Police Families: Stresses,Syndromes, and Solutions

Law enforcement families experience a variety of both commonplace and unique stressors. This article discusses the main forms of police family stresses and crises and offers a range of practical solutions that family therapists can use to help these families cope and thrive. Especially with this kind of population, the emphasis is on both direct clinical services and a coaching-style, self-empowerment model that therapists can productively utilize in helping officers and their families to help themselves.     

Structural Family Therapy and Autism Spectrum Disorder: Bridging the Disciplinary Divide

ABSTRACT

Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is an evidence-based practice approach for the treatment of individuals with autism. The systemic effects of autism suggest that family therapy would considerably enhance the treatment of individuals with autism. Marriage and family therapy (MFT) training does not routinely include exposure to autism beyond the associated diagnostic criteria. Structural Family Therapy (SFT) is a systemic model that is familiar to those trained in family therapy and appropriate for the needs of families affected by autism. Therefore, the authors have used SFT as a foundation for supervising MFT trainees working in an autism treatment setting.     

Sexual offenses against children: Patterns and motives

Children are the quintessential innocent victims; therefore, special opprobrium is reserved for offenders who sexually abuse them. This article describes the more prominent typologies of pedophilic sex offenders and discusses the role of child pornography in child sexual abuse of actual children. It next examines the often overlooked population of women offenders who sexually abuse children. Attention then turns to the sexual abuse of children in child care settings and by members of the clergy; practical recommendations are provided for reducing the risk of this kind of institutional child sexual abuse. Theoretical conceptualizations of child sexual abuse are considered, in the three main categories of cognitive–psychodynamic theories, neuropsychological conceptualizations, and contributions from the emerging field of evolutionary psychology. Finally, recommendations are made for developing a way of handling sex offenders, including sexual offenders against children, that balances the fair administration of justice with society's obligation to protect vulnerable potential victims.     

Understanding active psychological states: Embedding engagement in a wider nomological net and closer attention to performance

We concur with the authors of the focal article that engagement is a critical topic at work, and we welcome the questions posed in this article. Nevertheless, we advocate a stronger link between engagement research and existing research and theory about active psychological states, including that discussed in the topic domains of job design/empowerment, leadership, and proactivity/job crafting. We outline the advantages of embedding engagement in a wider nomological net. We also advocate closer attention to type of work performance that is prompted and sustained by engagement, as well as considering how both context and individual differences moderate the link between engagement and performance. We suggest there is more to learn about how, when, and why engagement influences specific aspects of performance.     

Human risky choice in a repeated-gambles procedure: an up-linkage replication of Lakshminarayanan, Chen and Santos (2011)

Lakshminarayanan et al. (J Exp Soc Psychol 47: 689–693, 2011) showed that when choice is between variable (risky) and fixed (safe) food amounts with the same expected values, capuchins prefer the safe alternative if choice is framed as a gain, but the risky alternative if it is framed as a loss. These results seem similar to those seen in human prospect-theory tests in choice between variable and fixed gains or losses. Based on this similarity, they interpreted their results as identifying a between-species commonality in cognitive function. In this report, we repeat their experiment with humans as subjects (an up-linkage replication). Whether choices were rewarded with candy or nickels, choice approximated indifference whether framed as gains or losses. Our data mirror those of others who found that when humans make risky choices within a repeated-trials procedure without verbal instruction about outcome likelihoods, preference biases seen in one-shot, language-guided, prospect-theory tests such as Tversky and Kahneman’s (Science 211:453–458, 1981) reflection effect may not appear. The disparity between our findings and those of Lakshminarayanan et al. suggests their study does not evidence a cognitive process shared by humans and capuchins.     

Effects of aging and divided attention on episodic feeling-of-knowing accuracy

This research investigated the effect of aging on episodic feeling-of-knowing (FOK) using a divided attention (DA) paradigm in order to examine whether DA in younger adults mimics the effects of aging when decreasing either memory encoding or monitoring processes. To that end, four groups of participants were tested on the FOK task: young adults (control group), young adults under DA at encoding, young adults under DA when making FOK judgments, and older adults. Our results showed that DA at encoding in young adults mimicked the effect of aging on memory performance, and also on FOK magnitude and accuracy, supporting the memory-constraint hypothesis ( Hertzog et al., 2010). However, our results do not completely contradict the monitoring-deficit hypothesis, as DA during FOK judgments also affected FOK accuracy, but to a lesser extent than the aging effect or DA during encoding. We suggest that the age-related FOK deficit may be due to a lower level of deep encoding, leading to difficulty retrieving target-related contextual details enabling accurate prediction of subsequent recognition.     

Effect of distinctive encoding on false recognition,discrimination, and decision criteria in young and elderly adults

In order to examine the effects of distinctive encoding on age-related differences in false memory and decision criteria, we used a standard recognition paradigm and manipulated three encoding conditions: control, general, and distinctive. The results revealed main effects of age and encoding condition on hits and false recognition, and interactions between these variables, with elderly adults benefiting more than young adults from the encoding tasks. In the distinctive encoding condition, the age-related difference on false recognition was eliminated. These findings are discussed in terms of an age-related deficit in self-initiated distinctive processing. Further analyses showed that elderly adults used a more lenient decision criterion than young adults. Distinctive encoding led all subjects to use stringent decision criteria, but did not eliminate age differences.     

Psychotropic placebos reduce the misinformation effect by increasing monitoring at test

A psychotropic placebo can help people resist the misinformation effect, an effect thought to be caused by a shift to more stringent source monitoring. When this shift occurs has been unclear. To address this issue we gave some people—but not others—a phoney cognitive-enhancing drug we called R273. Shortly afterwards, everyone took part in a misinformation effect experiment. To gather evidence about source monitoring we surreptitiously recorded time to read the misleading postevent narrative, and response time at test. Our findings suggest that people shifted to more stringent source monitoring at test. Moreover, people with higher working memory capacity (WMC) performed better than people with lower WMC—but only when they were told they had received R273, a finding that fits with research showing that WMC can confer advantages in situations demanding effortful control, but not when automatic heuristics suffice.     

Weathering the storm: Children's long‐term recall of Hurricane Andrew

Children who experienced a highly stressful natural disaster, Hurricane Andrew, were interviewed within a few months of the event, when they were 3–4 years old, and again 6 years later, when they were 9–10 years old. Children were grouped into low, moderate, or high stress groups depending on the severity of the experienced storm. All children were able to recall this event in vivid detail 6 years later. In fact, children reported over twice as many propositions at the second interview as at the first. At the initial interview, children in the high stress group reported less information than children in the moderate stress group, but 6 years later, children in all three stress groups reported similar amounts of information. However children in the high stress group needed more questions and prompts than children in the other stress groups. Yet children in the high stress group also reported more consistent information between the two interviews, especially about the storm, than children in the other stress groups. Implications for children's developing memory of stressful events are discussed.