Brief report: The development of superstitious beliefs in the effectiveness of treatment of anger: Evidence for the importance of experimental program evaluation in applied settings

Many youth placed in out of home care have serious anger and aggression problems. These youth create much administrative and staff frustration. This frustration can cause program administrators to look to new treatment modalities whether inside or outside of their specific milieu for the therapeutic solutions to these problems. This randomized control group study provides an example of the importance of experimental program evaluation when an applied setting begins a drift towards the use of new treatment modalities. The results showed that both treatment and control groups improved over time but that there was no differences between groups in the daily number of angry incidents, the number of youth negatively terminated from the program, or self-report of state-trait anger expression. The results also suggest that without this research the noneffective intervention would have continued to be funded and given causative status for the observed improvements in referred youth behavior into the foreseeable future. Moreover, the development of these types of superstitious beliefs may lead child care organizations to spend scarce dollars on expensive treatments that do not increase the efficacy of the treatment as usual. Thus, this study shows that there are potential economic and treatment efficacy reasons for the use of experimental program evaluation when new treatments are implemented.     

Varying cautionary instructions, monetary incentives, and comorbid diagnostic training in malingered psychopathology research

In this article, we combine two analogue experiments in which we empirically examined three malingering methodological issues in individuals trained and instructed to simulate posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on the Trauma Symptom Inventory (TSI; Briere, 1995). In Experiment 1, we examined TSI scale effects of the following manipulations using a 2 x 2 design with 330 college students: (a) inclusion or exclusion of cautionary instructions regarding believability of participants' simulation and (b) different financial incentive levels. In Experiment 2, we examined comorbid psychiatric diagnostic training with 180 college students who were either trained to simulate PTSD and comorbid major depressive disorder or trained to simulate only PTSD. Caution main effects were significant for all but two TSI Clinical Scales, incentive main effects and interactions were only significant for one Clinical scale each, and the comorbidity manipulation did not yield any scale differences. We discuss malingering research design implications regarding the use of cautionary instructions, financial incentive levels, and comorbid training.     

A Rapid Systematic Review of Outcomes Studies in Genetic Counseling

As healthcare reimbursement is increasingly tied to value-of-service, it is critical for the genetic counselor (GC) profession to demonstrate the value added by GCs through outcomes research. We conducted a rapid systematic literature review to identify outcomes of genetic counseling. Web of Science (including PubMed) and CINAHL databases were systematically searched to identify articles meeting the following criteria: 1) measures were assessed before and after genetic counseling (pre-post design) or comparisons were made between a GC group vs. a non-GC group (comparative cohort design); 2) genetic counseling outcomes could be assessed independently of genetic testing outcomes, and 3) genetic counseling was conducted by masters-level genetic counselors, or non-physician providers. Twenty-three papers met the inclusion criteria. The majority of studies were in the cancer genetic setting and the most commonly measured outcomes included knowledge, anxiety or distress, satisfaction, perceived risk, genetic testing (intentions or receipt), health behaviors, and decisional conflict. Results suggest that genetic counseling can lead to increased knowledge, perceived personal control, positive health behaviors, and improved risk perception accuracy as well as decreases in anxiety, cancer-related worry, and decisional conflict. However, further studies are needed to evaluate a wider array of outcomes in more diverse genetic counseling settings.     

Assessing the external correlates of alternative factor models of the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-short form across three samples

This study investigated various theoretically relevant correlates of a short form of the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI; Lilienfeld & Andrews, 1996) using archival data from large undergraduate, foster care, and juvenile offender samples. External correlates of the 2 primary scales (PPI-I and PPI-II) and the Coldheartedness subscale were for the most part consistent with prior findings. Analyses for an alternate factor model in which the Fearlessness subscale loaded onto PPI-II (rather than PPI-I) resulted in relatively few substantial changes to the pattern of correlations with criterion measures, but a third factor that included the Coldheartedness and Carefree Nonplanfulness subscales functioned differently than Coldheartedness alone in these data.     

A Body Image Resilience Model for First-Year College Women

The purpose of this study was to investigate Choate’s (2005) theoretical model of body image resilience by examining the association among protective factors and body image. First-year college women (N?=?301) from two universities in the United States (one in the South and one in the Northeast) completed questionnaires assessing five protective factors. The hypothesized model fit the data well. As predicted, high family support; low levels of perceived sociocultural pressure from family, friends, and media regarding the importance of achieving a thin-and beautiful ideal; rejection of the superwoman ideal; positive physical self-concept; and active coping skills contributed to a woman’s overall wellness, which was associated with a more positive body image. Results can inform prevention for young women at risk for eating disorders and suggest specific counseling interventions to improve body dissatisfaction and initial maladaptive eating practices.     

A critical eye: Praise directed toward traits increases children’s eye fixations on errors and decreases motivation

Although there is evidence that praise of different types (i.e., generic vs. nongeneric) influences motivation, it is unclear how this occurs. Generic praise (e.g., ??You are smart??) conveys that a child possesses a trait responsible for their performance, whereas nongeneric praise (e.g., ??You worked hard??) conveys that performance is effort-based. Because praise conveys the basis for success, praise may change the interpretation and salience of errors. Specifically, generic praise may highlight the threatening nature of error (i.e., the child does not possess this trait). Because attention is drawn to threats in the environment, we expected generic praise to increase attention to error. We used eyetracking to measure implicit responses to errors (i.e., visual attention: fixation counts and durations) in order to determine the relation between visual attention and verbal reports of motivation (persistence and self-evaluations) in 30 four- to seven-year-old children. Children first saw pictures attributed to them, for which they received either generic or nongeneric praise. The children then saw pictures attributed to them that contained errors??that is, missing features. As a pretest and posttest, the children saw pictures that were ??drawn by other children,?? half of which contained errors. The results indicated that children who received generic praise (??you are a good drawer??) produced more and longer fixations on errors, both their ??own?? and on ??other children??s,?? than did children who received nongeneric praise (??you did a good job drawing??). More fixations on errors were related to lower persistence and lower self-evaluations. These results suggest that generic praise increases attention to errors because error threatens the possession of a positive trait.     

An analysis of hope as a psychological strength

Psychologists have placed an increased emphasis on identifying psychological strengths that foster healthy development. Hope, as operationalized in Snyder's hope theory Snyder, C. R., Hoza, B., Pelham, W. E., Rapoff, M., Ware, L., & Danovsky, M., et al. (1997). The development and validation of the children’s hope scale. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 22, 399-421], is one such cognitive-motivational construct that has received recent attention as a potential psychological strength that may serve as a protective factor for adolescents in the face of adverse life events. This longitudinal study, involving middle and high school students, provided evidence of (1) stability of hope reports of adolescents over a 1-year period, (2) predictive validity of adolescent hope reports, and (3) hope's functional role as a moderator in the relationship between stressful life events and adolescent well-being. Taken together, the results provide support for consideration of hope as a key psychological strength in youth. The findings are consistent with theories of motivation in which individual differences in hopeful thinking are conceptualized to play a functional role in linking life events and psychological well being.