“Let our Apache Heritage and Culture Live on Forever and Teach the Young Ones”: Development of The Elders’ Resilience Curriculum,an Upstream Suicide Prevention Approach for American Indian Youth

The White Mountain Apache Tribe have developed an innovative curriculum that connects youth through Elders to their heritage, traditions, and culture, which has been proven to be a protective factor for native Americans. The development process took 4½ years and included community stakeholder buy‐in, Elders’ Council group formation, extensive formative work to identify content, iterative feedback between curriculum writers and Elders, and Elder training prior to implementation. Members of the Elders’ Council have been visiting the local schools to teach youth about the Apache culture, language, and way of life since February 2014 reaching over 1000 youth. This approach demonstrates a promising upstream suicide prevention strategy. We discuss the process of development, implementation, and lessons learned, as this curriculum has potential for adaptation by other Indigenous communities.     

Measuring attention in the hemispheres: the lateralized attention network test (LANT)

The attention network test (ANT) is a brief computerized battery measuring three independent behavioral components of attention: Conflict resolution (ability to overcome distracting stimuli), spatial Orienting (the benefit of valid spatial pre-cues), and Alerting (the benefit of temporal pre-cues). Imaging, clinical, and behavioral evidence demonstrate hemispheric asymmetries in these attentional networks. We constructed a lateralized version of the ANT (LANT), with brief targets flashed in one or the other visual hemifield. We also modified the tests by including invalid spatial cues in order to measure the cost component of Orienting. In a series of experiments, we investigated the efficiency of the attention networks separately in each hemisphere. Participants exhibited significant estimates of all networks measured by the LANT, comparable to the ANT. The three networks were represented in each hemisphere separately and were largely comparable across the two hemispheres. We suggest that the LANT is an informative extension of the original ANT, allowing for measurement of the three attention networks in each hemisphere separately.     

Reciprocal Associations between Boys’ Externalizing Problems and Mothers’ Depressive Symptoms

Although much has been written about the utility of applying transactional models to the study of parenting practices, relatively few researchers have used such an approach to examine how children influence maternal well-being throughout their development. Using a sample of males from predominantly low-income families, the current study explored reciprocal relations between boys' overt disruptive behavior (boys' ages 5 to 10 years) and maternal depressive symptoms. We then examined this model with youth-reported antisocial behaviors (ASB) and maternal depressive symptoms when the boys were older, ages 10 to 15. In middle childhood, evidence was found for both maternal and child effects from boys' ages 5 to 6 using both maternal and alternative caregiver report of child aggressive behavior. In the early adolescence model, consistent maternal effects were found, and child effects were evident during the transition to adolescence (boys' ages 11 to 12). The findings are discussed in reference to reciprocal models of child development and prevention efforts to reduce both maternal depression and the prevalence of child antisocial behavior.     

Overthinking skilled motor performance: Or why those who teach can’t do

Skilled athletes often maintain that overthinking disrupts performance of their motor skills. Here, we examined whether these experiences have a basis in verbal overshadowing, a phenomenon in which describing memories for ineffable perceptual experiences disrupts later retention. After learning a unique golf-putting task, golfers of low and intermediate skill either described their actions in detail or performed an irrelevant verbal task. They then performed the putting task again. Strikingly, describing their putting experience significantly impaired higher skill golfers’ ability to reachieve the putting criterion, compared with higher skill golfers who performed the irrelevant verbal activity. Verbalization had no such effect, however, for lower skill golfers. These findings establish that the effects of overthinking extend beyond dual-task interference and may sometimes reflect impacts on long-term memory. We propose that these effects are mediated by competition between procedural and declarative memory, as suggested by recent work in cognitive neuroscience.     

Brief functional anlaysis and treatment of elopement in preschoolers with autism

As a result of the impact of functional analysis methodologies in identifying maintaining variables of problem behavior, considerable research has been devoted to tailoring the methodologies to be practical for an outpatient setting. The purpose of this study was (a) to use brief functional analysis (BFA) methodologies to empirically demonstrate the function of elopement exhibited by two preschoolers diagnosed with autism and (b) to develop function‐based interventions derived from the results of the BFA. In phase one, a BFA consisting of 5‐min sessions with multiple repetitions of each condition was conducted with each participant. In phase two, the efficacy of function‐based interventions was assessed using a pairwise design. Both participants' rates of elopement were differentially lower during the implementation of the function‐based intervention relative to baseline. Collectively, these results demonstrated that brief functional methodologies could be applied successfully to the assessment and treatment of elopement. Moreover, the application of BFA and the ensuing treatment in an outpatient setting extend the existing research on functional analysis. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Temporal dynamics of the action-sentence compatibility effect

A number of recent studies have demonstrated variants of the action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE), wherein the execution of a motor response is facilitated by the comprehension of sentences that describe actions taking place in the same direction as the motor response (e.g., a sentence about action towards one's body facilitates the execution of an arm movement towards the body). This paper presents an experiment that explores how the timing of the motor response during the processing of sentences affects the magnitude of the ACE that is observed. The results show that the ACE occurs when the motor response is executed at an early point in the comprehension of the sentence, disappears for a time, and then reappears when the motor response is executed right before the end of the sentence. These data help to refine our understanding of the temporal dynamics involved in the activation and use of motor information during sentence comprehension.     

Learning (not) to talk about race: when older children underperform in social categorization

The present research identifies an anomaly in sociocognitive development, whereby younger children (8 and 9 years) outperform their older counterparts (10 and 11 years) in a basic categorization task in which the acknowledgment of racial difference facilitates performance. Though older children exhibit superior performance on a race-neutral version of the task, their tendency to avoid acknowledging race hinders objective success when race is a relevant category. That these findings emerge in late childhood, in a pattern counter to the normal developmental trajectory of increased cognitive expertise in categorization, suggests that this anomaly indicates the onset of a critical transition in human social development.     

Liberation,Salvation, Enlightenment: An Exercise in Comparative Soteriology

Abstract : This article is an exercise in what might be called “comparative soteriology.” It is both constructive and essential for Christians to examine non‐Christian expressions of soteriology that challenge their own, in order to see with new eyes what salvation can and perhaps should connotate. Thus, this article intends to lead the reader to a deeper appreciation of the Christian doctrine of salvation through the exploration of three different images of salvation: from Hinduism, the Nataraja—the Dancing Shiva; from Buddhism, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, Avalokiteshvara; and from Christianity, an icon of the crucifixion, the San Damiano Crucifix.