An Approach to Examining the Proximal and Intermediate Outcomes of an Intensive Family Preservation Program

This study examined the effects of the Boys Town In-Home Family Program (BT-IHFP) on parenting skills, family functioning, and child behavior for at-risk families involved with child protective services. The BT-IHFP is designed as a home-based, family-centered alternative to out-of-home placement with the goal of improving family functioning, keeping families together, and preventing further involvement with child protective services. The model uses a hands-on cognitive-behavioral approach, promotes family engagement, provides 24/7 services to families, and links families to community resources. While it is essential to examine ultimate, long-term outcomes such as family preservation, it is also important to investigate the proximal and intermediate outcomes that address the key changes in behavior that support successful long-term outcomes. The goals of this study were to (1) examine the pre-post change of proximal and intermediate outcomes and (2) examine if improvements in parenting skills, parental roles, and parental stress (proximal outcomes) will be related to improvements in child behavior at home, child behavior at school, and family functioning (intermediate outcomes). Inspecting intake and discharge data for 44 families, 94% were intact at discharge and significant pre-post improvements were found in proximal and intermediate outcomes. These findings suggest that this six-week intensive BT-IHFP holds promise for teaching at-risk families skills to promote positive family functioning.     

Student Development and Support using a Logotherapeutic Approach

This study reports on participants' meaning-centred experiences and perspectives after attending a logotherapy-based student development and support programme. Thirteen students who were enrolled in the first year of the academic programme, in health science programme at a South Africa university, were participants. Qualitative inquiry was used for the data collection and analysis. Findings suggest that a meaning-centred approach may prove to be beneficial for first year university students.     

Further Validational Data on “A Simple Course Evaluation Scale”

Two studies test the hypothesis that a child's scores on two factor analytically derived dimensions of social-emotional functioning are directly related to the frequency and type of his peer interactions. In the first study, three measures of observer rated peer interaction correlated negatively and significantly with high scores on the Apathy-Withdrawal dimension.

In the second study, observation-based frequency counts showed a high frequency of solitary behavior for apathetic-withdrawn children, as well as a number of qualitative differences between the groups in kinds of interactive behavior: angry-defiant children tended to be both verbal and negative-hostile, while apathetic-withdrawn children, when they ddid interact, were unable to cope with aggression directed at them by their peers.     

Association Between Socio-Ecological Risk Factor Clustering and Mental,Emotional, and Behavioral Problems in Hispanic Adolescents

Compared to non-Hispanic whites, Hispanic adolescents in the U.S. report higher rates of several mental, emotional, and behavioral problems such as substance use, sexual risk behaviors, and internalizing and externalizing problems. There is evidence of common pathways in the development of mental, emotional, and behavioral problems with certain subgroups of Hispanic adolescents being at greater risk. In the present article, we report analysis of baseline data for 959 Hispanic adolescents who participated in one of two randomized controlled trials evaluating a family-based preventive intervention. Utilizing latent class analysis, we identified subgroups of Hispanic adolescents based on socio-ecological risk and protective factors (e.g., parent–adolescent communication, parental involvement in school). Three distinct socio-ecological risk subgroups (high, medium, and low risk) were identified and exhibited significant differences from each other across a majority of socio-ecological risk and protective factors. Adolescents in higher socio-ecological risk subgroups reported greater mental, emotional, and behavioral problems across all outcomes. Individual comparisons revealed significant differences between the low socio-ecological risk group and both the medium and high socio-ecological risk group in lifetime alcohol use, smoking, and sex, as well as internalizing and externalizing problems. Implications for intervention include focusing on specific risk subgroups and targeting shared risk and protective factors rather than specific mental, emotional, and behavioral outcomes.     

Individual differences in the neural basis of causal inferencing

This study used fMRI to examine individual differences in the neural basis of causal inferencing. Participants with varying language skill levels, as indexed by scores on the vocabulary portion of the Nelson-Denny Reading Test, read four types of two-sentence passages in which causal relatedness (moderate and distant) and presence or absence of explicit clause connectives were orthogonally varied to manipulate coherence and cohesion during inference generation. Skilled readers showed better neural efficiency (less activation) during all context sentences and during all inference conditions. Increased activation in less-skilled readers was most extensively distributed in the right hemisphere (RH) homologues of left hemisphere (LH) language areas, especially in the most difficult passage types. Skilled readers also showed greater sensitivity to coherence (greater activation and synchronization in moderately related than distantly related passages) whereas less-skilled readers showed sensitivity to cohesion (greater activation and synchronization when clause connectives were present than when they were not). These finding support the hypothesis that skilled reading comprehension requires recruitment of the RH on an “as needed” basis. We describe the dynamic spillover hypothesis, a new theoretical framework that outlines the conditions under which RH language contributions are most likely evoked.     

MORAL INJURY*

The devastating effect on the self of moral injury, often a core component of trauma, occurring when one’s actions have profoundly violated one’s code of ethics, when one has been a victim of such violation, or when one has been a passive witness, has been extensively explored as it has occurred in veterans of the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Two examples illustrate its prevalence in civilian life. The literature shows violation of expected empathy from and for others, inherent in our nature, is more devastating than violation of the ethical code of our culture or sub-culture, adherence to which becomes urgent as our need emerges to belong to the culture or subculture of which we are a part, values which often contradict our innate sense of “what is right.”     

Male susceptibility to attentional capture by power cues

The present investigation explores the possibility that power has increased salience among males but not females. Evidence indicates that stimuli that are self-relevant or related to chronic goals are more likely to capture attention than neutral information. Across three studies we explore the possibility that the premium males place on power influences how they attend to their environment. Consistent with the common belief that power more readily captures their attention, results indicate that males “dwell” longer on power-related cues (Experiment 1) and are more subject to distraction by task-irrelevant power cues (Experiment 2) than are females. Experiment 3 demonstrates that this increased salience has enduring social consequences by increasing the likelihood that males commit power-relevant material to memory.     

Aretaic Appraisal and Practical Reasons

When we criticize someone for being unjust, deceitful, or imprudent—or commend him as just, truthful, or wise—what is the content of our evaluation? On one way of thinking, evaluating agents in terms that employ aretaic concepts evaluates how they regulate their actions (and judgment‐sensitive attitudes) in light of the reasons that bear on them. On this virtue‐centered view of practical reasons appraisal, evaluations of agents in terms of ethical virtues (and vices) are, inter alia, evaluations of them as practical reasoners. Here I consider and respond to an objection that threatens to debunk the virtue‐centered view.     

Habituation and novelty detection fNIRS brain responses in 5‐ and 8‐month‐old infants: The Gambia and UK

The first 1,000 days of life are a critical window of vulnerability to exposure to socioeconomic and health challenges (i.e. poverty/undernutrition). The Brain Imaging for Global Health (BRIGHT) project has been established to deliver longitudinal measures of brain development from 0 to 24 months in UK and Gambian infants and to assess the impact of early adversity. Here results from the Habituation‐Novelty Detection (HaND) functional near‐infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) task at 5 and 8 months are presented (N = 62 UK; N = 115 Gambia). In the UK cohort distinct patterns of habituation and recovery of response to novelty are seen, becoming more robust from 5 to 8 months of age. In The Gambia, an attenuated habituation response is evident: a larger number of trials are required before the response sufficiently suppresses relative to the response during the first presented trials. Furthermore, recovery of response to novelty is not evident at 5 or 8 months of age. As this longitudinal study continues in The Gambia, the parallel collection of socioeconomic, caregiving, health and nutrition data will allow us to stratify how individual trajectories of habituation and recovery of response to novelty associate with different risk factors and adaptive mechanisms in greater depth. Given the increasing interest in the use of neuroimaging methods within global neurocognitive developmental studies, this study provides a novel cross‐culturally appropriate paradigm for the study of brain responses associated with attention and learning mechanisms across early development.     

Relationships between health behaviors,posttraumatic stress disorder,and comorbid general anxiety and depression

Poor health outcomes associated with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may reflect engagement in unhealthy behaviors that increase morbidity risk and disengagement in healthy behaviors that decrease morbidity risk. Although research supports this pattern, findings are not definitive, particularly for healthy behaviors. Many studies have not controlled for effects of concurrent generalized anxiety and depression, which might explain conflicting findings. To address this limitation, we used an online cross-sectional research design and multivariate multilevel modelling to evaluate associations between a multitude of health behaviors (i.e. sedentary behavior, sleep quality, physical activity, eating habits, alcohol use and substance use) and PTSD, while adjusting for comorbid generalized anxiety and depression, in a sample of trauma-exposed individuals (N = 246). Our results indicate that PTSD and comorbid generalized anxiety and depression symptoms were differentially associated with specific health constructs. Specifically, sedentary behavior and poor sleep quality were associated with PTSD, whereas low physical activity, poor sleep quality, and unhealthy eating habits were associated with depression. Both increased alcohol and substance use were associated with generalized anxiety. Results from our study highlight the need to conceptualize associations between health behaviors and specific psychological symptoms in a comprehensive manner as part of clinical presentations of PTSD.