Treatment Effectiveness of a Brief Behavioral Intervention for Preschool Disruptive Behavior

Parent management training is an evidence-based treatment for disruptive behavior. However, the number of treatment sessions can be high, contributing to high attrition rates. The purpose of this study was to examine post-treatment, 6-month, and 1-year treatment outcomes of the Brief Behavioral Intervention. One hundred twenty children aged 2–6.5 years demonstrating clinically significant disruptive behavior were referred to an outpatient clinic for treatment and participated in the study. Attrition was below reported rates in the literature. Significant decreases in child disruptive behavior and parent stress were found from pre-to-post intervention, and improvements were maintained at follow-ups. Significant pre-to-post intervention teacher reported decreases in behavior were reported.     

A comparison of types of support for lower-skill workers: Evidence for the importance of family supportive supervisors

The work–family literature to date does not offer a clear picture in terms of the relative importance of different types of supports for balancing work and family demands. Grounded in conservation or resources theory, we develop an integrative model relating multiple forms of social support, both formal (i.e., work–life benefit use) and informal (supervisor work–family support and family support) to work-interference-with-family and family-interference-with-work and task and contextual performance. We chose to focus our study on lower-skill workers because, despite being a relatively large segment of the workforce, these workers are relatively understudied in the work–family literature. Results revealed that supervisor support is a key form of support in this sample. Supervisor support had negative same domain (work-interference-with-family) and cross domain (family-interference-with-work) effects with work–family conflict, as well as positive relationships with task and contextual performance. Family support was negatively related to family-interference-with-work; whereas use of work–life benefits was not significantly related to either form of work–family conflict or any of the performance variables. The implications of our results for conservation of resources theory and practical implications to employers of lower-skill workers are discussed.     

Replies to Kane,McCormick, and Vargas

This is a reply to discussions by Robert Kane, Kelly McCormick, and Manuel Vargas of Shaun Nichols, Bound: Essays on Free Will and Responsibility.     

Language Difficulty at School Entry and the Trajectories of Hyperactivity-Inattention Problems from Ages 4 to 11: Evidence from a Population-Representative Cohort Study

Latent growth curve modelling was used to contrast the developmental trajectories of hyperactivity-inattention (H-I) problems across childhood for children with a language difficulty at the start of school and those with typical language and to examine if the presence of a language difficulty moderates the associations of child, parent and peer predictors with these trajectories. Unconditional and language-status conditional latent growth curves of H-I problems were estimated for a large nationally representative cohort of children, comprising 1627 boys (280 - language difficulty) and 1609 girls (159 - language difficulty) measured at age 4 to 5, 6 to 7, 8 to 9 and 10 to 11. Multiple regression tested interaction between language status and predictors of the level and slope of the trajectory of H-I problems. On average, boy’s H-I behaviours showed temporal stability while for girls H-I decreased over time with a slower rate of decrease with age. For both boys and girls, the levels of H-I problems were persistently elevated for those with a language difficulty compared to their peers. Neither the shape nor rate of change of H-I problems were associated with language status. Child sociability predicted the rate of growth in H-I for boys with a language difficulty but not for other boys. Child prosocial behaviours and parental psychological distress predicted the rate of growth in H-I for girls with a language difficulty but not for other girls. Parental hostility was associated with the rate of growth only for boys with typical language. The findings indicate that having a language difficulty at school entry is associated with persistently higher levels of H-I problems across childhood and moderates the rate of their growth in some circumstances.     

Toward a reliable and valid measure of institutional mission and values perception: the DePaul values inventory

Across three studies, the development of a reliable and valid measure of perceptions by students of an urban, private, faith‐based teaching university's mission and values was assessed. Study 1 presented scale construction and reliability of the DePaul Values Inventory (DeVI) with undergraduates (n = 111), yielding a final 22‐item rating scale with four subscales. Study 2 supported the psychometric structure of the DeVI through a confirmatory factor analysis (n = 292). Study 3 assessed the DeVI's discriminant validity by correlating scores with social desirability and personal values surveys (n = 106). Overall, the DeVI was determined to be a reliable and valid measure of students' perceptions of an institution's mission and values, regardless of student gender, and independent of one's personal values even controlling for social approval tendencies. Future studies should examine the DeVI and its applicability for other similar institutions of higher learning.     

Experience-dependent attentional tuning of distractor rejection

Irrelevant salient distractors often capture attention, but given a sufficiently specific search template, these salient items no longer capture attention. In the present experiments, we investigated whether specific target templates are sufficient to resist capture, or whether experience with the salient distractors is also necessary. To test this hypothesis, observers completed four blocks of trials, each with a different-colored irrelevant singleton present on half of the trials. Color singletons captured attention early within a block, but after sufficient experience with the irrelevant singletons, those singletons no longer captured attention in the second halves of the blocks. This result suggests that to resist capture, a specific target template must be accompanied by experience-dependent attentional tuning to distractor properties.     

Connecting confusions with painful realities: Group analytic psychotherapy for adults with learning disabilities

Developments in the psychodynamic understanding of individuals with learning disabilities (LD) ¹ This recently-adopted term is used here. Earlier authors have used other terms to refer to such clients, including ‘mental retardation’, ‘subnormality’, ‘handicap’, and ‘learning difficulties’. View all notes have included the exploration of the relationships between biological and psychosocial vulnerabilities, and emphasis on separation and individuation processes. While the normalisation movement encourages access to mainstream counselling and psychotherapy services, confusions persist about the suitability of people with LD for analytic psychotherapies. Given some recent positive accounts of group psychotherapy, in this paper we aim to explore the opportunities and challenges associated with an outpatient analytic group for adults with LD.

The group's background, members, material, and outcomes illustrate the emerging themes of confusions, connections, and painful realities for adults with LD. Attempts to understand individual and group transference and therapists' countertransference emphasised the primacy of dependence, handicap, and loss within the content and process of the group.

We encourage further consideration of the psychodynamics, service, and research issues involved in psychotherapy for adults with LD.     

Dynamical agents: Consciousness, causation, and two specters of epiphenomenalism

The aim of this paper is to defend the causal efficacy of consciousness against two specters of epiphenomenalism. We argue that these challenges are best met, on the one hand, by rejecting all forms of consciousness-body dualism, and on the other, by adopting a dynamical systems approach to understanding the causal efficacy of conscious experience. We argue that this non-reductive identity theory provides the theoretical resources for reconciling the reality and efficacy of consciousness with the neurophysiology of the brain and body.

Visual prior entry for foreground figures

Attended stimuli reach perceptual-level processes before unattended stimuli do, a finding that is referred to as visual prior entry. We asked whether a similar effect arises for salient objects (foreground figures) in a visual scene. If prior entry holds for figure—ground perception, targets will be perceived to appear earlier on figures than on grounds. Participants performed a temporal order judgment by reporting the order in which targets appeared. Participants perceived that targets appearing on foreground figures occurred earlier than did those appearing on backgrounds. These findings did not result from a response bias for targets appearing on figures. Most important, when figures and grounds were spatially separated and did not share an edge, no prior-entry effects were observed. Our results suggest that figural regions are available to perceptual-level processes sooner than are grounds.