‘Someone to talk to who'll listen’: addressing the psychosocial needs of children and families

The paper presents the Lewisham Community Child and Family Service (LCCFS), a community‐based intervention providing psychosocial help for children, young people, parents and families. The service is focused on early intervention, prevention and promotion in the improvement of local health. It works under a service framework based on inter‐agency collaboration, and a counselling model based on community and interpersonal partnerships, grounded in personal construct theory (Kelly, 1955). The policy demands and local need for accessible and acceptable mental health are discussed, and quantitative and qualitative findings of the needs assessment preceding the establishment of the LCCFS are presented, supporting the need for community mental health provision. The feasibility for the LCCFS to reconcile and meet the policy demands and the needs of parents with respect to child psychosocial help and services are discussed. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Impact of Wellness‐Focused Supervision on Mental Health Counseling Practicum Students

Professional counseling organizations tout the importance of wellness for counselors and counselors‐in‐training. The authors used a wellness‐focused supervision model with mental health practicum students to assess the model's degree of treatment effect at improving students' wellness over the course of the semester. Participants' demographics included three women, one man, three European Americans, and one Latino/a. Single‐case design results revealed that ongoing wellness‐focused interventions are helpful in improving participants' level of wellness; implications for practice are provided.     

Is It a Name or a Fact? Disambiguation of Reference Via Exclusivity and Pragmatic Reasoning

Adults reason by exclusivity to identify the meanings of novel words. However, it is debated whether, like children, they extend this strategy to disambiguate other referential expressions (e.g., facts about objects). To further inform this debate, this study tested 41 adults on four conditions of a disambiguation task: label/label, fact/fact, label/fact, and fact/label (Scofield & Behrend, 2007 ). Participants also provided a verbal explanation for their referent selections to tease apart the underlying processes. Results indicated that adults successfully discerned the target object in the label/label and label/fact condition, yet not the remaining two conditions. Verbal reports indicated that the strategy utilized to disambiguate differed depending upon communicative context. These findings confirm that the tendency to reason by exclusivity becomes restricted to word‐learning situations with growing linguistic and communicative experience.     

TEACHING WOMEN WITH INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES TO IDENTIFY AND REPORT INAPPROPRIATE STAFF‐TO‐RESIDENT INTERACTIONS

This study examined the effectiveness of behavioral skills training in teaching 2 adult women with mild intellectual disabilities to report inappropriate staff‐to‐resident interactions. The reporting skill included making a self‐advocacy response, walking away, and reporting the interaction. Participants' performance was measured during baseline, posttesting, 2‐ and 4‐week follow‐up, and generalization probes in new situations. All participants learned reporting skills, maintained these skills at 2‐ and 4‐week follow‐up, and generalized the skills to novel stimulus situations.     

Moral injury,coherence, and spiritual repair

In the PTSD literature, moral injury represents dissonance between a person’s beliefs about how they and the world should function, and the trauma event(s) they experienced. Given the association of moral injury with the assumptive world, it is not surprising the concept is closely intertwined with spiritual concerns. This paper reports on a spiritually integrated group intervention designed to help veterans with PTSD in the process of moral and spiritual repair. Qualitative findings are shared from interviews conducted with 18 participants who completed the intervention. Themes are centred around participants’ overall response to their experience in the group; where they are at regarding feelings such as guilt, shame, anger, trust, sense of betrayal, and desire for forgiveness; changes in religious/spiritual beliefs and practices and the experience of moral injury; and if they now find meaning in the trauma. The findings support the need for additional treatment options that address the moral and spiritual aspects of trauma.     

Salad = success and fries = failure? Conceptualizing and assessing self‐control outcome measures in food decision‐making research

Researchers studying decisions about food utilize a wide variety of measures to assess self‐control outcomes in experimental studies. However, it is often unclear whether or not the chosen dependent variables truly implicate self‐regulatory mechanisms in decision making. In the present research, we provide a conceptual framework for evaluating self‐control outcome measures, concentrating specifically on the domain of food and eating self‐control decisions. We propose and empirically examine the essential characteristics [i.e., (i) recognized as self‐control relevant by study population, (ii) related to individual differences in self‐control, and (iii) recognized as self‐control relevant by individual] of good self‐control outcome measures and provide specific methodological recommendations (including the “rank‐then‐choose” method) for capturing exhibited self‐control in the domain of food decision making. Our conceptual developments and recommendations seek to enhance the consistency, efficiency, and effectiveness of food‐related decision research. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

College Students' Responses to Suicidal Content on Social Networking Sites: An Examination Using a Simulated Facebook Newsfeed

Although Facebook has a peer‐initiated suicide prevention protocol, little is known about users' abilities to notice, recognize, and appropriately interpret suicidal content or about their willingness to intervene. In this study, 468 college students were randomly assigned to interact with a simulated Facebook newsfeed containing content reflecting various suicide risk levels. A larger proportion of those exposed to content reflecting moderate and severe suicide risk noticed, recognized, appropriately interpreted, and endorsed taking action to intervene, as compared to those exposed to content representing no or low risk. Overall, results indicate that college students are responsive to suicidal content on Facebook.