An outcome evaluation study of a psycho‐educational course in a primary care setting

Rationale: To date relatively little research has examined the effectiveness of psycho‐educational courses provided in a primary care setting to adults with mild‐to‐moderate mental health concerns. Aims: To determine whether group psycho‐education could be a viable alternative to individual counselling by (1) assessing the clinical effectiveness of an 8‐week psycho‐educational course, and (2) examining the group outcomes in comparison with individual treatment outcomes from a previous study in the same counselling service. Method: A total of 57 participants attending a psycho‐educational course provided data over a 36‐month period, using the Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation – Outcome Measure (CORE‐OM) pre‐ and post‐intervention. A comparison was then made with the data of 58 previous participants of individual counselling evaluation, using the same CORE‐OM system. Results: Participants reported significantly lower levels of psychological distress after attending the course and these results are comparable to outcomes measured in the same service for individual counselling, indicating that group interventions could be considered a legitimate alternative to individual counselling, thus increasing cost effectiveness and reducing waiting times. Limitations of the study and implications for practice and further investigation are considered.     

Experiences related to expert supervisors' views of ideal therapeutic practice

Aims: This study examines the relationship between expert supervisors' professional experiences and their views about the importance of different psychotherapy techniques. Method: Thirty psychodynamic‐interpersonal (PI) supervisors and 13 cognitive‐behavioural (CB) supervisors (N=43) were instructed to rate 20 therapeutic techniques according to how characteristic each technique is of an ideally‐conducted session within their theoretical orientation. The measure used for this assessment was the Comparative Psychotherapy Process Scale. Results: Findings demonstrated that supervisors' beliefs about ideal therapeutic techniques are related to their number of years in post‐graduate clinical practice, training, and supervising trainees, as well as to the number of publications they have authored. Further, experience within a given orientation tends to lead to a greater endorsement of techniques within that orientation, although this finding is more uniform for CB supervisors than PI supervisors. Finally, differential types of experience lead to differential focusing on specific techniques. Discussion: The clinical importance of these findings is explored.     

Children's social identities

This paper provides a brief overview of recent developmental research on themes related to children's social identities. Initially, consideration is given to the capacity for social categorization, following which attention is given to children's developing conceptions of social identities, their identification with social groups, and the consequences of identification upon various phenomena such as ingroup favouritism and well‐being. Finally, some personal thoughts on the wider political implications of this research are offered. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Automatic emotion regulation after social exclusion: tuning to positivity

Nine experiments tested competing hypotheses regarding nonconscious affective responses to acute social exclusion and how such responses may relate to positive mental health. The results strongly and consistently indicated that acute social exclusion increased nonconscious positive affect. Compared to nonexcluded participants, excluded participants recalled more positive memories from childhood than did accepted participants (Experiment 1), gave greater weight to positive emotion in their judgments of word similarity (Experiments 2 and 3), and completed more ambiguous word stems with happy words (Experiments 4a and 4b). This process was apparently automatic, as participants asked to imagine exclusion overestimated explicit distress and underestimated implicit positivity (Experiment 3). Four final experiments showed that this automatic emotion regulation process was found among participants low (but not high) in depressive symptoms (Experiments 5 and 6) and among participants high (but not low) in self-esteem (Experiments 7 and 8). These findings suggest that acute exclusion sets in motion an automatic emotion regulation process in which positive emotions become highly accessible, which relates to positive mental health.     

Is there a mutual relationship between opposite attentional biases underlying anxiety?

Current models that account for attentional processes in anxiety have proposed that high-trait anxious individuals are characterized by a hypervigilant-avoidant pattern of attentional biases to threat. We adopted a laboratory conditioning procedure to induce concomitant hypervigilance and avoidance to threat, emphasizing a putative relationship between lower-level reactive and upper-level controlled attentional mechanisms as the core account of attentional processes involved in the development and maintenance of anxiety. Eighty high- and low-trait anxious participants underwent Pavlovian conditioning to a human face. Eye tracking was used to monitor attentional changes to the conditioned stimulus (CS+) face and the neutral stimulus (CS-) face, presented at 200, 500, and 800 ms durations. The high-anxious participants developed the expected attentional bias toward the CS+ at 200 ms presentation time and attentional avoidance at 500 and 800 ms durations. Hypervigilance to aversive stimuli at 200 ms and later avoidance to the same stimuli at 500 and 800 ms were associated with higher levels of galvanic skin conductance to the CS+. The low-anxious individuals developed the opposite attentional pattern with an initial tendency to orient attention away from the aversive stimuli in the 200 ms condition and to orient attention toward aversive stimuli in the remaining time. The differential modulation between hypervigilance and avoidance elicited in the two groups by the conditioning procedure suggests that vulnerability to anxiety is characterized by a latent relationship between diverse attentional mechanisms. Within this relationship, hypervigilance and avoidance to threat operate at different stages of information processing suggesting fuzzy boundaries between early reactive and later-strategic processing of threat.     

Signal evaluation environment: a new method for the design of peripheral in-vehicle warning signals

An evaluation method called the Signal Evaluation Environment (SEE) was developed for use in the early stages of the design process of peripheral warning signals while driving. Accident analyses have shown that with complex driving situations such as intersections, the visual scan strategies of the driver contribute to overlooking other road users who have the right of way. Salient peripheral warning signals could disrupt these strategies and direct drivers’ attention towards these road users. To select effective warning signals, the SEE was developed as a laboratory task requiring visual–cognitive processes similar to those used at intersections. For validation of the SEE, four experiments were conducted using different stimulus characteristics (size, colour contrast, shape, flashing) that influence peripheral vision. The results confirm that the SEE is able to differentiate between the selected stimulus characteristics. The SEE is a useful initial tool for designing peripheral signals, allowing quick and efficient preselection of beneficial signals.     

Faculty Selling Desk Copies��The Textbook Industry, the Law and the Ethics

It is a guilty secret that many college professors sell the complimentary desk copies that they receive from textbook publishers for cash. This article attempts to shed light on the undercover practice by looking at the resale of complimentary textbooks by faculty from four perspectives. Part One provides an overview of the college textbook industry, the business reasons that motivate publishers to provide complimentary desk copies to faculty, and the economic consequences of the entry of the textbooks into the used book market. Part Two examines the legal characteristics of complimentary desk copies in terms of their ownership and any contractual duties that may arise from their receipt. Part Three looks at legislative efforts to curb the practice, and Part Four reviews university policies addressing the issue. In Part Five, the ethical implications of faculty selling desk copies are examined, with a special focus on this practice in a business school. The Conclusion considers the future of the sale of complimentary copies in light of the move to e-books and other initiatives by authors and textbook publishers to circumvent the practice.     

The institutional review board is an impediment to human research: the result is more animal-based research

Biomedical research today can be generally classified as human-based or nonhuman animal-based, each with separate and distinct review boards that must approve research protocols. Researchers wishing to work with humans or human tissues have become frustrated by the required burdensome approval panel, the Institutional Review Board. However, scientists have found it is much easier to work with the animal-based research review board, the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. Consequently, animals are used for investigations even when scientists believe these studies should be performed with humans or human tissue. This situation deserves attention from society and more specifically the animal protection and patient advocate communities, as neither patients nor animals are well served by the present situation.     

Linking impulsivity and inhibitory control using manual and oculomotor response inhibition tasks

Separate cognitive processes govern the inhibitory control of manual and oculomotor movements. Despite this fundamental distinction, little is known about how these inhibitory control processes relate to more complex domains of behavioral functioning. This study sought to determine how these inhibitory control mechanisms relate to broadly defined domains of impulsive behavior. Thirty adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and 28 comparison adults performed behavioral measures of inhibitory control and completed impulsivity inventories. Results suggest that oculomotor inhibitory control, but not manual inhibitory control, is related to specific domains of self-reported impulsivity. This finding was limited to the ADHD group; no significant relations between inhibitory control and impulsivity were found in comparison adults. These results highlight the heterogeneity of inhibitory control processes and their differential relations to different facets of impulsivity.