How to Identify Negative Actions with Positive Events

It is often assumed that, while ordinary actions are events, ‘negative actions’ (omissions, refrainments, etc.) are absences of events. I claim that a negative action is an ordinary, ‘positive’ event that plays a certain role. I argue that my approach can answer standard objections to the identity of negative actions and positive events.     

Knowing When Help Is Needed: A Developing Sense of Causal Complexity

Research on the division of cognitive labor has found that adults and children as young as age 5 are able to find appropriate experts for different causal systems. However, little work has explored how children and adults decide when to seek out expert knowledge in the first place. We propose that children and adults rely (in part) on “mechanism metadata,” information about mechanism information. We argue that mechanism metadata is relatively consistent across individuals exposed to similar amounts of mechanism information, and it is applicable to a wide range of causal systems. In three experiments, we show that adults and children as young as 5 years of age have a consistent sense of the causal complexity of different causal systems, and that this sense of complexity is related to decisions about when to seek expert knowledge, but over development there is a shift in focus from procedural information to internal mechanism information.     

Assessing psychological inflexibility: the psychometric properties of the Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire for Youth in two adult samples

The current study examined whether the Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire for Youth (AFQ-Y; L. A. Greco, W. Lambert, & R. A. Baer, 2008), a self-report measure of psychological inflexibility for children and adolescents, might be useful for measuring psychological inflexibility for adults. The psychometric properties of the AFQ-Y were examined using data from a college student sample (N = 387) and a clinical sample of patients with anxiety disorders (N = 115). The AFQ-Y, but not the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-II (AAQ-II; F. W. Bond et al., in press), demonstrated a reading level at or below the recommended 5th or 6th grade reading level. The AFQ-Y also demonstrated adequate reliability (internal consistency), factorial validity, convergent and discriminant validity, and concurrent validity predicting psychological symptoms. Moreover, the AFQ-Y showed incremental validity over the AAQ-II in predicting several psychological symptom domains. Implications for the assessment of psychological inflexibility are discussed.     

Always on call: thoughts from a neophyte physician

This commentary describes a new physician who encountered a patient in crisis in a nonmedical environment. It discusses professional obligations, ethical principles, errors committed, and reasoning behind such errors. Unusual circumstances, uncertainty about how to properly identify oneself as a physician, self-doubt, and discomfort with practicing outside one's scope of training are recognized as reasons behind these errors. Medical students should be reminded of their ethical obligation to offer emergency care within their limitations, instructed how to identify themselves, and guided to become competent team leaders. Resident doctors should continue to receive instruction as they internalize ethical principles and identify their scopes of practice. Practicing physicians should be competent in offering basic emergency care if needed.     

Examination of Negative Peer Contagion in a Residential Care Setting

There has been ongoing concern about the negative impact of residential treatment on youth in care. Research examining the impact of negative peer influence in juvenile justice, education, and residential care settings is reviewed. A study was conducted to examine the impact of negative peer contagion on the level of problem behavior in a residential care program, and the extent to which caregiver experience and youth time-in-program mediated that relationship. The study used archival data for 1,438 first-time admissions to a large Midwestern out-of-home residential program for youth with emotional and behavioral problems. Hierarchical Linear Modeling was used to examine the relationship between daily reports of conduct and oppositional defiant disorder (CD/ODD) behaviors and the percentage of conduct disorder youth living in a home. Greater exposure to conduct disordered peers was not related to increased rates of CD/ODD behavior. CD/ODD behavior was directly related to direct care staff level of experience and youth time in program. Implications for residential care are discussed.     

Influence of perceived and preferred coach feedback on youth athletes' perceptions of team motivational climate

ObjectivesThis study examined youth ice hockey players' perceptions of individual feedback received from their coach, and the agreement and discrepancies between preferred and perceived coach feedback patterns, on athletes' perceptions of team motivational climate. The following research questions were answered: How does agreement in perceived and preferred coach feedback relate to task- and ego-involving motivational climate? How does the degree of discrepancy between perceived and preferred coach feedback relate to motivational climate? How does the direction of the discrepancy between perceived and preferred coach feedback relate to motivational climate?DesignThis study used non-probability based sampling within a cross-sectional (survey) design.MethodAthletes (n = 70) completed a self-report survey comprised of measures of coaching feedback and motivational climate. The data were examined using polynomial regression and response surface analysis.ResultsLinear associations were observed between coaching feedback and motivational climate, and unique associations between the perceived and preferred coach feedback discrepancies were distinctly related to increased perceptions of both task- and ego-involved motivational climates.ConclusionsThe type of feedback, purpose of the feedback, and agreement or discrepancy in perceptions and preferences for different feedback styles are important to understanding task- and ego-involved motivational climate in youth sport. Coaching programs should assist coaches in learning their athletes' preferences for positive and negative feedback in sport and matching these preferences with their individual feedback styles.     

Practical Implementation Science: Developing and Piloting the Quality Implementation Tool

According to the Interactive Systems Framework for Dissemination and Implementation, implementation is a major mechanism and concern in bridging research and practice. The growing number of implementation frameworks need to be synthesized and translated so that the science and practice of quality implementation can be furthered. In this article, we: (1) use the synthesis of frameworks developed by Meyers et al. (Am J Commun Psychol, 2012) and translate the results into a practical implementation science tool to use for improving quality of implementation (i.e., the Quality Implementation Tool; QIT), and (2) present some of the benefits and limitations of the tool by describing how the QIT was implemented in two different pilot projects. We discuss how the QIT can be used to guide collaborative planning, monitoring, and evaluation of how an innovation is implemented.     

Syntactic structure building in the anterior temporal lobe during natural story listening

The neural basis of syntax is a matter of substantial debate. In particular, the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), or Broca’s area, has been prominently linked to syntactic processing, but the anterior temporal lobe has been reported to be activated instead of IFG when manipulating the presence of syntactic structure. These findings are difficult to reconcile because they rely on different laboratory tasks which tap into distinct computations, and may only indirectly relate to natural sentence processing. Here we assessed neural correlates of syntactic structure building in natural language comprehension, free from artificial task demands. Subjects passively listened to Alice in Wonderland during functional magnetic resonance imaging and we correlated brain activity with a word-by-word measure of the amount syntactic structure analyzed. Syntactic structure building correlated with activity in the left anterior temporal lobe, but there was no evidence for a correlation between syntactic structure building and activity in inferior frontal areas. Our results suggest that the anterior temporal lobe computes syntactic structure under natural conditions.