Life Goals Over Time Among Homeless Adults in Permanent Supportive Housing

Permanent supportive housing (PSH) is a widely‐accepted solution to the challenge of chronic homelessness. While housing support and retention, physical health, and healthcare continue to be important for formerly homeless persons in PSH, “higher‐order” and humanistic needs such as thriving have received less attention and as a result are less well understood in this population. One important indicator of thriving is the ability to establish and articulate life goals. This study utilizes longitudinal data from 421 formerly homeless adults prior to their move into PSH, and at 3‐, 6‐ and 12‐months after move‐in (369 respondents completed all four interviews), to examine what life goals are articulated by this population and how those goals change over time. Prior to housing, most respondents articulated housing attainment as their primary life goal, whereas at follow‐up interviews health goals, housing relocation, and financial goals became more prevalent. Aspirational goals (e.g., independence, self‐improvement, artistic pursuits) were also common, but demonstrated a decrease over time in housing. Relationship goals remained common and consistent over time. Findings indicate that housing is a necessary, but perhaps not sufficient, step for improving thriving among formerly homeless adults. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.     

Two subtypes of psychopathic violent offenders that parallel primary and secondary variants

Although psychopathy usually is treated as a unitary construct, a seminal theory posits that there are 2 variants: Primary psychopathy is underpinned by an inherited affective deficit, whereas secondary psychopathy reflects an acquired affective disturbance. The authors investigated whether psychopathy phenotypically may be disaggregated into such types in a sample of 367 prison inmates convicted of violent crimes. Model-based cluster analysis of the Revised Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R; R. D. Hare, 2003) and trait anxiety scores in the psychopathic subgroup (n = 123; PCL-R > or = 29) revealed 2 clusters. Relative to primary psychopaths, secondary psychopaths had greater trait anxiety, fewer psychopathic traits, and comparable levels of antisocial behavior. Across validation variables, secondary psychopaths manifested more borderline personality features, poorer interpersonal functioning (e.g., irritability, withdrawal, poor assertiveness), and more symptoms of major mental disorder than primary psychopaths. When compared with the nonpsychopathic subgroup (n = 243), the 2 psychopathic variants manifested a theoretically coherent pattern of differences. Implications for etiological research and violence prevention are discussed.     

A quantitative estimate of schema abnormality in socially anxious and non-anxious individuals

Although cognitive theories of anxiety suggest that anxious individuals are characterized by abnormal threat-relevant schemas, few empirical studies have estimated the nature of these cognitive structures using quantitative methods that lend themselves to inferential statistical analysis. In the present study, socially anxious (n = 55) and non-anxious (n = 62) participants completed 3 Q-Sort tasks to assess their knowledge of events that commonly occur in social or evaluative scenarios. Participants either sorted events according to how commonly they personally believe the events occur (i.e. "self" condition), or to how commonly they estimate that most people believe they occur (i.e. "other" condition). Participants' individual Q-Sorts were correlated with mean sorts obtained from a normative sample to obtain an estimate of schema abnormality, with lower correlations representing greater levels of abnormality. Relative to non-anxious participants, socially anxious participants' sorts were less strongly associated with sorts of the normative sample, particularly in the "self" condition, although secondary analyses suggest that some significant results might be explained, in part, by depression and experience with the scenarios. These results provide empirical support for the theoretical notion that threat-relevant self-schemas of anxious individuals are characterized by some degree of abnormality.     

Theory of mind and emotion understanding predict moral development in early childhood

The current study utilized longitudinal data to investigate how theory of mind (ToM) and emotion understanding (EU) concurrently and prospectively predicted young children's moral reasoning and decision making. One hundred twenty‐eight children were assessed on measures of ToM and EU at 3.5 and 5.5 years of age. At 5.5 years, children were also assessed on the quality of moral reasoning and decision making they used to negotiate prosocial moral dilemmas, in which the needs of a story protagonist conflict with the needs of another story character. More sophisticated EU predicted greater use of physical‐ and material‐needs reasoning, and a more advanced ToM predicted greater use of psychological‐needs reasoning. Most intriguing, ToM and EU jointly predicted greater use of higher‐level acceptance‐authority reasoning, which is likely a product of children's increasing appreciation for the knowledge held by trusted adults and children's desire to behave in accordance with social expectations.     

TEACHING CHILDREN WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER TO MAND FOR INFORMATION USING “WHICH?”

We examined a procedure consisting of a preference assessment, prompting, contrived conditioned establishing operations, and consequences for correct and incorrect responses for teaching children with autism to mand “which?” We used a modified multiple baseline design across 3 participants. All the children learned to mand “which?” Generalization occurred to the natural environment, to a novel activity, and to a novel container; the results were maintained over time.Key words: mand for information, verbal behavior, verbal operant, whichContrived motivating operations have been used to teach mands for information to children with autism, including the mands “what?” (e.g., Williams, Donley, & Keller, 2000), “where?” (e.g., Betz, Higbee, & Pollard, 2010; Lechago, Carr, Grow, Love, & Almason, 2010), and “who?” (e.g., Endicott & Higbee, 2007; Sundberg, Loeb, Hale, & Eigenheer, 2002). More recently, researchers have examined the effects of contriving establishing operations (CEOs) in four different ways to teach children with autism to acquire the mands “what?” (Marion, Martin, Yu, & Buhler, 2011; Roy-Wsiaki, Marion, Martin, & Yu, 2010) and “where?” (Marion, Martin, Yu, Buhler, & Kerr, in press). Like the mands “what?” and “where?,” the mand “which?” is a mand for information that gives the speaker the ability to gather specific information regarding an item (e.g., “Which book is mine?”). Given the dearth of research that has examined interventions to teach mands for information using “which?,” the purpose of the present study was to extend the work of Marion et al. (2011, in press) by contriving one of four CEOs for teaching the mand “which?” to children with autism, and to assess for generalization to the other CEOs, the natural environment, and over time.     

A qualitative examination of body image threats using Social Self-Preservation Theory

This study sought to identify and describe comfortable and uncomfortable body-related situations of young women, as well as describe their responses to such situations and strategies they used to cope with body-related threats, using Social Self-Preservation Theory (SSPT) as a guiding framework. Interviews were conducted with college women (N = 23). A theoretical thematic analysis approach was taken to identify, code, and report themes. In general, participants found it difficult to identify specific comfortable situations and responses in those situations. Comfortable situations were characterized by the presence of supportive others and feelings of general calmness and lowered body awareness or self-presentational concerns. Findings regarding uncomfortable body-related situations indicated that the context (e.g., presence of others, body exposure), responses (e.g., embarrassment, inadequacy, awareness of others’ evaluations, faster heart rate), and coping strategies (e.g., avoidance, concealing behaviors) described by participants were consistent with SSPT.     

Parents’ Reflections on their Child's Experiences of Emotionally Abusive Coaching Practices

The purpose of this study was to explore parents’ reflections on their child's experiences of emotionally abusive coaching practices. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 parents of retired elite athletes, and data were coded using open, axial, and selective coding techniques. Parents’ reflections indicated a process of accepting disconcerting coaching practices across their child's athletic career. Findings are interpreted to suggest that parents are socialized into the culture of elite sport and can become silent bystanders to their children's experiences of emotional abuse. Implications for athlete protection are discussed.     

Sexual homicide: Definition,motivation and comparison with other forms of sexual offending

Sexual homicides attract a great deal of attention from the media and the scientific community. Yet, despite this interest, there is no universally accepted definition of the term. This paper explores this issue and looks closely at the motivation behind these offenses. In particular, it explores the role of pathology, anger, and sadistic sexual fantasy. It also explores whether sexual homicide is distinct from other forms of sexual violence, or whether it is better explained as an extreme variant of sexual assault.     

The effect of articulatory suppression and manual tapping on serial recall

Concurrent tasks, such as articulatory suppression and manual tapping, are used to understand the mechanisms underlying short-term memory by overloading domain-specific resources. The present study addresses the debate regarding the theoretical frameworks accounting for interference in serial recall by comparing the effects of both the modality of concurrent tasks (verbal vs. spatial) as well as the state of the tasks (steady vs. changing) in both verbal and spatial recall. The findings indicate that the verbal changing-state concurrent task significantly impaired digit recall, whereas the spatial changing-state concurrent task significantly impaired block recall. The theoretical implications are discussed in the context of a multimodal working memory model with domain-specific resources and a unitary approach to short-term memory.