Adult Male Perpetrators’ Perspectives on What Prevention Approaches Work Best for Young Boys at Risk of Future Intimate Partner Violence Perpetration

As part of a 2-year ethnographic study, 49 adult men who had been convicted of intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration were interviewed on what they thought would have prevented them from engaging in perpetration behaviors, or rather what they believed prevention with young boys needed to include in order to prevent future IPV perpetration. The authors’ open-ended interviews yielded five main themes: (a) messages about healthy relationship behaviors, (b) the need to promote respect for women, (c) teaching effective skills for communicating and managing anger, (d) programs that provide role models and are school-based, and (e) addressing the impact of experiencing violence as a child. The authors conclude that prevention efforts focused on changing both attitudes regarding IPV and behaviors might be most effective for reducing perpetration, and that greater attention needs to be paid towards prevention among youth most at risk of IPV perpetration, those experiencing violence in their homes.     

Responses to Conflict and Cooperation in Adolescents with Anxiety and Mood Disorders

This study examined patterns of behavioral and emotional responses to conflict and cooperation in adolescents with anxiety/mood disorders and healthy peers. We compared performance on and emotional responses to the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) game, an economic exchange task involving conflict and cooperation, between adolescents with anxiety/depressive disorders (A/D) (N=21) and healthy comparisons (n = 29). Participants were deceived to believe their co-player (a pre-programmed computer algorithm) was another study participant. A/D adolescents differed significantly from comparisons in patterns of play and emotional response to the game. Specifically, A/D participants responded more cooperatively to cooperative overtures from their co-players; A/D girls also reported more anger toward co-players than did comparison girls. Our findings indicate that A/D adolescents, particularly females, respond distinctively to stressful social interchanges. These findings offer a first step toward elucidating the mechanisms underlying social impairment in youth with internalizing disorders. This research was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH, NIMH.     

EVALUATION OF ERRORLESS COMPLIANCE TRAINING IN A GENERAL EDUCATION CLASSROOM

Errorless compliance training (ECT) is a success‐based, nonaversive intervention to reduce child noncompliance that has been shown to be effective in both home and special education settings. In the current study, ECT was evaluated in a multiple‐baseline across‐subjects design with three kindergarten students who displayed noncompliant behavior in their general education classrooms. The researcher delivered a range of classroom requests to each student to determine the probability of compliance for each request. Requests were then arranged in a hierarchy, ranging from those initially yielding high compliance probabilities (level 1) to those yielding low compliance (level 4). At the beginning of treatment, students were presented with a high number of level 1 requests and provided verbal praise for compliance. Over several weeks, lower probability requests were faded in. The three students demonstrated considerable improvement in compliance levels during and following treatment. Improved compliance generalized to low‐probability requests not used in treatment. When the teacher delivered requests, results of generalization were mixed. The results provide preliminary support for the use of errorless compliance training in the general education setting. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Covered in stigma? The impact of differing levels of Islamic head‐covering on explicit and implicit biases toward Muslim women

Given the prominence of Muslim veils—in particular the hijab and full‐face veil—in public discourse concerning the place of Muslims in Western society, we examined their impact on non‐Muslims’ responses at both explicit and implicit levels. Results revealed that responses were more negative toward any veil compared with no veil, and more negative toward the full‐face veil relative to the hijab: for emotions felt toward veiled women (Study 1), for non‐affective attitudinal responses (Study 2), and for implicit negative attitudes revealed through response latency measures (Studies 3a and 3b). Finally, we manipulated the perceived reasons for wearing a veil, finding that exposure to positive reasons for wearing a veil led to better predicted and imagined contact (Study 4). Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Examining the contributions of desirable difficulty and reminding to the spacing effect

Although substantial evidence indicates that spacing repeated study events with intervening material generally enhances memory performance relative to massing study events, the mechanism underlying this benefit is less clear. Two experiments examined the role of reminding difficulty during the acquisition of material in modulating final memory performance for spaced repetitions utilizing recognition (Experiment 1) and recall tests (Experiment 2). Specifically, participants studied a list of words presented one or two times separated by one or five items. On each trial participants reported whether the item had been previously presented (i.e., repetition detection judgment), and the response latency served as a proxy for reminding difficulty such that longer response latencies reflected more difficult reminding. A third experiment extended this paradigm with the inclusion of a massed condition and novel lag conditions (three and ten items). Results revealed significant lag effects in final test performance across experiments despite comparable repetition detection difficulty between lag conditions during acquisition. Moreover, results from within-participant point-biserial analyses and mediation analyses converged on overall performance measures in suggesting that repetition detection difficulty failed to modulate final test performance in the current paradigm. Discussion considers the implications of the current results for mechanisms proposed to underlie the benefits of spaced study and spaced retrieval practice.     

When does dual identity predict protest? The moderating roles of anti‐immigrant policies and opinion‐based group identity

Dual identities are defined as immigrants' identification with their ethnic ingroup as well as the national community in their country of residence. Dual identities have been argued to increase protest, because they make immigrants feel entitled to advocate for their disadvantaged ethnic group as part of a larger national community. In a study of Latino immigrants to the United States, however, we found that dual identities no longer predict protest when immigrants learn that other members of the national community have passed laws or enacted policies that would exclude immigrants or restrict their rights, through deportation and detention. Further, we found that immigrants who identify with those fighting to change such anti‐immigrant policies support protest regardless of the level of their dual identity and regardless of policy salience. We argue that these results point to the importance of dual identity recognition for research on immigrant protest. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Multifaceted Relationship Between Physical Activity and Affect

The purpose of the present paper is to provide a summary of scientific findings on the relationship between physical activity (PA) and affect. We provide separate narrative reviews of (a) the association between PA and well‐being in the general population; (b) PA as a prophylactic and/or treatment for clinical depression; and (c) immediate affective response to individual PA sessions and the implications for adherence to PA programs. Findings suggest an association between engaging in regular PA and more positive well‐being, decreased risk of future depression, and reduction of depressed mood among those who are already depressed. However, despite the fairly strong evidence for these associations, there is less evidence for causal effects of PA on well‐being and depression. Individual sessions of PA generally result in positive shifts in affective valence from pre‐PA to post‐PA, but during PA, affective response is intensity‐dependent, with considerable variability for moderate intensity PA. In sum, despite the “physical activity feels good” narrative often portrayed in the popular media, the relationship between PA and affect is complex and multifaceted.     

Learning to “See” Less Than Nothing: Putting Perceptual Skills to Work for Learning Numerical Structure

How can children's natural perceptuo-motor skills be harnessed for teaching and learning mathematical structure? We address this question in the case of the integers. Existing research suggests that adult mental representations of integers recruit perceptuo-motor functionalities involving symmetry. Building on these findings, we designed a hands-on curriculum that emphasizes symmetry to teach integer concepts to fourth graders. Compared to two control conditions, children who went through the experimental curriculum showed evidence of incorporating symmetry into their mental representations of integers and performed higher on problems beyond the scope of instruction, including negative fractions and algebra-readiness problems. Gains did not come at the expense of basic integer computation skill. This study has direct practical implications, as current integers curricula generally omit symmetry. The research demonstrates an approach to designing instruction that involves identifying perceptuo-motor functionalities underlying numerical cognition and creating learning activities to recruit them.     

Making the Intangible Tangible: Using Expressive Art During Termination to Co-Construct Meaning

In this article, a creative termination activity grounded in relational-cultural theory is presented. In addition to providing a means for summarizing the counseling experience, this activity promotes relational development in the midst of client termination. Following implementation of the activity, the client and counselor are provided tangible, co-constructed gifts that are symbolic of the therapeutic relationship and relational growth. The authors provide a rationale for how this intervention promotes self-awareness, outline directions for implementation, and provide a case illustration to demonstrate how counselors can help promote relational closure and solidify clients’ therapeutic gains.