Equality in hiring permanent resident foreign nationals in the United States: when loyalty is the question, but not the issue

Permanent resident foreign nationals, who have been legally admitted to the United States, have the right to work. However, when deciding the constitutionality of a state statute that requires citizenship for a public domain job, the rights of permanent residents to seek gainful employment are balanced against the rights of state governments to ensure that important sovereign functions are entrusted only to their citizens. Several important Supreme Court decisions have been 5/4 split decisions because of this tension and dissenting judges have countered that the majority rulings were based on presumptions, and not facts, that citizens are more loyal than permanent residents. The judges have also disagreed about the level, within a civil service hierarchy, below which a citizenship requirement is unconstitutional. This article reviews United States court decisions for relevant issues and solutions, and shows how empirical studies in the area of human resource management can help resolve the issues that have caused the dissent. The analysis will be useful to legal and human resource professionals in the U.S. and other countries affected by surging global migration.     

The daily inventory of stressful events: an interview-based approach for measuring daily stressors

This study introduces the Daily Inventory of Stressful Events (DISE), an interview-based approach to the measurement of multiple aspects of daily stressors through daily telephone interviews. Using a U.S. national sample of adults aged 25 to 74 (N = 1,031), the prevalence as well as the affective and physical correlates of daily stressors are examined. Respondents had at least one daily stressor on 40 percent of the study days and multiple stressors on 11 percent of the study days. The most common class of stressors was interpersonal tension followed by work-related stressors for men and network stressors (events that occur to close others) for women. Stressors that involved danger of loss were more prevalent than stressors in which loss actually occurred. Regression analyses showed that specific types of daily stressors such as interpersonal tensions and network stressors were unique predictors of both health symptoms and mood.     

Long-term memory for concepts in a California sea lion (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Zalophus californianus</Emphasis>)

An adult California sea lion (Zalophus californianus) with extensive experience in performing discrimination learning tasks was tested to evaluate her long-term memory for two previously learned concepts. An associative concept, that of equivalence classification, was retested after a retention interval of approximately 1 year. The sea lion had originally shown emergent equivalence classification with nonsimilarity-based classes of stimuli in a simple discrimination repeated-reversal procedure as well as in a matching-to-sample procedure. The 1-year memory test revealed no decrement in classification performance in either procedure. A relational concept, that of generalized identity matching, was retested after approximately 10 years. The sea lion had originally received trial-and-error exemplar training with identity matching-to-sample problems prior to transferring the concept to novel stimulus configurations. In the 10-year memory test, the sea lion immediately and reliably applied the previously established identity concept to familiar and novel sets of matching problems. These are the first reports of long-term conceptual memory in a nonprimate species. The experimental findings are consistent with a variety of observations of sea lions in natural settings, which indicate that natal sites, feeding areas, and individuals may be remembered over long periods of time. Electronic Supplementary Material is available if you access this article at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10071-002-0153-8. On that page (frame on the left side), a link takes you directly to the supplementary material. Electronic Publication     

Psychosocial Treatment Strategies in the MTA Study: Rationale, Methods, and Critical Issues in Design and Implementation

The Collaborative Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), the MTA, is the first multisite, cooperative agreement treatment study of children, and the largest psychiatric/psychological treatment trial ever conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health. It examines the effectiveness of Medication vs. Psychosocial treatment vs. their combination for treatment of ADHD and compares these experimental arms to each other and to routine community care. In a parallel group design, 579 (male and female) ADHD children, aged 7–9 years, 11 months, were randomly assigned to one of the four experimental arms, and then received 14 months of prescribed treatment (or community care) with periodic reassessments. After delineating the theoretical and empirical rationales for Psychosocial treatment of ADHD, we describe the MTA's Psychosocial Treatment strategy applied to all children in two of the four experimental arms (Psychosocial treatment alone; Combined treatment). Psychosocial treatment consisted of three major components: a Parent Training component, a two-part School Intervention component, and a child treatment component anchored in an intensive Summer Treatment Program. Components were selected based on evidence of treatment efficacy and because they address comprehensive symptom targets, settings, comorbidities, and functional domains. We delineate key conceptual and logistical issues faced by clinical researchers in design and implementation of Psychosocial research with examples of how these issues were addressed in the MTA study.Deceased     

Key Word Index Volume 4

Other Index

Key Word Index Volume 4     

Treatment for sexually abused children and adolescents

The authors review research demonstrating the variable effects of childhood sexual abuse, the need for intervention, and the effectiveness of available treatment models. The well-controlled treatment-outcome studies reviewed do not focus on sensationalistic fringe treatments that treat sexually abused children as a special class of patients. Instead, studies demonstrate empirical evidence for extending and modifying treatment models from mainstream clinical child psychology to sexually abused children. The authors propose a continuum of interventions to meet the needs of this heterogeneous group. Interventions range from psychoeducation and screening, to short-term, abuse-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy with family involvement, to more comprehensive long-term plans for multiproblem cases. Last discussed are gaps in the research and suggestions for future research to address the pressing dilemmas faced by clinicians and policymakers.     

Asymmetries in a unilateral flanker task depend on the direction of the response: the role of attentional shift and perceptual grouping

Four experiments were conducted using a flanker task with 1 distractor appearing either on the left or right side of a central target. Responses were made on a keyboard aligned parallel to the displays. A larger flanker effect was obtained when the distractor was on the same side as the response. Two factors account for this asymmetry. First, when the flanker and target are identical, the 2 form a group that is assigned a spatial tag, creating a form of the Simon effect on the basis of the compatibility between the response keys and the group. Second, preparation of a lateralized response appears to entail a shift of visual attention in the corresponding direction, thus enhancing processing of the flanker on the response side. Consistent with the 2nd hypothesis, participants were more likely to correctly recognize letters that were briefly presented at the distractor position on the same side as the response.     

Group Psychotherapy as the Century Turns: Toward a Philosophy of Care

A futuristic essay should be written by two persons so as to invoke Bion's basic assumption pairing (Bion, 1964) with its connotations of hope, no matter how irrational. Accordingly, I split my self in two parts, one, the hard-headed realist, and the other, the prophetic visionary. As idealized identities, neither comes easily to me. But, perhaps heeding the two has permitted the articulation of some presentable notions about group psychotherapy and its evolving fate.     

The role of reinforcement contingencies in chronic alcoholism: An experimental analysis of one case

investigators have questioned chronic alcoholics and round that some of them have returned to normal social drinking (Davies, 1962; Lemere, 1953; Nørvig and Nielsen, 1956; Selzer and Holloway. 1957; and Shea, 1954). These findings would seem inconsistent with such notions as loss of control or craving as the basis of compulsive drinking. Moreover, antecedents and consequences of these explanatory constructs, have not been elucidated. The purpose of this research was to make an intensive study of a single subject to see if specific conditions could be identified under which a chronic alcoholic's drinking could be controlled, in a setting in which environmental variables could be systematically varied and drinking behavior documented.