The effect of token reinforcement on McCarthy Scale performance for white preschoolers of low and high social position

In Study 1, the effect of making tokens contingent on correct performance of low social position preschoolers on the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilitieswas examined. Preschoolers in a token reinforcement group scored significantly higher (mean=8 IQ points) than subjects in a control group. In Study 2, the effect of tokens on McCarthyresults was examined as a function of social position in a 2×2 design. The high social position control group scored significantly above the low social position control. The low social position token reinforcement group, however, performed as well as both the high social position control and token reinforcement groups. Use of systematic reinforcement contingencies to reduce test error is discussed.     

The Narrative Arc of TATs: Introduction to the JPA Special Section on Thematic Apperceptive Techniques

The past decade has seen important developments in thematic apperceptive techniques (TATs), with the creation of new card sets having alternate pictures representing different cultures, new scoring systems becoming available, and increasing international communication of these achievements. However, continuing impediments to the development of a validational literature include lingering mistaken assumptions about the nature of story data, ongoing debates about appropriate psychometric evaluation, and continuing questions about how stimuli and scoring systems should be conceptualized and interpreted. Negotiating the publication system can impede some potential authors. Excellent work on TATs with children is not well known in the adult-focused journals. The labor burden of meeting increasingly sophisticated publication standards might be a barrier to assessors focused on clinical practice. Accumulating a focused evidence base is challenging given the diversity of criterion variables for which TATs have been used. Research on TATs by clinicians can span the science–practice gap, but the narrative arc can be a dramatic one. The articles in this special section on TATs represent important conceptual, methodological, and substantive innovations.     

Adorno: Cultural Education and Resistance

In recent years, culture has become significantly politicized, or conspicuously de-politicized, in different parts of the UK, making its appearance in education policy of pivotal interest and ripe for critical attention. From the vantage point of Theodor Adorno’s work on the culture industry and his writings on the work of the teacher, I argue that cultural education is a site where something crucial and distinctive takes place. Within the Enlightenment tradition, critical self-reflection and resistance to heteronymous ways of thinking are core aims of education. Adorno’s contribution to an understanding of these aims leads us to consider the importance of ‘live contact with the warmth of things’ as essential to ethical and intellectual life. The kindly tolerance of the pluralist ideal is now being teased and goaded by acts of terror and widespread concern about personal and social security. At such an unstable juncture, an understanding of cultural education as an experience of ‘incorrigible plurality’ enriches and informs the beleaguered ideal of pluralism and points a way forward in troubled times.     

Promoting Mental Health Equity: The Role of Integrated Care

People suffering from mental illness experience poor physical health outcomes, including an average life expectancy of 25 years less than the rest of the population. Stigma is a frequent barrier to accessing behavioral health services. Health equity refers to the opportunity for all people to experience optimal health; the social determinants of health can enable or impede health equity. Recommendations from the U.S. government and the World Health Organization support mental health promotion while recognizing barriers that preclude health equity. The United States Preventive Services Task Force recently recommended screening all adults for depression. The Satcher Health Leadership Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine (SHLI/MSM) is committed to developing leaders who will help to reduce health disparities as the nation moves toward health equity. The SHLI/MSM Integrated Care Leadership Program (ICLP) provides clinical and administrative healthcare professionals with knowledge and training to develop culturally-sensitive integrated care practices. Integrating behavioral health and primary care improves quality of life and lowers health system costs.     

Becoming a Telepathic Tuning Fork: Anomalous Experience and the Relational Mind

Although we tend to regard telepathic communication as anomalous or uncanny, outside the range of scientific explanation, many paranormal experiences can be understood scientifically as the type of unconscious affective communication about which there is a growing body of scientific research and evidence. An information-processing model illuminates how a patient’s dissociated attempts to communicate through sensory experiences may be converted to the verbal symbolic via the analyst’s use of evoked images in the dissociative process. Understanding projective identification as a dissociative process of communication by which the patient projected his own unacceptable emotions into the analyst, who could then know experientially what the patient was feeling, can be understood scientifically as telepathic communication. When a patient experiences the effects of severe trauma and is very dissociative, as in the case presented, it is difficult to track and reflect upon these processes as they occur, making it virtually impossible to become and remain empathically attuned to his many self states. In the dissociative attunement deconstructed here, the therapist–patient dyad resonated increasingly in a telepathic attunement, despite much discord and confusion.     

Long-Term Guilt and Hostility Underlying Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms in War Combatants and Ex-Prisoners of War

The link between posttraumatic guilt and posttraumatic stress disorder has gained recognition over the past decades and was recently expressed in the modifications made to the diagnostic criteria for the disorder under the DSM-V. Yet, the psychological dynamics underlying this relation are still not fully understood. The present study introduces a model whereby different dynamics between guilt and hostility are related to posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms (PTSS), following different traumatic war experiences. One hundred and forty-four former prisoners of war (ex-POWs) and 143 comparable combatants participated in the study, 30 years after the war, reporting on their PTSS, guilt, and hostility. Moderation analyses revealed a three-way interaction, where high hostility buffered the effect of guilt on PTSS only among ex-POWs. This finding suggests a distinctive dynamic among guilt, hostility, and PTSS following diverse traumatic events. Specifically, it appears that hostility can have a mitigating effect on the negative outcomes of guilt for ex-POWs following trauma, but not for non-POW veterans. The theoretical reasoning and the clinical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Actors in the Classroom: The Dramatic Pedagogy Model of Counselor Education

Role playing is a fundamental component in the training of counselors to use counseling skills. However, role play activities commonly involve counseling students as clients or actors and hence have notable limitations. One training method widely practiced in the medical profession is the use of professional actors as patients. Although there are some examples in the literature of studies that have used actors for counselor training, most address only a specific topic or skill set. In this article, the authors propose the dramatic pedagogy model (DPM) as a comprehensive model for implementing client actors into the education of counselors. The DPM includes a set of pedagogical techniques and a structure for preparing actors and curriculum.