Early Career Boot Camp: A Novel Mechanism for Enhancing Early Career Development for Psychologists in Academic Healthcare

The purpose of this article is to describe a pilot mentoring program for Early Career Psychologists (ECPs) working in Academic Health Centers (AHCs) and synthesize the lessons learned to contribute to future ECP and AHC career development training programs. The authors describe an early career development model, named the Early Career Boot Camp. This intensive experience was conducted as a workshop meant to build a supportive network and to provide mentorship and survival tools for working in AHCs. Four major components were addressed: professional effectiveness, clinical supervision, strategic career planning, and academic research. Nineteen attendees who were currently less than 5 years post completion of doctoral graduate programs in psychology participated in the program. The majority of boot camp components were rated as good to excellent, with no component receiving below average ratings. Of the components offered within the boot camp, mentoring and research activities were rated the strongest, followed by educational activities, challenges in AHCS, and promotion and tenure. The article describes the purpose, development, implementation, and assessment of the program in detail in an effort to provide an established outline for future organizations to utilize when mentoring ECPs.     

Pathways to vocational services: factors affecting entry by veterans enrolled in Veterans Health Administration mental health services

The current study provides naturalistic data documenting the pathways-to-care to vocational services for 155 veterans who were receiving some form of mental health care from the Veterans Health Administration and had a vocational need but were not currently enrolled in vocational services. Of the participants, 94.2% had recognized their vocational need, 80.6% reported that they or someone else had sought help to alleviate the need, and 77.4% had previously received some form of vocational services. The median length of the participants' vocational need was more than 4.2 years. Delays associated with recognition, help-seeking, and treatment entry all contributed to the overall delay in entering appropriate care. Filtering factors associated with quicker recognition, seeking help, and receiving services included diagnosis, level of disability, type of vocational need, and support from primary providers, family, and friends. The results provide information for designing interventions to improve service entry by adults with mental health problems and vocational needs.     

“Socializing” Achievement Goal Theory: The Need for Social Goals

Cultures shape the types of goals that students pursue in the classroom. However, research in achievement goal theory seems to have neglected this cultural aspect with its exclusive focus on individualistically-based goals such as mastery and performance goals. This emphasis on mastery and performance goals may reflect Western individualist psychological thinking. Thus, social goals, which may be more salient in collectivist cultures, are relatively neglected. There is a dearth of studies investigating the role of social goals in academic motivation, and the few studies that did explore them are somewhat problematic. This paper reviews research done within the achievement goal theory, considers the need for more studies on social goals, and concludes with the argument that social goals are important in understanding student motivation especially in collectivist cultures.     

Feeling like you know who you are: perceived true self-knowledge and meaning in life

The essence of who a person really is has been labeled the "true self," and an emerging area of research suggests that this self-concept plays an important role in the creation of a fulfilling existence. Three studies investigate the role of the subjective feeling that one possesses knowledge of one's true self in meaning in life judgments. Consistently, the perception of availability of true self-knowledge (operationalized as the metacognitive experience of ease in describing one's true self) predicted meaning in life judgments over and above other potentially related constructs such as mood and self-esteem. Conversely, the subjective availability of knowledge of how one actually behaves (i.e., one's actual self) was unrelated to meaning in life judgments. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

How you Perceive Time Matters for how you Feel in School: Investigating the Link Between Time Perspectives and Academic Emotions

Research on time perspectives and academic emotions have proceeded in parallel with little cross-fertilization of ideas. The aim of this study was to explore the synergies between these two lines of inquiry by looking at how time perspectives are related to different academic emotions. Filipino university students answered relevant questionnaires. Regression analyses were conducted to examine how time perspectives predicted different academic emotions. Results indicated that future time perspective was positively associated with positive academic emotions such as enjoyment, hope, and pride. Present-fatalistic time perspective was positively associated with negative academic emotions such as anger, anxiety, shame, hopelessness, and boredom. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Graph Theoretical Analysis of Brain Network Characteristics in Brain Tumor Patients: A Systematic Review

Neuropsychology Review - Graph theory is a branch of mathematics that allows for the characterization of complex networks, and has rapidly grown in popularity in network neuroscience in recent...     

Traction without Tracing: A (Partial) Solution for Control‐Based Accounts of Moral Responsibility

Control‐based accounts of moral responsibility face a familiar problem. There are some actions which look like obvious cases of responsibility but which appear equally obviously to lack the requisite control. Drunk‐driving cases are canonical instances. The familiar solution to this problem is to appeal to tracing. Though the drunk driver isn't in control at the time of the crash, this is because he previously drank to excess, an action over which he did plausibly exercise the requisite control. Tracing seeks to show that an agent's responsibility for some outcome (over which he lacked control) can be traced back to a prior exercise of control which caused (in the right way) the later lack of control. These and related cases have led many theorists to treat tracing as an indispensable component of any adequate theory of responsibility. This paper argues that tracing is in fact dispensable. I offer two strategies for explaining responsibility in drunk‐driving cases (and those with a similar structure): responsibility can either be exhaustively modeled on recklessness, or exhaustively modeled on negligence. Neither explanation, however, relies on tracing. If I'm right, the case for tracing is seriously weakened.     

Working memory load and distraction: dissociable effects of visual maintenance and cognitive control

We establish a new dissociation between the roles of working memory (WM) cognitive control and visual maintenance in selective attention as measured by the efficiency of distractor rejection. The extent to which focused selective attention can prevent distraction has been shown to critically depend on the level and type of load involved in the task. High perceptual load that consumes perceptual capacity leads to reduced distractor processing, whereas high WM load that reduces WM ability to exert priority-based executive cognitive control over the task results in increased distractor processing (e.g., Lavie, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(2), 75–82, 2005). WM also serves to maintain task-relevant visual representations, and such visual maintenance is known to recruit the same sensory cortices as those involved in perception (e.g., Pasternak & Greenlee, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6(2), 97–107, 2005). These findings led us to hypothesize that loading WM with visual maintenance would reduce visual capacity involved in perception, thus resulting in reduced distractor processing—similar to perceptual load and opposite to WM cognitive control load. Distractor processing was assessed in a response competition task, presented during the memory interval (or during encoding; Experiment 1a) of a WM task. Loading visual maintenance or encoding by increased set size for a memory sample of shapes, colors, and locations led to reduced distractor response competition effects. In contrast, loading WM cognitive control with verbal rehearsal of a random letter set led to increased distractor effects. These findings confirm load theory predictions and provide a novel functional distinction between the roles of WM maintenance and cognitive control in selective attention.     

Cerebral blood flow in 5‐ to 8‐month‐olds: Regional tissue maturity is associated with infant affect

Infancy is marked by rapid neural and emotional development. The relation between brain function and emotion in infancy, however, is not well understood. Methods for measuring brain function predominantly rely on the BOLD signal; however, interpretation of the BOLD signal in infancy is challenging because the neuronal‐hemodynamic relation is immature. Regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) provides a context for the infant BOLD signal and can yield insight into the developmental maturity of brain regions that may support affective behaviors. This study aims to elucidate the relations among rCBF, age, and emotion in infancy. One hundred and seven mothers reported their infants' (infant age M ± SD = 6.14 ± 0.51 months) temperament. A subsample of infants completed MRI scans, 38 of whom produced usable perfusion MRI during natural sleep to quantify rCBF. Mother‐infant dyads completed the repeated Still‐Face Paradigm, from which infant affect reactivity and recovery to stress were quantified. We tested associations of infant age at scan, temperament factor scores, and observed affect reactivity and recovery with voxel‐wise rCBF. Infant age was positively associated with CBF in nearly all voxels, with peaks located in sensory cortices and the ventral prefrontal cortex, supporting the formulation that rCBF is an indicator of tissue maturity. Temperamental Negative Affect and recovery of positive affect following a stressor were positively associated with rCBF in several cortical and subcortical limbic regions, including the orbitofrontal cortex and inferior frontal gyrus. This finding yields insight into the nature of affective neurodevelopment during infancy. Specifically, infants with relatively increased prefrontal cortex maturity may evidence a disposition toward greater negative affect and negative reactivity in their daily lives yet show better recovery of positive affect following a social stressor.