Parents,friends and immigrant youths' academic engagement: A mediation analysis

Parents and friends can help facilitate the academic engagement of newcomer immigrant youth during the early post-migration years. Using an accelerated longitudinal design and the integrative risk and resilience framework, we examined how parent home involvement and friendships were directly and indirectly associated with the development of newcomer immigrant youths' academic engagement. We used data from three waves (Years 3–5) of the Longitudinal Immigrant Student Adaptation study where a culturally diverse group of immigrant youth (N = 354, ages 10–17, M_timeinUS = 3.98 years, SD = 1.39) in the United States reported on their perceptions of parent home involvement (educational values and communication) and friendship (educational values and academic support) in Year 3 and on their academic engagement (behavioural and emotional) across 3 years. Findings showed high-stable behavioural and emotional engagement and direct positive associations between perceptions of parent home involvement and initial levels of behavioural and emotional engagement and between perceptions of friend educational values and initial levels of emotional engagement. Additionally, perceptions of parents' educational values indirectly contributed to initial levels of emotional engagement through positive associations with perceptions of friends' educational values. These findings can inform family–school partnerships and school-interventions targeting newcomer immigrant youths' engagement.     

Relapse of anxiety-related fear and avoidance: Conceptual analysis of treatment with acceptance and commitment therapy

Excessive fear and avoidance in relatively safe situations can lead to a narrowing of one's behavioral repertoire and less engagement with valued aspects of living. Ultimately, these processes can reach clinical levels, as seen in anxiety, trauma, and obsessive–compulsive disorders. Research on the basic behavioral processes underlying successful treatment with exposure therapy is growing, yet little is known about the mechanisms contributing to clinical relapse. Until recently, these mechanisms have largely been conceptualized in terms of Pavlovian return of fear, with relatively little research into operant processes. In the current paper, we briefly review translational research in anxiety disorders and the connections between fear and avoidance, focusing on recent work in the acquisition, extinction, and relapse of avoidance behavior and the generalization of this learning through arbitrary symbolic relations. We then introduce one possible treatment approach to mitigating clinical relapse, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and provide a conceptual analysis for why ACT may be especially well-situated to address this issue. Finally, we end with potential directions for future research on treatment and relapse of anxiety disorders.     

Mental Health Literacy and Peer-to-Peer Counseling Referrals Among Community College Students

Mental health literacy (MHL) has utility for promoting peer-to-peer referrals to mental health support services among university students. However, there is a gap in the extant literature about the potential usefulness of MHL for supporting the mental health of community college students, a population facing a number of mental health conditions. The authors examined the construct validity and the utility of 3 dimensions of MHL as predictors of peer-to-peer referrals to the counseling center among community college students. Results of confirmatory factor analyses supported the dimensionality of the instrumentation and a hierarchical logistic regression analysis revealed that MHL was a significant positive predictor of peer-to-peer referrals to the counseling center. Implications for counseling practice and future research are discussed.     

An examination of the effects of mental disorders as mitigating factors on capital sentencing outcomes

Mentally ill and emotionally disturbed offenders comprise a significant component of those whose criminal conduct has swept them into the criminal justice system, including a subset who are tried and convicted of capital murder. The present study employs the population of capital cases advanced to penalty phase in the state of North Carolina (1990–2009) to examine whether presentation to the jury of the statutory mitigators of extreme mental and emotional disturbance and capacity impaired, and specific mental illness diagnoses, often referred to as mental disorders, at the sentencing phase mitigate against a sentence of death. Mental disorders included mood disorders, psychotic disorders, anxiety disorders, brain disorders, multiple mental illness diagnoses, learning disabilities, and personality disorders. Results from these 835 cases indicate that with the exception of one, the diagnosis of a learning disability, the capital jury's acceptance of various mental health conditions does not effectively mitigate against a capital sentence. In addition, jury rejection of a diagnosis of mental illness or the two mental health statutory mitigators, capacity impaired and extreme emotional disturbance, as a mitigating factor has a counter-mitigating effect in that it significantly increases the odds of a death penalty recommendation by about 85–200%.     

You focus on the forest when you're in charge of the trees: power priming and abstract information processing

Elevated power increases the psychological distance one feels from others, and this distance, according to construal level theory, should lead to more abstract information processing. Thus, high power should be associated with more abstract thinking-focusing on primary aspects of stimuli and detecting patterns and structure to extract the gist, as well as categorizing stimuli at a higher level-relative to low power. In 6 experiments involving both conceptual and perceptual tasks, priming high power led to more abstract processing than did priming low power, even when this led to worse performance. Experiment 7 revealed that in line with past neuropsychological research on abstract thinking, priming high power also led to greater relative right-hemispheric activation.     

English soccer teams' aggressive behavior when playing away from home

Speculation about key factors affecting home advantage still exists. The present study investigated aggressive behavior amongst English Football Premiership (soccer) players and its relation to home advantage. The frequency of aggressive behaviour, identified by the award of a penalty or disciplinary card (yellow for caution or red for dismissal) was analysed over 2000-2003. Chi-square analyses assessed whether a greater frequency of aggressive behavior was performed by teams away from home. In decided matches, teams playing away received significantly more cautions (yellow cards) than home teams. A further analysis of tied matches indicated that away teams received significantly more cautions (yellow cards) than home teams. No significant differences between home and away teams were found for dismissals and penalties awarded. Reasons for these findings are considered.     

At a Crossroad: Standing Still and Moving Forward

Reading the article, "Community psychology at the crossroads: Prospects for interdisciplinary research" (Maton, Perkins & Saegert, this issue), there is a sense that community psychology is at a crossroad with regard to being an interdisciplinary field. This paper aims to offer insight and guidance to proponents of interdisciplinary research in the community psychology field by drawing on experiences in urban studies, which shares similar origins and interdisciplinary claims.     

Rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) monitor uncertainty during numerosity judgments

Two rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) judged arrays of dots on a computer screen as having more or fewer dots than a center value that was never presented in trials. After learning a center value, monkeys were given an uncertainty response that let them decline to make the numerosity judgment on that trial. Across center values (3-7), errors occurred most often for sets adjacent in numerosity to the center value. The monkeys also used the uncertainty response most frequently on these difficult trials. A 2nd experiment showed that monkeys' responses reflected numerical magnitude and not the surface-area illumination of the displays. This research shows that monkeys' uncertainty-monitoring capacity extends to the domain of numerical cognition. It also shows monkeys' use of the purest uncertainty response possible, uncontaminated by any secondary motivator.