Can Messages Make a Difference? The Association Between E‐Mail Messages and Health Outcomes in Diabetes Patients

This investigation examined the impact of social support messages on patient health outcomes. Forty‐one American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian patients received a total of 618 e‐mail messages from their healthcare provider (HCP). The e‐mail messages were divided into 3,565 message units and coded for instances of emotional social support. Patient glycosulated hemoglobin scores (HbA1c) showed significantly improved glycemic control and emotional social support messages were associated with significant decreases in HbA1c values. Patient involvement with the system, measured by system login frequency and the frequency of uploaded blood glucose scores to the HCP, did not predict change in HbA1c.     

Perceptual evaluation of the speech before and after fluency shaping stuttering therapy

An often-cited criterion for assessing the effect of a stuttering therapy is the ability of the stutterers to produce normally fluent speech. Many modern stuttering therapies use special techniques that may produce stutter-free speech that does not sound completely normal. The present study investigates this problem in the framework of the Dutch adaptation of the Precision Fluency Shaping Program.

Pre-, post-, and -year follow-up therapy speech samples of 32 severe stutterers who were treated in a four-week intensive therapy are compared with comparable samples of 20 nonstutterers. For that aim the samples were rated on 14 bipolar scales by groups of about 20 listeners. The results show that the speech of the stutterers in all three conditions differs significantly from the speech of the nonstutterers. The pretherapy speech takes an extreme position on a Distorted Speech dimension, due to the large proportion of disfluencies. The posttherapy speech has extremely low scores on a Dynamics/Prosody dimension, a‘1 while the follow-up therapy speech differs from the normal speech on both dimensions, but now the distances are smaller. These results are discussed in relation to the severity of the stuttering problem in the group of treated stutterers. Finally, implications for future research on therapy evaluation are discussed.     

The deceleration of inappropriate comments by a natural consequence

The characters of this study were two boys in a class for pupils with learning disabilities. The subject was a nine-year-old boy who emitted certain inappropriate comments in class. The manager throughout this study was a peer of the subject.Following a period of initial assessment, which revealed that the inappropriate verbalizations occurred about twice each day, the peer-manager, contingent on each inappropriate remark, moved away from the subject to another desk. Furthermore, before he moved, he explained to the subject why he was displeased. The peer-manager, after a period of time, returned to his original location contingent on appropriate verbalizations of the subject.This technique proved effective in that the subject rarely responded inappropriately throughout the remainder of the school term. Further, it was reported that follow-up observations taken the next year, when the pupil was in a different class, revealed that the inappropriate verbalizations had not reoccurred.     

Perceived characteristics of “competent” people

The purpose of this research was to determine the specific behaviors and cues which 104 assessors perceived as indicating the presence of psychological variables shown to be related to competent job behavior. The cue systems utilized were found to be reminiscent of theory Y conceptions of effective job behavior. Implications of the lack of correlation of cue utilization with assessor characteristics are discussed.     

Exploring changes during life and career design dialogues

This article describes the processes of change that occur during career counseling based on the ‘making oneself self’ model (Guichard, 2008; Guichard, 2009). This counseling intervention process forms part of the more general paradigm of life designing (Savickas et al., 2009). The main goal for this counseling is fostering “reflexivity” of individuals with regard to their investment in their various spheres of life. Three career counseling interviews were conducted using both methods of dialogues for life and career design dialogues (LCDD) and self-confrontation (Larsen, Flesaker, & Foundation, 2008; Valach, Michel, Dey, & Young, 2002). Each interview is described with a focus on the changes perceived by the interviewees in relation to their initial reason for consulting as well as on their dialogues with the counselor, who facilitated these changes and provided support for them. The analysis of the dialogues suggests the existence of a three-step evolution supporting the changes. On the basis of these data, the discussion examines the reflexive approach in its theoretical, methodological and practical dimensions.     

Cognitive adjustment as an indicator of psychological health at work: Development and validation of a measure

Based on organizational socialization literature (e.g., Bauer, Bodner, Erdogan, Truxillo, & Tucker, 2007; Kammeyer-Mueller & Wanberg, 2003; Saks, Uggerslev, & Fassina, 2007) and Conservation of Resources theory (COR theory; Hobfoll, 1989, 2001), this article aims to develop a conceptualization and a measurement of cognitive adjustment at work (CAW), as an indicator of psychological health in the workplace. Two studies, including three independent samples (N_A = 296, N_B = 350, N_C = 139), were conducted to test an operational proposal of CAW. In Study 1, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, as well as reliability and temporal invariance analyses, were performed to test the structure of both the construct and the instrument. In Study 2, nomological network analysis was conducted. Results suggest strong empirical support for the structure and validity of CAW, defined as a second-order factor, which includes task adjustment, work group adjustment and organizational adjustment.     

Cross‐linguistic interactions influence reading development in bilinguals: a comparison between early balanced French‐Basque and Spanish‐Basque bilingual children

This study investigates whether orthographic consistency and transparency of languages have an impact on the development of reading strategies and reading sub‐skills (i.e. phonemic awareness and visual attention span) in bilingual children. We evaluated 21 French (opaque)‐Basque (transparent) bilingual children and 21 Spanish (transparent)‐Basque (transparent) bilingual children at Grade 2, and 16 additional children of each group at Grade 5. All of them were assessed in their common language (i.e. Basque) on tasks measuring word and pseudoword reading, phonemic awareness and visual attention span skills. The Spanish speaking groups showed better Basque pseudoword reading and better phonemic awareness abilities than their French speaking peers, but only in the most difficult conditions of the tasks. However, on the visual attention span task, the French‐Basque bilinguals showed the most efficient visual processing strategies to perform the task. Therefore, learning to read in an additional language affected differently Basque literacy skills, depending on whether this additional orthography was opaque (e.g. French) or transparent (e.g. Spanish). Moreover, we showed that the most noteworthy effects of Spanish and French orthographic transparency on Basque performance were related to the size of the phonological and visual grain used to perform the tasks.     

Judging the plausibility of arguments in scientific texts: a student–scientist comparison

The ability to evaluate scientific claims and evidence is an important aspect of scientific literacy and requires various epistemic competences. Readers spontaneously validate presented information against their knowledge and beliefs but differ in their ability to strategically evaluate the soundness of informal arguments. The present research investigated how students of psychology, compared to scientists working in psychology, evaluate informal arguments. Using a think-aloud procedure, we identified the specific strategies students and scientists apply when judging the plausibility of arguments and classifying common argumentation fallacies. Results indicate that students, compared to scientists, have difficulties forming these judgements and base them on intuition and opinion rather than the internal consistency of arguments. Our findings are discussed using the mental model theory framework. Although introductory students validate scientific information against their knowledge and beliefs, their judgements are often erroneous, in part because their use of strategy is immature. Implications for systematic trainings of epistemic competences are discussed.