Profiles of Resilience and Psychosocial Outcomes among Young Black Gay and Bisexual Men

Young Black gay/bisexual men (YBGBM) are affected by contextual stressors—namely syndemic conditions and minority stress—that threaten their health and well‐being. Resilience is a process through which YBGBM achieve positive psychosocial outcomes in the face of adverse conditions. Self‐efficacy, hardiness and adaptive coping, and social support may be important resilience factors for YBGBM. This study explores different profiles of these resilience factors in 228 YBGBM in New York City and compares profiles on psychological distress, mental health, and other psychosocial factors. Four profiles of resilience were identified: (a) Low self‐efficacy and hardiness/adaptive coping (23.5%); (b) Low peer and parental support (21.2%); (c) High peer support, low father support (34.5%); and (d) High father and mother support, self‐efficacy, and hardiness/adaptive coping (20.8%). YBGBM in profile 1 scored markedly higher on distress (d = .74) and lower on mental health functioning (d = .93) compared to men in the other profiles. Results suggest that self‐efficacy and hardiness/adaptive coping may play a more important role in protecting YBGBM from risks compared to social support and should be targeted in interventions. The findings show that resilience is a multidimensional construct and support the notion that there are different patterns of resilience among YBGBM.     

Development of egocentric and allocentric spatial representations from childhood to elderly age

Spatial reference frames are fundamental to represent the position of objects or places. Although research has reported changes in spatial memory abilities during childhood and elderly age, no study has assessed reference frames processing during the entire lifespan using the same task. Here, we aimed at providing some preliminary data on the capacity to process reference frames in 283 healthy participants from 6 to 89 years of age. A spatial memory task requiring egocentric/allocentric verbal judgments about objects in peri-/extrapersonal space was used. The main goals were: (1) tracing a baseline of the normal process of development of these spatial components; (2) clarifying if reference frames are differently vulnerable to age-related effects. Results showed a symmetry between children of 6–7 years and older people of 80–89 years who were slower and less accurate than all other age groups. As regards processing time, age had a strong effect on the allocentric component, especially in extrapersonal space, with a longer time in 6- to 7-year-old children and 80- to 89-year-old adults. The egocentric component looked less affected by aging. Regarding the level of spatial ability (accuracy), the allocentric ability appeared less sensitive to age-related variations, whereas the egocentric ability progressively improved from 8 years and declined from 60 years. The symmetry in processing time and level of spatial ability is discussed in relation to the development of executive functions and to the structural and functional changes due to incomplete maturation (in youngest children) and deterioration (in oldest adults) of underlying cerebral areas.     

Collective Contexts in Conversation: Grounding by Proxy

Anecdotal evidence suggests that participants in conversation can sometimes act as a coalition. This implies a level of conversational organization in which groups of individuals form a coherent unit. This paper investigates the implications of this phenomenon for psycholinguistic and semantic models of shared context in dialog. We present a corpus study of multiparty dialog which shows that, in certain circumstances, people with different levels of overt involvement in a conversation, that is, one responding and one not, can nonetheless access the same shared context. We argue that contemporary models of shared context need to be adapted to capture this situation. To address this, we propose “grounding by proxy,” in which one person can respond on behalf of another, as a simple mechanism by which shared context can accumulate for a coalition as a whole. We explore this hypothesis experimentally by investigating how people in a task‐oriented coalition respond when their shared context appears to be weakened. The results provide evidence that, by default, coalition members act on each other's behalf, and when this fails they work to compensate. We conclude that this points to the need for a new concept of collective grounding acts and a corresponding concept of collective contexts in psycholinguistic and semantic models of dialog.     

The Munroe-Meyer Approach: Continuous Integration of Didactic Instruction,Research, and Clinical Practice

Increased demand for applied behavior analysis (ABA) services has increased the need for additional masters-level practitioners and doctoral-level academicians and clinical directors. Based on these needs, the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s (UNMC) Munroe-Meyer Institute has developed a PhD program. The academic structure at UNMC allowed us to create our PhD program in a relatively quick and efficient manner. Our PhD program has many unique features, including (a) close integration of didactic instruction with clinical and research training provided by leading experts in ABA in which students immediately apply concepts introduced in the classroom during coordinated clinical and research practica; (b) structured grant writing training in which students learn to write and submit an NIH-level grant; (c) financial support in the form of a stipend of $23,400 per year, free health benefits, and a full-tuition waiver for up to 12 credits per semester for UNMC courses (a benefits package worth approximately $50,000 per year for an out-of-state student); and (d) encouragement and financial support to present papers at local, regional, and national behavior analysis conferences.     

Common Factors Come Alive: Practical Strategies for Implementing Common Factors in MFT Training

Presently, MFT training programs teach MFT models in a way that emphasizes differences over similarities (Karam et al. in J Marital Fam Ther, 2015. doi: 10.1111/jmft.12096; Sprenkle and Blow in J Marital Fam Ther 30:113–129, 2004a. doi: 10.1111/j.1752-0606.2004.tb01228.x, in J Marital Fam Ther 30:151–157, b. doi: 10.1111/j.1752-0606.2004.tb01230.x; Sprenkle et al. in Common factors in couple and family therapy: the overlooked foundation for effective practice. Guilford Press, New York, 2009). Although teaching a variety of models and their distinctiveness is vital, doing so may create a competitive rather than integrative relationship between models (Karam et al. 2015). While Karam et al. 2015 encourage the inclusion of common factors in MFT training, we expand their justification for the importance of doing so We also explain conceptual and practical ways to include common factors in MFT training. Common factors instruction can fulfill multiple purposes: (a) create a sense of cohesiveness for programs which need to teach breadth of topics that can seem unrelated, (b) help prepare practitioners who need to learn many models well but will likely adopt an integrative approach, (c) align with basic skills training, (d) align with process research, and (e) enhance the richness of individual models. For each of these purposes, we provide an example of a classroom activity. We conclude with a unifying example of how one student may learn the common-factors perspective and weave it into her reflective practices as an MFT student.     

Collateral Reports and Cross-Informant Agreement about Adult Psychopathology in 14 Societies

To advance international mental health assessment, instruments that have been internationally validated are needed. To this end, we analyzed ratings from 14 societies on the Adult Behavior Checklist (ABCL), a collateral-report form parallel to the Adult Self-Report (ASR; Achenbach and Rescorla 2003) for ages 18 to 59. Both the ABCL and the ASR assess problems, personal strengths, and adaptive functioning. For a sample of 8322 see note below collaterals, we found strong consistency across societies regarding which ABCL problem items tended to obtain relatively low, medium, or high ratings. Most societal effect sizes (ESs) for problem scale scores were small to medium (< 13.9 %), but the ES for the ABCL Personal Strengths scale was 25 %. For most of the same participants (N = 8,302), we analyzed cross-informant agreement between self-reports on the ASR and collateral reports on the ABCL. Cross-informant correlations for problem scale scores averaged .47, with considerable societal variation. Problem score means were higher on the ASR than the ABCL in every society, but the size of the difference varied across societies. Mean item ratings on the ABCL and ASR were highly correlated within every society (mean r = .92), but within-dyad item rating agreement varied widely in every society (mean r = .39). In all societies, non-corroboration of self-reported deviance and of collateral-reported deviance was common. Overall findings indicated considerable similarity but also some important differences in collateral-reported problems and adaptive functioning across 14 societies.     

Childhood Interrupted: A Story of Loss,Separation, and Reconciliation

This essay presents a story of personal loss and childhood trauma experienced by the author in 1968. Written in autoethnographic form, the author narrates a particular time in his life when he lost his hearing and subsequently experienced “disrupted attachment”(Becker, 1997 Becker, G. (1997). Disrupted lives: How people create meaning in a chaotic world. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]) caused by forced separation from family on the day he began life at a residential school for deaf children. Forty-six years later, the author weaves together a narrative of loss and trauma followed by his own reflections, showing how he used writing conversation as a source of healing that allowed him reconcile with his past.