The Counseling Center Assessment of Psychological Symptoms Distress Index: A pragmatic exploration of general factors to enhance a multidimensional scale

Objective: The authors attempted to develop and validate a general distress index for a multidimensional psychological symptom/outcome measure used in over 300 college counseling centers with more than 100,000 cases annually: the Counseling Center Assessment of Psychological Symptoms (CCAPS). Method: Four models were compared for fit indices (n = 19,247): the existing first-order factor model (without a general factor), a second-order factor model, a bifactor model, and a single factor or “total score” model. In separate clinical and non-clinical samples, concurrent and divergent validity were examined using several well-established measures of psychological symptoms, as well as two-week test–retest and treatment utilization data. Results: Second-order and bifactor models which captured a single “distress” factor both exhibited good fit to the data relative to the baseline and “total score” model. Validity data indicated that factors adequately measured meaningful clinical onstructs. Conclusion: Both the bifactor and second-order models indicated the presence of a “distress index” comprised items across many of the CCAPS subscales. This distress scale has strong applicability for benchmarking the overall severity and complexity of patients at different centers, and can be used to help identify colleges and universities with areas of clinical strength, which can be studied to improve the field. Clinically, the distress index offers a parsimonious and efficient method for clinicians to monitor patients’ progress through treatment.     

Religious Experience in a Cross-Cultural and Interfaith Context: Limitations and Possibilities

Religious experience is a multifaceted aspect of an individual’s experience involving conscious and unconscious components. Individuals, for example, maintain varied ideas of God at different levels of awareness and consciousness, all of which contribute to their broader experience of God. This paper focuses primarily on complex theistic experiences of God, their relationship to psychological and spiritual health, and how these experiences can be changed through psychological intervention. Consideration is also given to ethical issues and other implications of changing one’s religious experience.     

Mentalist evidentialism vindicated (and a super-blooper epistemic design problem for proper function justification)

Michael Bergmann seeks to motivate his externalist, proper function theory of epistemic justification by providing three objections to the mentalism and mentalist evidentialism characteristic of nonexternalists such as Richard Feldman and Earl Conee. Bergmann argues that (i) mentalism is committed to the false thesis that justification depends on mental states; (ii) mentalism is committed to the false thesis that the epistemic fittingness of an epistemic input to a belief-forming process must be due to an essential feature of that input, and, relatedly, that mentalist evidentialism is committed to the false thesis that the epistemic fittingness of doxastic response B to evidence E is an essential property of B–E; and (iii) mentalist evidentialism is “unmotivated”. I object to each argument. The argument for (i) begs the question. The argument for (ii) suffers from the fact that mentalist evidentialists are not committed to the consequences claimed for them; nevertheless, I show that there is, in the neighborhood, a substantive dispute concerning the nature of doxastic epistemic fittingness. That dispute involves what I call “Necessary Fittingness”, the view that, necessarily, exactly one (at most) doxastic attitude (belief, or disbelief, or suspension of judgment) toward a proposition is epistemically fitting with respect to a person’s total evidence at any time. Reflection on my super-blooper epistemic design counterexamples to Bergmann’s proper function theory reveals both the plausibility of Necessary Fittingness and a good reason to deny (iii). Mentalist evidentialism is thus vindicated against the objections.     

Decreased aggressive and locomotor behaviors in Betta splendens after exposure to fluoxetine

The failure of sewage treatment plants to remove pharmaceuticals such as fluoxetine from waste water has become a concern given that these products are being detected in the surface waters of many countries of the world. The effects of fluoxetine in sub-lethal doses on the neural systems and behaviors of aquatic life are worthy of investigation. This study investigated the effects of sub-lethal amounts fluoxetine dissolved in water on the aggressive and locomotor behaviors of 44 male Betta splendens. Fish treated with 705 microg/l of fluoxetine and 350 microg/l of fluoxetine generally demonstrated significant decreases in locomotion and number of aggressive attacks compared to 0 microg/l of fluoxetine (controls) on Days 11 and 19 of drug exposure and persisted for at least 13 days after removal of fluoxetine. Consistent with decreases in the number of aggressive attacks, there was a significant increase in aggression-response time to a perceived intruder for treated males on Days 11 and 19 and persisted for 6 days following removal of fluoxetine. However, the differences in aggressive and locomotor behaviors seen in the fluoxetine-treated groups were indistinguishable from controls three weeks following drug removal.     

Leisure and Subjective Well-Being: A Model of Psychological Mechanisms as Mediating Factors

Leisure is a key life domain and a core ingredient for overall well-being. Yet, within positive psychology, its definition and the psychological pathways by which it evokes happiness are elusive (Diener and Biswas-Diener 2008). In this paper, we seek to address these issues by delineating leisure and presenting a conceptual framework linking leisure to subjective well-being (SWB). Leisure is defined as a multidimensional construct, encompassing both structural and subjective aspects. Respectively, it is the amount of activity/time spent outside of obligated work time and/or perceived engagement in leisure as subjectively defined. To explain the effects of leisure on SWB, a quantitative summary of theories from 363 research articles linking leisure and SWB was conducted. Based on our findings, we propose five core psychological mechanisms that leisure potentially triggers to promote leisure SWB: detachment-recovery, autonomy, mastery, meaning, and affiliation (DRAMMA). These psychological mechanisms promote leisure SWB which leads to enhanced global SWB through a bottom-up theory of SWB. We discuss how future research can use this conceptual model for understanding the interplay between leisure and SWB.     

Two-Factor Structure of Social-Evaluative Fear in Children: Distinguishing Fear of Positive and Negative Evaluation in Social Anxiety

Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment - Social anxiety is characterized by fear, nervousness, and avoidance in social situations and can emerge as early as childhood. Recent...     

Stress Mediates the Within-Person Longitudinal Associations Between Depression and Different Anxiety Syndromes in Youth

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - Depressive symptoms predict within-person change in physical symptoms of anxiety and social anxiety symptoms; however, potential mediators of...     

Expressing experience: the promise and perils of the phenomenological interview

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - This paper outlines several of the challenges that are inherent in any attempt to communicate subjective experience to others, particularly in...     

The Rhetoric of Racism: Revisiting the Creation of the Psychological Institute of the Republic of South Africa (1956–1962)

This paper revisits the 1962 splitting of the South African Psychological Association (SAPA), when disaffected Afrikaner psychologists broke away to form the whites‐only Psychological Institute of the Republic of South Africa (PIRSA). It presents an analysis of the rhetorical justification for forming a new professional association on principles at odds with prevailing international norms, demonstrating how the episode involved more than the question of admitting black psychologists to the association. In particular, the paper argues that the SAPA‐PIRSA separation resulted from an Afrikaner nationalist reading of the goals of psychological science. PIRSA, that is, insisted on promoting a discipline committed to the ethnic‐national vision of the apartheid state. For its part, SAPA's racial integration was of a nominal order only, ostensibly to protect itself from international sanction. The paper concludes that, in a racist society, it is difficult to produce anything other than a racist psychology.