Youth Action Research for Prevention: A Multi-level Intervention Designed to Increase Efficacy and Empowerment Among Urban Youth

Youth Action Research for Prevention (YARP), a federally funded research and demonstration intervention, utilizes youth empowerment as the cornerstone of a multi-level intervention designed to reduce and/or delay onset of drug and sex risk, while increasing individual and collective efficacy and educational expectations. The intervention, located in Hartford Connecticut, served 114 African-Caribbean and Latino high school youth in a community education setting and a matched comparison group of 202 youth from 2001 to 2004. The strategy used in YARP begins with individuals, forges group identity and cohesion, trains youth as a group to use research to understand their community better (formative community ethnography), and then engages them in using the research for social action at multiple levels in community settings (policy, school-based, parental etc.) Engagement in community activism has, in turn, an effect on individual and collective efficacy and individual behavioral change. This approach is unique insofar as it differs from multilevel interventions that create approaches to attack multiple levels simultaneously. We describe the YARP intervention and employ qualitative and quantitative data from the quasi-experimental evaluation study design to assess the way in which the YARP approach empowered individual youth and groups of youth (youth networks) to engage in social action in their schools, communities and at the policy level, which in turn affected their attitudes and behaviors.     

Intelligence and persisting with medication for two years: Analysis in a randomised controlled trial

The study examined whether verbal intelligence is associated with persisting to take medication for up to two years. The design is a prospective follow-up of compliance with taking medication in high-risk individuals participating in a randomised, placebo-controlled trial set in Central Scotland. Participants were 1993 people aged between 50 and 77 years with an ankle brachial index ≤ 0.95. The medication was 100 mg aspirin or placebo daily.The principal outcome measure was continuing with taking medication or stopping it due to having ‘changed one's mind’. Higher verbal intelligence was associated with a greater likelihood of continuing to take medication up to two years after randomisation. For a standard deviation increase in Mill Hill Vocabulary Scale score, risk of stopping medication in the first two years of the study was 0.75 (95% CI 0.64 to 0.87, p < 0.001). Comparing the highest and lowest quartiles of IQ, the lowest IQ group's relative rate of stopping medication was 2.51 (95% CI 1.52 to 4.22). The effect was not attenuated after adjustment for sex, smoking, or level of deprivation. Verbal intelligence is associated with continuing, medium-to-long term engagement with health self-care, even in the face of uncertainty about whether active treatment is being received, whether the treatment is known to be effective in general, and whether it will be helpful to the individual taking it. Such persisting with potentially helpful health behaviours in the face of uncertainty might partly explain why people with higher intelligence live longer and suffer less morbidity from chronic diseases.     

Accentuating the positive in adolescent patients

One is forced to distinguish ”positive“ transference from ”negative“ transference, the transference of affectionate feeling from that of hostile feeling, and to deal separately with the two varieties of the transference to the physician ? Where the capacity to transfer feeling has come to be of an essentially negative order ? the possibility of influence or cure ceases.     

Spirituality,Religion, and CACREP Curriculum Standards

Survey data of the general population, counselors, and counselor educators indicate that spiritual and religious issues are therapeutically relevant, ethically appropriate, and potentially significant topics for counseling and counselor education in secular settings. In this article, the authors propose that a balanced, thoughtful inclusion of these topics in Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) core curriculum areas is a reasonable and sound approach to preparing counselors to work ethically and effectively with these issues in secular counseling settings. Methods and examples for achieving this inclusion are presented for each of the CACREP core curriculum areas.     

Spatial probability as an attentional cue in visual search

We investigated the role of spatial probabilities in target location during participants' performance of a visual search task. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that spatial probabilities could serve as a powerful attentional bias that produced faster detection of targets in high-probability locations than of those in low- or random-probability locations. The effect could not be explained by repetition priming alone. Moreover, responses to targets in low-probability locations were slowed only when a distractor was present in the high-probability location. In Experiments 3-5, we compared the effects of spatial probability with an explicit endogenous cue and a salient exogenous cue. Facilitation due to spatial probability was independent of any benefit afforded by the explicit endogenous cue but interacted with the salient exogenous cue, such that the exogenous cue validity effect was compressed for targets in the high-probability location. Together, these results suggest that the spatial probabilities governing target location constitute a potent bias of visual processing and, as such, can be considered an attentional cue that differs from both typical explicit endogenous and salient exogenous cues.     

Nipping psychopathy in the bud: an examination of the convergent, predictive, and theoretical utility of the PCL-YV among adolescent girls

Over the last decade rates of violence among adolescent girls have increased. Within high-risk contexts, urgent calls for assessment options have resulted in the extension of adult and male-based instruments to adolescent females in spite of the absence of strong empirical support. The current study evaluates the downward extension of psychopathy within a population of female juvenile offenders (N=125). The convergent and predictive validity of the Psychopathy Checklist-Youth Version (PCL-YV) were evaluated within a structural equation modeling (SEM) framework. Results indicated that while a specific component of psychopathy, deficient affective experience, was related to aggression, the effect was negated once victimization experiences were entered into the models. In addition, PCL-YV scores were not predictive of future offending, while victimization experiences significantly increased the odds of re-offending. Implications for research, policy, and clinical practice are discussed.     

The emergence of gender differences in physical aggression in the context of conflict between young peers

It is well known that a gender difference in physical aggression emerges by the preschool years. We tested the hypothesis that the gender difference is partly due to changing tactics in peer interaction. Observations of girls’ and boys’ social initiatives and reactions to opportunities for conflict were made, using the Peer Interaction Coding System (PICS) in four independent samples of children between 9 and 36 months of age, which were aggregated to form a summary data set (N= 323), divided into two age bands (below or above 24 months of age). Linear mixed‐model analyses revealed significant age by gender interactions in the use of bodily force in response to peers’ initiatives and in the tendency to use bodily force at later stages of conflicts with peers. The gender difference in use of force was not explained by differences in the use of verbal tactics. These cross‐sectional findings suggest that girls are initially more likely than boys to use reactive aggression, but then desist, whereas boys increase their use of force to defend their territory and possessions. The difference between older and younger girls likely reflects girls’ abilities to regulate their behaviour in response to social challenges and the fact that girls are explicitly socialized to yield to peers’ demands.