The community substance use environment: The development and predictive ability of a multi‐method and multiple‐reporter measure

This study tested the feasibility and utility of developing a multiple‐method and multiple‐reporter measure that describes the community substance use environment. Data on community‐level norms and availability of substances were reported by 5261 students and 181 prevention‐focused community leaders (CL) involved in the 28 promoting school–university–community partnerships to enhance resilience (PROSPER) Project communities between 2002 and 2005. Additionally, locations of alcohol and tobacco outlets were geocoded. Initially, these four subscales were aggregated to measure the community substance use environment. Analyses demonstrated this measure was associated with community rates of adolescent reported cigarette use, but it was not associated with community rates of adolescent reported alcohol use. Further analyses tested the relative strength of the four different subscales in predicting rates of student use. Implications of these results for the field of community‐based prevention are discussed, as well as limitations and future directions. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Group Art Therapy With Incarcerated Women

Art therapy in groups with incarcerated individuals may be effective when participants are defensive and possess limited education. The authors provide procedures, techniques, and case examples from the New Beginnings program for working with women in a detention facility.     

Perceived Parenting,Self-Esteem,and General Self-Efficacy of Iranian American Adolescents

We examined whether Iranian American adolescents’ perceptions of parental support, parental knowledge, and parental psychological control relate to general self-efficacy directly, and indirectly through positive esteem and self-deprecation. To investigate this, self-report surveys were collected from 158 Iranian American adolescents attending Iranian American youth groups, Armenian private school, and one public school. Results indicated that positive esteem, self-deprecation, mother and father knowledge, and mother and father psychological control were directly related to general self-efficacy. Furthermore, the parenting variables were indirectly related to general self-efficacy through either positive esteem or self-deprecation.     

Relationships of parents’ and child’s general attributional styles to academic performance

This study examined the relationships among student academic performance and child’s and parents’ attributional styles. One hundred seventy-nine students (87 boys and 92 girls) who were enrolled in primary public schools in New South Wales, Australia, and their parents volunteered to participate in the study. Only English-speaking, two-parent families were included. Participants completed age-appropriate attributional style questionnaires. Academic performance was obtained from student records of course grades. The results indicated that both mothers’ and fathers’ attributions for their own positive and negative life events were related to their children’s attributions for their academic performance. We present implications of these results for research on attributions and academic performance.     

Pupil diameter tracks changes in control state predicted by the adaptive gain theory of locus coeruleus function

An important dimension of cognitive control is the adaptive regulation of the balance between exploitation (pursuing known sources of reward) and exploration (seeking new ones) in response to changes in task utility. Recent studies have suggested that the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system may play an important role in this function and that pupil diameter can be used to index locus coeruleus activity. On the basis of this, we reasoned that pupil diameter may correlate closely with control state and associated changes in behavior. Specifically, we predicted that increases in baseline pupil diameter would be associated with decreases in task utility and disengagement from the task (exploration), whereas reduced baseline diameter (but increases in task-evoked dilations) would be associated with task engagement (exploitation). Findings in three experiments were consistent with these predictions, suggesting that pupillometry may be useful as an index of both control state and, indirectly, locus coeruleus function.     

A validation of well-being and happiness surveys for administration via the Internet

Internet research is appealing because it is a cost- and time-efficient way to access a large number of participants; however, the validity of Internet research for important subjective well-being (SWB) surveys has not been adequately assessed. The goal of the present study was to validate the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS; Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985), the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS-X; Watson & Clark, 1994), and the Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS; Lyubomirsky & Lepper, 1999) for use on the Internet. This study compared the quality of data collected using paper-based (paper-and-pencil version in a lab setting), computer-based (Web-based version in a lab setting), and Internet (Web-based version on a computer of the participant’s choosing) surveys for these three measures of SWB. The paper-based and computer-based experiment recruited two college student samples; the Internet experiments recruited a college student sample and an adult sample responding to ads on different social-networking Web sites. This study provides support for the reliability, validity, and generalizability of the Internet format of the SWLS, PANAS-X, and SHS. Across the three experiments, the results indicate that the computer-based and Internet surveys had means, standard deviations, reliabilities, and factor structures that were similar to those of the paper-based versions. The discussion examines the difficulty of higher attrition for the Internet version, the need to examine reverse-coded items in the future, and the possibility that unhappy individuals are more likely to participate in Internet surveys of SWB.     

Vegetative state: efforts to curb misdiagnosis

Media reports on the case of Rom Houben have constituted a new reminder of the risks of misdiagnosis with cases with apparent vegetative state, particularly when following the clinical consensus of the care team as diagnostic criterion. Systematic use of behavioral and non-behavioral assessment strategies (e.g., behavioral scales, event-related potentials, and neuro-imaging) may help reduce the aforementioned risks. A new learning assessment strategy could also be considered part of the assessment to extend the evaluation process. Signs of learning might be viewed as forms of concrete knowledge representing a basic level of non-reflective consciousness.     

Real behavior in virtual environments: psychology experiments in a simple virtual-reality paradigm using video games

The purpose of this research was to illustrate the broad usefulness of simple video-game-based virtual environments (VEs) for psychological research on real-world behavior. To this end, this research explored several high-level social phenomena in a simple, inexpensive computer-game environment: the reduced likelihood of helping under time pressure and the bystander effect, which is reduced helping in the presence of bystanders. In the first experiment, participants had to find the exit in a virtual labyrinth under either high or low time pressure. They encountered rooms with and without virtual bystanders, and in each room, a virtual person requested assistance. Participants helped significantly less frequently under time pressure but the presence/absence of a small number of bystanders did not significantly moderate helping. The second experiment increased the number of virtual bystanders, and participants were instructed to imagine that these were real people. Participants helped significantly less in rooms with large numbers of bystanders compared to rooms with no bystanders, thus demonstrating a bystander effect. These results indicate that even sophisticated high-level social behaviors can be observed and experimentally manipulated in simple VEs, thus implying the broad usefulness of this paradigm in psychological research as a good compromise between experimental control and ecological validity.     

To Die or Not to Die: Zhuangzi’s Three Immortalities

While it is known that the problem of death is a central topic animating the author/s of the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi, leading Chinese and Western interpretations of this Chinese classic have usually focused much more on other themes and aspects. Even more problematic in the author’s view is the fact that the Zhuangzi has been closely associated with one death philosophy, the set of concepts, arguments and figures present in chapter 6. This study puts death back at the very center of the Zhuangzian philosophical project yet insisting at the same time on the difficulties of defending one philosophy of death since different passages introduce new concepts, imagery, nuances and perspectives. The Zhuangzi’s focus on death is being situated within a discussion of the “immortality” ideal––accepting a total death (“to die”) or find refuge in immortality ideals (“not to die”). Different passages from the Inner Chapters are being presented as proposing three distinct immortality projects or strategies––personal, social and cosmic––to address the problem of death. E. Becker’s reflections on the challenge of mortality and the psychological need of a “beyond” in order to cope with the consciousness of death provide the basic theoretical framework underlying the discussion of the Zhuangzi in this essay.     

Contextual control of inhibition with reinforcement: adaptation and timing mechanisms

Four experiments with rats studied the effects of switching the context after Pavlovian conditioning. In three conditioned suppression experiments, a large number of conditioning trials created "inhibition with reinforcement" (IWR), in which fear of the conditional stimulus (CS) reached a maximum and then declined despite continued CS-unconditional stimulus pairings. When IWR occurred, a context switch augmented fear of the CS; IWR and augmentation were highly correlated. Neither IWR nor augmentation resulted from inhibition of delay (IOD): In conditioned suppression, IWR and augmentation occurred without IOD (Experiment 3), and in appetitive conditioning (Experiment 4), IOD occurred without IWR or augmentation. IWR may occur in conditioned suppression because the animal adapts to fear of the CS in a context-specific manner. The authors discuss several implications.