Person–Environment Interaction in a New Secure Forensic State Psychiatric Hospital

This study examined the person–environment interaction effects of environmental design on ward climate, safety, job satisfaction, and treatment outcomes within a new high security forensic psychiatric facility. Participants included male and female adult psychiatric inpatients and staff members at different security stages. Data were collected once before and twice after the experimental group moved into the new building. The control group remained in the same facilities. Contrary to expectations, the new building had limited effects on the measured variables. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Goal-setting in diabetes self-management: A systematic review and meta-analysis examining content and effectiveness of goal-setting interventions

Background: Goal-setting is recommended and widely used within diabetes self-management programmes. However, empirical evidence around its effectiveness lacks clarity. This review aims to evaluate the effectiveness of goal-setting interventions on diabetes outcomes and to determine which behaviour change techniques (BCTs) are frequently used within these interventions.

Methods: A systematic search identified 14 studies, describing 12 interventions targeting diabetic-control which incorporated goal-setting as the main intervention strategy. Study characteristics, outcome measures and effect sizes of the included studies were extracted and checked by two authors. The BCT taxonomy v1 was used to identify intervention content. Meta-analyses were conducted to assess intervention effects on the primary outcome of average blood glucose levels (HbA1c) and on body-weight. Psycho-social and behavioural outcomes were summarised in narrative syntheses.

Results: Significant post-intervention improvements in HbA1C were found (?.22, 95% CI, ?.40, ?.04) across studies. No other main effects were identified. The BCT ‘goal-setting (behaviour)’ was most frequently implemented and was identified in 84% of the interventions.

Conclusions: Goal-setting interventions appear to be associated with reduced HbA1C levels. However, the low numbers of studies identified and the risk biases across studies suggest more research is needed to further explore goal-setting BCTs in diabetes self-management.     

Differences in Unit Cohesion and Combat-Related Mental Health Problems Based on Attachment Styles in US Military Veterans

This study explored the differences in perceived unit cohesion, trauma symptoms, depression symptoms, and anxiety symptoms controlling for childhood trauma, based on attachment style in US military veterans. Previous studies have reported that higher levels of military unit cohesion, bonding through the social relationships between service members and their larger units, and secure attachment, are negatively associated with trauma symptoms, depression symptoms, and anxiety symptoms in veterans. This study examined mental health distress symptoms as well as military unit cohesion across attachment styles. Results suggest mean differences in trauma symptoms, depression symptoms, and anxiety symptoms across attachment styles. However, there was no difference in perceived unit cohesion across the four attachment styles. Those using fearful-avoidant attachment styles reported the highest mean trauma, depression, and anxiety symptoms followed by those using a dismissing-avoidant attachment style. Those using a secure attachment style reported the least mean trauma, depression, and anxiety symptoms. Implications for assessing and treating avoidant type attachment styles are discussed.     

Cross-Cultural Measurement of Positive and Negative Emotions in Adolescence: Evidence from Three Countries

Journal of Happiness Studies - Cross-cultural assessment of affective well-being among adolescents has received scarce attention in positive psychological research. The present study investigated...     

Absence of exposure time influence on lateralized face recognition and object naming latency tasks

J. Sergent (1982, Perception & Psychophysics, 31, 451-461; 1983, Psychological Bulletin, 93, 481-512) postulates that the left cerebral hemisphere preferentially extracts higher spatial frequency information, while the right hemisphere preferentially extracts lower frequency spatial information, from the visual scene. According to this view, shorter exposure times favor better right than left hemisphere performance, while longer exposure times favor better left than right hemisphere performance on tachistoscopic laterality tasks. We studied the effects of a threefold variation (40 msec versus 120 msec) in exposure duration, with constant 3-mL luminance, on face recognition and on object naming latency task performances. These are the same stimulus parameters employed by J. Sergent (1983, Psychological Bulletin, 93, 481-512) to demonstrate exposure duration effects in a task requiring the judgment of the sex of models from face photographs. We found the expected LVF superiority on the face recognition task and RVF superiority on the object naming task. There was, however, no influence of exposure duration on the performances. It is concluded that these tasks, which tap established lateralized processing asymmetries, are quite robust in their resistance to exposure time influence.     

Reducing Youth Access to Alcohol: Findings from a Community-Based Randomized Trial

Underage drinking continues to be an important public health problem and a challenge to the substance abuse prevention field. Community-based interventions designed to more rigorously control underage access to alcohol through retailer education and greater enforcement of underage drinking laws have been advocated as potentially effective strategies to help address this problem, but studies designed to evaluate such interventions are sparse. To address this issue we conducted a randomized trial involving 36 communities to test the combined effectiveness of five interrelated intervention components designed to reduce underage access to alcohol. The intervention was found to be effective in reducing the likelihood that retail clerks would sell alcohol to underage-looking buyers, but did not reduce underage drinking or the perceived availability of alcohol among high school students. Post hoc analyses, however, revealed significant associations between the level of underage drinking law enforcement in the intervention communities and reductions in both 30-day use of alcohol and binge drinking. The findings highlight the difficulty in reducing youth drinking even when efforts to curtail retail access are successful. Study findings also suggest that high intensity implementation of underage drinking law enforcement can reduce underage drinking. Any such effects of enhanced enforcement on underage drinking appear to be more directly attributable to an increase in perceived likelihood of enforcement and the resultant perceived inconveniences and/or sanctions to potential drinkers, than to a reduction in access to alcohol per se.     

A Dyadic Perspective on Speech Accommodation and Social Connection: Both Partners' Rejection Sensitivity Matters

Findings from confederate paradigms predict that mimicry is an adaptive route to social connection for rejection‐sensitive individuals (Lakin, Chartrand, & Arkin, 2008). However, dyadic perspectives predict that whether mimicry leads to perceived connection depends on the rejection sensitivity (RS) of both partners in an interaction. We investigated these predictions in 50 college women who completed a dyadic cooperative task in which members were matched or mismatched in being dispositionally high or low in RS. We used a psycholinguistics paradigm to assess, through independent listeners' judgments (N = 162), how much interacting individuals accommodate phonetic aspects of their speech toward each other. Results confirmed predictions from confederate paradigms in matched RS dyads. However, mismatched dyads showed an asymmetry in levels of accommodation and perceived connection: Those high in RS accommodated more than their low‐RS partner but emerged feeling less connected. Mediational analyses indicated that low‐RS individuals' nonaccommodation in mismatched dyads helped explain their high‐RS partners' relatively low perceived connection to them. Establishing whether mimicry is an adaptive route to social connection requires analyzing mimicry as a dyadic process influenced by the needs of each dyad member.     

On Community Leadership: Stories About Collaboration in Action Research

This article provides an account of a 10-year collaborative documentation of community leadership in an African American community on the South side of Chicago. The stories are oriented to several critical incidents in the life course of the collaboration. They are told from the perspectives of one university professor, four graduate students, and one community leader. Together they provide an account of how this research was shaped by the interactions of the research team with members of the community, how research questions emerged, methodologies were developed, ways of gathering data were tried and tested, and interpretations of data unfolded. Special attention is given to the ways in which the process and products of this research contributed to the community's own process of leadership development. The stories also discuss the various roles participants in this collaboration played both in the academic arena and in the community, and how they experienced gender, race, nationality, and social status.