Exploring Indigenous Mental Health Practices: The Roles of Healers and Helpers in Promoting Well‐Being in People of Color

The authors present an extensive literature review and discuss the cultural relevance of indigenous healing practices in promoting psychological, physical, and spiritual well‐being in people of color. Suggestions are also presented for ways counselors might work with indigenous healing resources to promote the well‐being of people of color.     

Is there None Left to Say Anything?

Abstract. Remarks made by Lutheran leaders in Africa indicate that the churches have not been responding to the crisis of the HIV/AIDS pandemic sufficiently. In this essay I ask how the churches would be better prepared to act and also, more broadly, how the churches act to begin with. The dialogue between religion and science can assist us with both tasks as we consider the challenge of HIV/AIDS as a focus for this dialogue. First, analysis by social scientists can uncover what problems face any effort to motivate churches to act—and, for that matter, any individual member of a church group. I argue, further, that we can discover the difficulties associated with producing action by religious communities by looking not at abstract theological ideas but by investigating the way those ideas are conveyed in worship. I explore the worship patterns of Lutherans to show what sort of view is actually produced by the week‐to‐week messages of liturgical texts. I contend that a different approach both to worship and to action can be produced by reconsidering our views of reality as seen through the eyes of contemporary science.     

A computational cognitive model of syntactic priming

The psycholinguistic literature has identified two syntactic adaptation effects in language production: rapidly decaying short-term priming and long-lasting adaptation. To explain both effects, we present an ACT-R model of syntactic priming based on a wide-coverage, lexicalized syntactic theory that explains priming as facilitation of lexical access. In this model, two well-established ACT-R mechanisms, base-level learning and spreading activation, account for long-term adaptation and short-term priming, respectively. Our model simulates incremental language production and in a series of modeling studies, we show that it accounts for (a) the inverse frequency interaction; (b) the absence of a decay in long-term priming; and (c) the cumulativity of long-term adaptation. The model also explains the lexical boost effect and the fact that it only applies to short-term priming. We also present corpus data that verify a prediction of the model, that is, that the lexical boost affects all lexical material, rather than just heads.     

School Counselors as Social Capital: The Effects of High School College Counseling on College Application Rates

Using social capital theory as a framework, the authors examined data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (Ingels, Pratt, Rogers, Siegel, & Stutts, 2004) to investigate how student contact with high school counselors about college information and other college‐related variables influence students' college application rates. In addition to some college‐related variables, the number of school counselors and student contacts were significant predictors of college application rates. Implications for school counselors and counselor training are included.     

Practicing What You Preach: Infidelity Attitudes as a Predictor of Fidelity

The current studies used the Perceptions of Dating Infidelity Scale (PDIS), which identifies attitudes toward three types of behaviors indicative of cheating: Ambiguous, Deceptive, and Explicit behaviors, to predict actual infidelity behaviors. Participants reported their attitude toward these behaviors and then reported their willingness to engage in these behaviors with a hypothetical target (Study 1) and reported actually engaging in these behaviors over the course of one month (Study 2). Study 1 showed that attitudes for Ambiguous and Deceptive behaviors significantly predict a willingness to engage in these behaviors with a hypothetical target. Study 2 showed that attitudes toward Ambiguous behaviors significantly predict actual engagement in Ambiguous behaviors during the course of one month.     

Psychometric properties of the Miranda Rights Comprehension Instruments with a juvenile justice sample

This article describes the psychometric properties of the Miranda Rights Comprehension Instruments, the revised version of Grisso's Miranda instruments. The original instruments demonstrated good reliability and validity in a normative sample. The revised instruments updated the content of the original instruments and were administered to a sample of 183 youth in pre- and postadjudication facilities. Analyses were conducted to establish the psychometric properties of the revised instruments and included similar analyses to those conducted by Grisso, as well as additional calculations (e.g., standard errors of measurement, intraclass correlation coefficients, Kappa coefficients). Results revealed sound psychometric properties, similar to those observed for the original instruments.     

Positive Indicators of Child Well-Being: A Conceptual Framework, Measures, and Methodological Issues

This article suggests a comprehensive conceptual framework which identifies constructs for positive well-being as well as potential indicators and extant measures that fit with those constructs. In addition, the article reviews existing data sources for examples of positive measures that are found in the proposed framework as well as research studies that have been successful in measuring these indicators. The article then notes the data and measurement gaps that exist in comprehensively measuring the positive in children and youth. Finally, it identifies a number of conceptual and methodological issues that need consideration as efforts to define and measure positive indicators of well-being and well-becoming go forward. We argue that positive indicators represent good science, reflect and promote a positive vision of children, and establish positive goals for nations.     

The vocational well-being of workers with childhood onset of disability: Life satisfaction and perceived workplace discrimination

Workers with disabilities are understudied, and workers with childhood onset of disability have been excluded from many of the studies on disability and work that do exist. This research compares the effects of childhood and adult onset of disability in a nationally representative sample of workers with disabilities. Educational disruptions due to disability status in childhood are negatively associated with life satisfaction and positively associated with perceived discrimination. Although age is associated with increased life satisfaction and decreased perceptions of discrimination for workers with adult disability onset, age is unrelated to these outcomes for workers with childhood disability onset. Receiving workplace accommodations is positively associated with satisfaction and negatively associated with discrimination for both groups, however, these relationships are stronger in magnitude for the childhood disability onset group. Organizational environments, both in education and in the workplace, play a critical role in the vocational well-being of workers with childhood disability onset.