Disclosure on Campus: Students’ Decisions to Tell Others About Unwanted Sexual Experiences,Intimate Partner Violence,and Stalking

The scope of student victimization occurring on college campuses is problematic, drawing the attention of researchers and campus officials. While most researchers of the disclosure of these unwanted experiences tend to examine just 1 form of victimization, a direct comparison of the disclosure of different types of campus victimization within a singular study is missing in the literature. The current study aimed to address this issue by examining 4 types of victimization experiences (unwanted sexual contact, unwanted sexual intercourse, intimate partner violence, and stalking) in a college population. A common set of possible predictors of disclosure were examined, including both demographic (e.g., gender, race, age) and situational factors (e.g., alcohol use, level of fear, relationship with perpetrator). While patterns of similarity across all victimization experiences emerged, the impact of gender, race, age, and alcohol use on disclosure decisions varied substantially by victimization type. The findings of this study address the gap in the current literature by providing a comparison and contrast of the influence of predictors across different types of victimization. Furthermore, the findings provide needed information that could help colleges and universities develop ways to encourage support-seeking and reporting among students.     

Multimedia Field Test: Digitalizing Better Sleep Using the Sleepio Program

The promise of online cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) and other sleep-related problems as an alternative to traditional face-to-face treatment rests upon the accessibility, ease-of-use, and effectiveness of these approaches. Here we provide a review of Sleepio, a digitalized, state-of-the-art CBT-I program for adults, informed by our personal experience with the program, available research, and information provided at the Sleepio website. The 6-week treatment program can be completed flexibly via web-based or mobile platform. Initial assessment of individual goals and baseline sleep patterns is used to build a personalized account comprised of four sections: Sleep Diary, Case File, Library, and Community. Sleepio uses evidence-based principles and practices, engaging content, and an easy-to-follow format. Unique features of the program including synchronization with compatible sleep tracking devices, multiple built-in user supports, and a 14-day money-back guarantee. Both statistical and clinically meaningful sleep improvements have been found in a large randomized controlled trial. Overall, Sleepio represents a model program for online CBT-I delivery.     

Implementation in a Changing Landscape: Provider Experiences During Rapid Scaling of Use of Evidence-Based Treatments

This study examined 133 service providers’ perspectives on a rapid shift to mandated evidence-based treatment delivery, utilizing an inductive coding process to capture themes present in their qualitative feedback. The majority of provider comments were negatively valenced, but attitudes varied considerably across response categories: comments regarding practice context and support were nearly uniformly negative, while comments regarding treatment fit and therapeutic consequences were more balanced. Treatment fit was the most commonly cited category; the fit to therapist (e.g., ease of use) subcategory was predominantly positive in contrast with the fit to client (e.g., flexibility) subcategory, which was predominantly negative. Results illustrate the intended and unintended consequences of large-scale implementation efforts on community providers, and may aid implementation researchers and system decision makers optimize the conditions under which community providers are asked to implement evidence-based treatment.     

The social functions of babbling: acoustic and contextual characteristics that facilitate maternal responsiveness

What is the social function of babbling? An important function of prelinguistic vocalizing may be to elicit parental behavior in ways that facilitate the infant's own learning about speech and language. Infants use parental feedback to their babbling to learn new vocal forms, but the microstructure of parental responses to babbling has not been studied. To enable precise manipulation of the proximal infant cues that may influence maternal behavior, we used a playback paradigm to assess mothers’ responsiveness to prerecorded audiovisual clips of unfamiliar infants’ noncry prelinguistic vocalizations and actions. Acoustic characteristics and directedness of vocalizations were manipulated to test their efficacy in structuring social interactions. We also compared maternal responsiveness in the playback paradigm and in free play with their own infants. Maternal patterns of reactions to babbling were stable across both tasks. In the playback task, we found specific vocal cues, such as the degree of resonance and the transition timing of consonant‐vowel syllables, predicted contingent maternal responding. Vocalizations directed at objects also facilitated increased responsiveness. The responses mothers exhibited, such as sensitive speech and vocal imitation, are known to facilitate vocal learning and development. Infants, by influencing the behavior of their caregivers with their babbling, create social interactions that facilitate their own communicative development.     

Qualitative insights into the relationship between socioeconomic status and students’ academic achievement goals

Recent research using quantitative methodologies and an emerging social psychological theory of socioeconomic status (SES) has found an association between students’ SES and their academic achievement goals. As a new area of research in the achievement goal tradition, there has been little investigation of the contextual influences upon particular goal orientations in divergent SES contexts. To explore these influences, focus groups were conducted with 24 secondary school students aged 16–17 years attending a high and a low SES school in New South Wales, Australia. These teenagers were approaching a ‘developmental deadline’ which required immediate decisions about future work and education pathways. As such, they could be experiencing a period of heightened contextual influences. Directed content analysis of the focus groups observed the broad distinctions in achievement goals seen in previous quantitative studies. However, the analysis elucidated some of the ways in which norms and values in different SES contexts influenced the adoption of particular goal orientations. In some cases, the same orientation had markedly different contextual influences stemming from students’ SES backgrounds. From these exploratory findings, we argue for further research into the factors which influence the adoption of different achievement goals by students from different SES backgrounds.     

Addition in kindergarten: The role of mothers’ and teachers’ language

Data from a longitudinal investigation were used to examine the effects of mothers’ and teachers’ language on children’s developing mathematical competencies during the kindergarten year. Specifically, 1) mothers’ use of metamemory talk, or references to the process of remembering, and 2) teachers’ use of cognitive processing language (CPL), or instruction that encourages deep levels of processing and metacognition, were related to students’ addition skills in kindergarten. The findings indicated that while maternal metamemory talk was associated with children’s mathematical competencies at school entry, teachers’ use of CPL was associated with the amount of growth that students demonstrated across the year, especially regarding strategy use. The results highlight the need for additional research that examines students’ academic trajectories longitudinally as a function of the language to which they are exposed at home and school.     

Connections Among Identity,Attachment, and Psychological Dating Aggression During Adolescence

The collective influence of identity styles and romantic attachment insecurity on psychological dating aggression was examined for 1,975 adolescents living in a southern state in the United States. Informational identity style related negatively to psychological dating aggression, but anxious romantic attachment related positively to this behavior. Diffuse-avoidant identity style and using psychological dating aggression were associated positively, whereas normative identity style and receiving psychological dating aggression were associated negatively. In addition, the combination of high informational or normative identity style with high avoidant romantic attachment was linked to lower psychological dating aggression. Our findings build on the previously noted parallelism between identity styles and romantic attachment insecurity by showing how they work together to explain variability in psychological dating aggression.     

Assessment as Intervention: A Pilot Study of Short-Term Dyadic Treatment

Assessment, as an intervention, is a hallmark of infant mental health that has not been evaluated for treatment effectiveness. A comprehensive assessment framework was standardized as a short-term intervention model and evaluated for treatment effects based on dynamic systems theory of change. The transdisciplinary interaction-based assessment model embeds nondidactic developmental guidance interpretations in the context of eliciting child functional capacities while engaging the caregiver in direct co-observation and reflection to challenge inflexibility in parents’ representations. The findings of this pilot project, with a community sample of Spanish- and English-speaking families, suggest this assessment as intervention model has the potential to promote an active process of change in parents’ representations toward a “disorderly,” or unstable state, possibly both in perceptions of self as caregiver and in representations of the child. Clinically, this disorderly state would be seen as an opportunity that could perpetuate the change process, recognizing disorderliness of representation as an opening, as emerging permeability of representations. Results indicate that this caregiver-clinician collaborative process is associated with caregiver reports of decreased distress, increased empathy for child’s difficulties, and changes in caregiver representations. A subset of families, caregivers who hold immutable views of their children, are less responsive to the developmental guidance approach and may require different or more long-term treatment.