Love transgresses: Reflections at 25 years

One of four short essays published in this issue of the journal to celebrate the 25th anniversary of bell hooks's classic book, Teaching to Transgress (1994). The authors reflect on the importance of this text for their teaching, when they discovered it, and how it has shaped their approach to the classroom, as illustrated in a particular teaching strategy or assignment that they have used that is inspired by the book.     

ETAT: Expository Text Analysis Tool

Qualitative methods that analyze the coherence of expository texts not only are time consuming, but also present challenges in collecting data on coding reliability. We describe software that analyzes expository texts more rapidly and produces a notable level of objectivity ETAT (Expository Text Analysis Tool) analyzes the coherence of expository texts. ETAT adopts a symbolic representational system, known asconceptual graph structures. ETAT follows three steps: segmentation of a text into nodes, classification of the unidentified nodes, and linking the nodes with relational arcs. ETAT automatically constructs a graph in the form of nodes and their interrelationships, along with various attendant statistics and information about noninterrelated, isolated nodes. ETAT was developed in Java, so it is compatible with virtually all computer systems.     

A Multi-Informant Approach to Assessing Safety Behaviors among Adolescents: Psychometric Properties of the Subtle Avoidance Frequency Examination

Safety behaviors are subtle avoidance strategies for minimizing distress within social situations (e.g., avoidance of eye contact). These behaviors factor prominently in the development and maintenance of social anxiety concerns, and when patients use these behaviors within psychosocial treatments for social anxiety, this may impede treatment response. Prior work supports the need to include measures of safety behaviors within evidence-based assessments of social anxiety. Along these lines, researchers developed the Subtle Avoidance Frequency Examination (SAFE) to assess safety behaviors among adults. However, we know relatively little about the SAFE’s psychometric properties when administered to adolescents. We tested the SAFE’s psychometric properties using adolescent self-reports and parallel parent reports in a mixed-clinical/community sample of 96 14 to 15 year-old adolescents and their parents (33 clinic-referred; 63 community control; 59.4% African American). Adolescent and parent SAFE reports displayed moderate correspondence with each other. Both adolescent and parent SAFE reports related positively to well-established measures of adolescent social anxiety and depressive symptoms. Both reports distinguished adolescents on referral status as well as cut scores on well-established measures of adolescent social anxiety. Further, both adolescent and parent SAFE reports displayed incremental validity in relation to survey reports of adolescent social anxiety, over-and-above survey reports of adolescent depressive symptoms, which commonly co-occur with social anxiety. However, adolescent (but not parent) SAFE reports predicted adolescents’ social anxiety and state arousal as displayed within social interactions with unfamiliar peer confederates. These findings have important implications for leveraging multi-informant approaches to assessing safety behaviors among adolescents.     

“I Choked Her But I Did Not Punch Her”: Constructions of Intimate Partner Violence Among Men in the Philippines

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a phenomenon that is persistent in society and exacts a heavy psychological toll on women and children victimized by it. This research aims to understand how doers of intimate partner violence construe or perceive their alleged violent behavior. This study focuses on fifteen men with cases of Republic Act of 9262 or the Anti-Violence Against Women for physical, psychological, economic and/or sexual abuse in Surigao del Sur, Philippines. Participants were interviewed on their perception of intimate partner violence and the factors that led to their alleged violent behavior. Thematic network analysis yielded five global themes to explain that there are different yet inter-related causations of violence according to the participants: (1) act of IPV as a cognitive dissonance; (2) socio-economic condition as primary source of conflict; (3) blaming partner as the problem; (4) IPV as an impulsive and emotional response; and (5) ineffective conflict resolution. The doers position themselves to be intrinsically good people who denounce the act of violence, however, to compensate their contradicting behavior, they minimize the consequence of behavior and negate responsibility through different mechanisms of moral disengagement. Given the results, the research stresses the importance of a rehabilitation program that targets moral disengagement, anger management and effective conflict resolution.     

Individual differences in physiological flexibility predict spontaneous avoidance

People often regulate their emotions by resorting to avoidance, a putatively maladaptive strategy. Prior work suggests that increased psychopathology symptoms predict greater spontaneous utilisation of this strategy. Extending this work, we examined whether heightened resting cardiac vagal tone (which reflects a general ability to regulate emotions in line with contextual demands) predicts decreased spontaneous avoidance. In Study 1, greater resting vagal tone was associated with reduced spontaneous avoidance in response to disgust-eliciting pictures, beyond anxiety and depression symptoms and emotional reactivity. In Study 2, resting vagal tone interacted with anxiety and depression symptoms to predict spontaneous avoidance in response to disgust-eliciting film clips. The positive association between symptoms and spontaneous avoidance was more pronounced among participants with reduced resting vagal tone. Thus, increased resting vagal tone might protect against the use of avoidance. Our findings highlight the importance of assessing both subjective and biological processes when studying individual differences in emotion regulation.     

The Influence of Multicultural Training on Perceived Multicultural Counseling Competencies and Implicit Racial Prejudice

This study examined the impact of multicultural training on multicultural counseling competencies and implicit racial prejudice. Results of a multilevel modeling analysis showed that only the multicultural counseling course was related to a decrease in implicit racial prejudice and an increase in cultural self‐awareness. Implications for multicultural training are discussed. Este estudio examinó el impacto de la formación multicultural en las competencias en consejería multicultural y el prejuicio racial implícito. Los resultados de un análisis de modelo a varios niveles mostraron que solo el curso en consejería multicultural estaba implicado en un descenso del prejuicio racial implícito y un aumento de la autoconciencia cultural. Se discuten las implicaciones para la formación multicultural.     

Integrating Behavioral and Social Sciences in the Medical School Curriculum: Opportunities and Challenges for Psychology

The Institute of Medicine has reviewed and made recommendations concerning current teaching approaches, content, and barriers to the incorporation of behavioral/social sciences in medical school curricula (Cuff & Vanselow, 2004). This paper discusses those recommendations, the history of medical education reform, the barriers to and evolution of behavioral/social sciences’ inclusion, and the implications for psychology’s future role in academic medicine. Psychological concepts and technology permeate medical practice, but little progress has been made in integrating psychological and biological sciences. Looking to its basic science domains (e.g. cognition, learning, development, neuroscience), psychology can take scientific leadership in illuminating the mechanisms by which behavioral/social processes interact with biological functions in health, thereby providing the empirical basis for a truly integrated bio-behavioral curriculum. This article is based upon a symposium, “IOM Report on Enhancing Behavioral & Social Science in Medical Education: Impact and Opportunities for Psychology,” presented at the Annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C., August 21, 2005. Suzanne Bennett Johnson, Chair; Elena Reyes, John E. Carr, and Anthony Errichetti, participants; Eugene K. Emory, Discussant.     

Scene recognition without identification

Recognition without identification (RWI) is old-new discrimination among recognition test items that go unidentified. Recently, the effect has been shown in situations that require pre-experimental connections between unidentified studied items and their test cues, such as when the test cues are general knowledge questions and the unidentified studied items are their answers, or when the test cues are pictures of celebrities and the unidentified studied items are their names. In these cases, RWI demonstrates a peculiar relationship with tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experiences: Participants give higher recognition ratings when in a TOT state than when not, even though studying an item does not increase the probability of a TOT state for that item. The present study extends these findings to the recognition of scene information. We demonstrate a scene RWI effect with scenes when scene names cannot be retrieved, and replicate the previously reported relationship between TOT states and RWI. In addition, we show that the relationship between RWI and reported TOT states also occurs between RWI and reported déjà vu states with the test scenes.