent multiple‐baseline design. Participants (N = 14) provided breath carbon monoxide (CO) samples by using a CO meter that was connected to the user's smartphone. An app (mMotiv8) housed on participants' smartphones automatically captured pictures of the CO sampling procedure to validate the end user's identity, and it prompted submissions via a push message delivered to participants' smartphones. Participants earned a $10 incentive for daily abstinence, which was added to a reloadable debit card. Overall, 4% of the CO samples were negative during baseline, and 89% were negative during treatment. Self‐reported usability and acceptability were high, and 85% of the prompted samples were submitted. A smartphone intervention could be scalable and reduce the health consequences and costs associated with cigarette smoking, particularly in rural and low‐income populations.     

Tool acceptance and acceptability: insights from a real tool use activity

Cognitive Processing - The issue of tool adoption has been the subject of many investigations, which focus either on acceptability (evaluating intention to use, a priori) or acceptance (evaluating...     

Remembering changes: repetition effects in face recollection.

Two experiments examined effects of repetition and change on states of awareness in face recognition. Participants studied repeatedly presented photographs of faces, with the second presentation following either immediately after the first presentation (massed repetition) or following six intervening items (spaced repetition). To manipulate perceptual change, each repeated face was either identical or a mirror image of the first presentation. Subsequently, when recognising a face, participants indicated whether they consciously recollected its prior occurrence ("remembering") or recognised it on the basis of familiarity ("knowing"). Changes in appearance between repeated faces enhanced remember, but not know, responses, and these effects were accentuated for spaced, rather than massed, repetition. These findings suggest that distinctiveness of encoding supports the phenomenological experience of conscious remembering.     

Nymphea: from psychic breakdown to the emergence of subjectivity

In the first part of the paper the author presents an account of the analysis of a woman who is psychically extremely disturbed. This clinical presentation focuses on the unfolding of the transference process, and on the countertransference difficulties encountered during the course of the treatment which lasted more than ten years. In the second part of the paper the author proposes a theoretical approach to the breakdown experienced by the patient, and puts forward the hypothesis that there was insufficient differentiation between her internal objects and the archetypes, and that this prevented the development of symbolization. The author proposes the idea of a collapse between internal and external objects, which destroys the space necessary for representation and symbolization that normally arise between the two poles of the object. The account of this transference process between the analyst and the patient is thus seen as the account of the (re)construction of true internal objects, and of the resumption of a symbolic process to make possible the development of subjectivity.     

On normal theory based inference for multilevel models with distributional violations

Data in social and behavioral sciences are often hierarchically organized though seldom normal, yet normal theory based inference procedures are routinely used for analyzing multilevel models. Based on this observation, simple adjustments to normal theory based results are proposed to minimize the consequences of violating normality assumptions. For characterizing the distribution of parameter estimates, sandwich-type covariance matrices are derived. Standard errors based on these covariance matrices remain consistent under distributional violations. Implications of various covariance estimators are also discussed. For evaluating the quality of a multilevel model, a rescaled statistic is given for both the hierarchical linear model and the hierarchical structural equation model. The rescaled statistic, improving the likelihood ratio statistic by estimating one extra parameter, approaches the same mean as its reference distribution. A simulation study with a 2-level factor model implies that the rescaled statistic is preferable.This research was supported by grants DA01070 and DA00017 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and a University of North Texas faculty research grant. We would like to thank the Associate Editor and two reviewers for suggestions that helped to improve the paper.