Coping With Stress: Getting the Message Across

On a campus of 30,000 students there are many who will not have direct contact with the Personal Counseling Service; yet those students experience and must cope with numerous pressures, which may affect their personal lives and academic progress. To help these students become more aware of stress areas and coping skills we submitted an article to The Addition, the Division of Student Services' semester newspaper. The unusual format for the information was selected to be eye-catching and thus more likely to be read than a regular news-format article.     

Discriminant and convergent validity of the SCL-90 in psychiatric inpatients

Examined the convergent and discriminant validity of the SCL-90 in a group of 113 psychiatric inpatients and determined the degree of reactivity to several common response sets. The nine SCL-90 dimensions were found to correlate with analogous measures from other tests, and thus showed convergent validity, but were also found to correlate with nonanalogous measures, an indication of low discriminant validity. In addition, the dimensions correlated with the three MMPI validity scales, suggesting their reactivity to response bias. These findings were interpreted as indicating that the SCL-90 has limited use with psychiatric inpatients at present, although it may be useful as a brief screening device for disposition and referral.     

THE GENERALIZATION EFFECTS OF PARENT TRAINING ACROSS STIMULUS SETTINGS

Five parents of nonverbal children were trained in two home settings to modify antecedents and consequences to their children's vocalizations. Generalization effects of the parent training on both the parent's and children's behaviors under different stimulus conditions were investigated using multiple-baseline designs. Increases in parent prompting and reinforcing their children's vocalizations generalized only minimally to a new setting in the home where parent training had not occurred. Child increases in vocalizations produced by the parents in the training settings did generalize to this new setting in the home. There was minimal generalization of child vocalizations to a free-play setting at school. In a formal speech session conducted by a behavior specialist at school, only one child showed definite increases in acquisition rate as a function of the parents starting to train the sound at home.     

Grouping strategies, peer influence, and free time as classroom management techniques with first- and third-grade children

This study systematically investigated the effects of different procedures on classroom behaviors ranging from teacher designated seating groups and seating groups based on sociometric data to peer encouragement and free time reinforcers. Subjects were first- and third-grade children in classrooms using a Follow Through program model. Data were taken on the attending behavior of the children in small groups arranged by the teacher. The level of appropriate attending behavior was low and did not increase when the groups were restructured based on sociometric data. The introduction of instructions to the peer groups to help the child with his or her work brought about a major increase in the third-grade subjects' appropriate behavior. Appropriate attending behavior for the first-grade children did not increase to the predetermined acceptable level until a free time period for each peer group was made contingent upon the appropriate behavior of the subject in each group. Frequencies of verbal interactions suggested peer attention has an effect on the appropriateness of peer interactions.     

Understanding the Progression from Early Alcohol Use Experimentation to Alcohol Use Disorder: Testing Vulnerability by Experience Interactions Using a Two-Part Latent Growth Curve Model

Most adolescents experiment with alcohol, but a smaller percentage advance to heavy alcohol use (AU) and AU disorder (AUD). Understanding for whom and how early risk leads to AUD is of interest to prevention, treatment, and etiology of AUD. Informed by developmental and behavioral neuroscience theory, the current study tested whether temperament (effortful control, surgency, and negative affect), peer AU (multi-reporter), and AU with parents’ permission interacted to distinguish youth who experiment with alcohol from those who escalate to AUD. Community adolescents (N?=?765, 53% female) were assessed annually for seven years (M_age?=?11.8, range: 10–13 at Year 1; M_age?=?18.7; range?=?17–20 at year 7). Temperament by early experience interactions were expected to predict amount of AU. Amount of AU was expected to mediate the relationship between the interactions and AUD symptoms (assessed at Years 3 and 7, M_age?=?13.8 and 18.7) above and beyond a range of confounds (e.g., problem behavior and parental AU and AUD). Supporting hypotheses, effortful control and surgency interacted with AU with parents’ permission and peer AU, respectively, to predict higher amount of AU (R²?=?0.47) and AUD symptoms (R²?=?0.03). Results support developmental and behavioral neuroscience theory. High surgency and low effortful control in conjunction with peer AU and AU with parents’ permission were associated with large effects on AU and moderate mediated effects through AU to AUD. AU with parents’ permission was risky at low and high effortful control and protective when peers used alcohol.

     

The effects of mood and retrieval cues on semantic memory and metacognition

We investigated whether the previously established effect of mood on episodic memory generalizes to semantic memory and whether mood affects metacognitive judgments associated with the retrieval of semantic information. Sixty-eight participants were induced into a happy or sad mood by viewing and describing IAPS images. Following mood induction, participants saw a total of 200 general knowledge trivia items (50 open-ended and 50 multiple-choice after each of two mood inductions) and were asked to provide a metacognitive judgment about their knowledge for each item before providing a response. A sample trivia item is: Author – – To kill a mockingbird. Results indicate that mood affects the retrieval of semantic information, but only when the participant believes they possess the requested semantic information; furthermore, this effect depends upon the presence of retrieval cues. In addition, we found that mood does not affect the likelihood of different metacognitive judgments associated with the retrieval of semantic information, but that, in some cases, having retrieval cues increases accuracy of these metacognitive judgments. Our results suggest that semantic retrieval processes are minimally susceptible to the influence of affective state but does not preclude the possibility that affective state may influence encoding of semantic information.