Women–Focused Treatment Agencies and Process Improvement: Strategies to Increase Client Engagement

Behavioral health treatment agencies often struggle to keep clients engaged in treatment. Women clients often have additional factors such as family responsibilities, financial difficulties, or abuse histories that provide extra challenges to remaining in care. As part of a national initiative, four women-focused drug treatment agencies used process improvement to address treatment engagement. Interviews and focus groups with staff assessed the nature and extent of interventions. Women-focused drug treatment agencies selected relational-based interventions to engage clients in treatment and improved four-week treatment retention from 66% to 76%. Process improvement interventions in women-focused treatment may be useful to improve engagement.     

Deriving Training Strategies for Spatial Knowledge Acquisition From Behavioral,Cognitive, and Neural Foundations

While much has been made of the potential uses for virtual environment (VE) technologies as training aids, there are few guidelines and strategies to inform system development from the user’s perspective. Assumptions are that a human factors-based evaluation will ensure optimal performance, transferring training from virtual to real worlds; however, there are complex, yet unexplored, issues surrounding system optimization and employment. A comprehensive investigation into the foundations of training, traversing levels of performance analysis, from overt behavioral responses to the less explicit neuronal patterns, is proposed from which optimal training strategies can be inferred and system development guidelines deduced.     

Empirical and historical perspectives on the growth of Pentecostal-style churches in Malaysia,Singapore and Hong Kong

This article considers the growth of Pentecostal-style churches in Southeast Asia, and specifically in Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. It outlines four reasons for the growth that occurred and then, using qualitative and quantitative data in a mixed mode, seeks to test the hypotheses it derives. It concludes that each of the hypotheses remains plausible but notes that contextual factors or major social disruptions undermine any deterministic account.     

Frontotemporal Dementia and the Reactive Attitudes: Two Roles for the Capacity to Care?

People who have a particular behavioural variant of Frontotemporal Dementia (bvFTD) suffer from a puzzling early set of symptoms. They appear to caregivers to cease to care about things that they did before, without manifesting certain other significant deficits that might be expected to accompany this change. Are subjects with bvFTD appropriate objects of reactive attitudes like resentment and indignation that seem to presuppose responsible agency? I explore two possible routes to answering this question in the negative that both appeal to the role of the capacity to care in accounts of responsible agency. The first appeals to the capacity to care as fundamental in determining the aptness of moral demands and appraisals; the second appeals to the capacity to care as required for the very possibility of being someone who could in principle receive deserved praise or blame. In order to assess these lines of reasoning, it will be necessary to settle on a plausible account of caring, and the case of subjects with bvFTD can help in illuminating the relevant capacities. I suggest that the two routes, when clarified, are promising, but that interesting questions about the nature of desert and its relationship to caring remain open.     

Is A Person Thinking About Suicide Likely to Find Help on the Internet? An Evaluation of Google Search Results

It is unclear whether individuals searching the Internet for assistance with thoughts of suicide are likely to encounter predominantly helpful or harmful resources. This study investigated websites retrieved by searching Google for information and support for suicidal thoughts. Google searches retrieved a high percentage of irrelevant websites (26%, n = 136). Of the 329 relevant websites retrieved, the majority were suicide preventive (68%); however, a considerable proportion of sites expressed mixed (22%) or neutral (8%) suicide attitudes, and 1% were explicitly pro‐suicide. The results highlight a need for suicide prevention organization websites to be made more easily accessible. In the meantime, clinicians should be aware of appropriate websites to recommend to clients.     

Evidence that gendered wording in job advertisements exists and sustains gender inequality

Social dominance theory (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999) contends that institutional-level mechanisms exist that reinforce and perpetuate existing group-based inequalities, but very few such mechanisms have been empirically demonstrated. We propose that gendered wording (i.e., masculine- and feminine-themed words, such as those associated with gender stereotypes) may be a heretofore unacknowledged, institutional-level mechanism of inequality maintenance. Employing both archival and experimental analyses, the present research demonstrates that gendered wording commonly employed in job recruitment materials can maintain gender inequality in traditionally male-dominated occupations. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated the existence of subtle but systematic wording differences within a randomly sampled set of job advertisements. Results indicated that job advertisements for male-dominated areas employed greater masculine wording (i.e., words associated with male stereotypes, such as leader, competitive, dominant) than advertisements within female-dominated areas. No difference in the presence of feminine wording (i.e., words associated with female stereotypes, such as support, understand, interpersonal) emerged across male- and female-dominated areas. Next, the consequences of highly masculine wording were tested across 3 experimental studies. When job advertisements were constructed to include more masculine than feminine wording, participants perceived more men within these occupations (Study 3), and importantly, women found these jobs less appealing (Studies 4 and 5). Results confirmed that perceptions of belongingness (but not perceived skills) mediated the effect of gendered wording on job appeal (Study 5). The function of gendered wording in maintaining traditional gender divisions, implications for gender parity, and theoretical models of inequality are discussed.     

On the perpetuation of ignorance: system dependence, system justification, and the motivated avoidance of sociopolitical information

How do people cope when they feel uninformed or unable to understand important social issues, such as the environment, energy concerns, or the economy? Do they seek out information, or do they simply ignore the threatening issue at hand? One would intuitively expect that a lack of knowledge would motivate an increased, unbiased search for information, thereby facilitating participation and engagement in these issues-especially when they are consequential, pressing, and self-relevant. However, there appears to be a discrepancy between the importance/self-relevance of social issues and people's willingness to engage with and learn about them. Leveraging the literature on system justification theory (Jost & Banaji, 1994), the authors hypothesized that, rather than motivating an increased search for information, a lack of knowledge about a specific sociopolitical issue will (a) foster feelings of dependence on the government, which will (b) increase system justification and government trust, which will (c) increase desires to avoid learning about the relevant issue when information is negative or when information valence is unknown. In other words, the authors suggest that ignorance-as a function of the system justifying tendencies it may activate-may, ironically, breed more ignorance. In the contexts of energy, environmental, and economic issues, the authors present 5 studies that (a) provide evidence for this specific psychological chain (i.e., ignorance about an issue → dependence → government trust → avoidance of information about that issue); (b) shed light on the role of threat and motivation in driving the second and third links in this chain; and (c) illustrate the unfortunate consequences of this process for individual action in those contexts that may need it most.     

Divergent effects of activating thoughts of God on self-regulation

Despite the cultural ubiquity of ideas and images related to God, relatively little is known about the effects of exposure to God representations on behavior. Specific depictions of God differ across religions, but common to most is that God is (a) an omnipotent, controlling force and (b) an omniscient, all-knowing being. Given these 2 characteristic features, how might exposure to the concept of God influence behavior? Leveraging classic and recent theorizing on self-regulation and social cognition, we predict and test for 2 divergent effects of exposure to notions of God on self-regulatory processes. Specifically, we show that participants reminded of God (vs. neutral or positive concepts) demonstrate both decreased active goal pursuit (Studies 1, 2, and 5) and increased temptation resistance (Studies 3, 4, and 5). These findings provide the first experimental evidence that exposure to God influences goal pursuit and suggest that the ever-present cultural reminders of God can be both burden and benefit for self-regulation.