Effectiveness of the Wraparound Process for Children with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders: A Meta-Analysis

Wraparound is a team-based service planning and coordination process intended to improve outcomes for children and youth with serious emotional and behavioral disorders and support them in their homes, schools, and communities. Given the substantial resources devoted to implementing wraparound, a meta-analysis of outcome studies was conducted to better understand current empirical support for this process. A literature search identified seven studies between 1986 and 2008 that documented the effects of youth receiving wraparound compared to control groups. Mean treatment effects across outcome domains ranged from medium for youth living situation (0.44) to small for mental health outcomes (0.31), overall youth functioning (0.25), school functioning (0.27), and juvenile justice-related outcomes (0.21). The overall mean effect size across studies was 0.33. Interpretation of results was complicated by the lack of consistent documentation of implementation fidelity across studies and conditions, variations in target population and intended outcomes, and methodological concerns. The authors conclude that, though the published wraparound research base is expanding and findings are largely positive, it continues to be in a preliminary state of development. However, there are insufficient data to support calls for wraparound’s acceptance or dismissal based on the strength of existing studies.     

Concerning the Preservation of God’s Omnipotence

Numerous examples have been offered that purportedly show that God cannot be omnipotent. I argue that a common response to such examples (i.e., that failure to do the impossible does not indicate a lack of power) does not preserve God’s omnipotence in the face of some of these examples. I consider another possible strategy for preserving God’s omnipotence in the face of these examples and find it wanting.

Resolving Nationalist Conflicts: Promoting Overlapping Identities and Pooling Sovereignty—The 1998 Northern Irish Peace Agreement

Nationalist and ethnic conflicts are a continuing source of tension in the post–Cold War period. The underlying factors affecting such conflicts are threat perception, ethnic security dilemmas, and lack of trust between nationalist/ethnic groups. The challenge is to find solutions to these conflicts. International institutions can establish trust and reduce the ethnic security dilemma by providing multiple forums of representation, promoting overlapping identities, and pooling sovereignty. Pooling sovereignty across a number of international representative bodies leads to increased access to governmental policymaking, with each party having a stake in government, and leads to a reduction in political tension and conflict. Thus, international parliamentary institutions may provide a solution to these conflicts. The British-Irish Peace Agreement (Good Friday Agreement) of 1998 is examined as an illustration of this argument.     

Assessing the process of desensitization therapy: Five practical measures

Assessment of phobic behavior has included self-report, physiological, and in vivobehavioral measures. While self-report measures are convenient, they suffer from subject bias and a low predictive validity. Physiological and in vivobehavioral measures are often too cumbersome to implement in standard clinical practice. The current study investigated the validity of five convenient measures of phobic behavior during the process of desensitization therapy. Responses of 14 clinically phobic patients were compared on phobic and neutral scenes presented within the context of systematic desensitization therapy. Phobic scenes resulted in less clarity of scene visualization, a longer latency to clear scene visualization, higher subjective units of discomfort (SUDs) at clear visualization, a longer latency to relaxation, and higher SUDs at relaxation. The measures seemed to reflect accurately the process and stages of desensitization therapy and showed low to high intercorrelations. The pragmatic value of these measures is discussed, as well as suggestions for future validational research.     

Modality-specific interference with overt mediation by pigeons in a delayed discrimination task

Pigeons were trained on a delayed discrimination task in which they were rewarded for pecking a white terminal stimulus (TS) presented 5 sec after a green initial stimulus (IS) and for not pecking the white TS when it followed a red IS. Each bird bridged the memory interval (MI) with overt mediational behaviors. Nevertheless, sustained retroactive interference (RI) effects were produced by houselight illumination (Experiments 1 and 3), and mild shock pulses (Experiment 5) but not white noise (Experiment 2) presented during the MI. Although the magnitude of the light-induced RI effect was proportional to the duration of houselight illumination (Experiment 4), the beginning-end effect described by W. A. Roberts and D. S. Grant (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 1978, 4, 219–236) was not observed. These results not only attest to the between-task robustness of both light-induced RI and modality-specific effects with pigeons, but also support the hypothesis that RI effects result from the disruption of mediational activities possibly analogous to rehearsal. The results further demonstrate that an event interpolated within the MI need not be unexpected or novel to produce RI. Furthermore, the interpolated event can produce modality-specific RI effects even though it effects a different sense than do the IS and TS.     

BEHAVIORAL INTERVENTION STRATEGIES FOR EMPLOYMENT COUNSELING

There is currently considerable impetus for applying behavioral intervention strategies to a variety of counseling settings. This discussion seeks to extend the application of these procedures to the employment security counseling situation. Unemployment is seen as unadaptive behavior, and its antecedent conditions are examined. Behavioral counseling tactics of goal-setting, contingency management, counter-conditioning procedures, and social systems intervention are considered in relation to the employment counselor's repertoire of potential helping responses. A hypothetical case is discussed to illustrate the application of these procedures. This case includes potential applications in systematic desensitization, assertion training, modeling and behavioral rehearsal, manipulation of reinforcement contingencies, and intervention in the employment system.