EXAMINING THE EFFECTS OF BRIEF TRAINING ON THE ATTITUDES AND FUTURE USE OF BEHAVIORAL METHODS BY TEACHERS

Teachers from government and independent schools anonymously completed a measure of attitudes towards applied behavior analysis (ABA) before and after participation in a short seminar on ABA. A total of 187 primary teachers provided data on professional qualifications, years of teaching, school type, number of students in the classroom, and prior knowledge of ABA. Data were also collected on the number of students with a disability the teacher had instructed. Survey results suggested that, before and after the seminar, teachers held negative attitudes towards ABA. These attitudes, however, significantly and positively shifted after attending the seminar. Neither the number of students taught with a disability over the last 5 years nor teacher type (e.g., specialist or classroom) nor school type (e.g., independent or government) was significantly related to the attitude measure. The findings have implications for ongoing teacher education and professional development, as well as for school psychologists tailoring interventions and framing recommendations for teachers in mainstream primary settings. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

God Attachment: Resource or Complication in Women’s and Their Partners’ Adjustment to the Threat of Breast Cancer

Journal of Religion and Health - This study explored the role of adult attachment and God attachment in women’s and their partners’ adjustment to the threat of breast cancer. Women and...     

Effects of pre-operant running and sucrose concentration on operant wheel running on a fixed interval schedule of reinforcement

Prior research proposed that temporal control over the pattern of operant wheel running on a fixed interval (FI) schedule of sucrose reinforcement is a function of automatic reinforcement generated by wheel running and the experimentally arranged sucrose reinforcement. Two experiments were conducted to assess this prediction. In the first experiment, rats ran for different durations (0, 30, 60, and 180 min) prior to a session of operant wheel running on a FI 120-s schedule. In the second experiment, the concentration of sucrose reinforcement on a FI 180-s schedule was varied across values of 0, 5, 15, and 25%. In Experiment 1, as the duration of pre-operant running increased, the postreinforcement pause before initiation of running lengthened while wheel revolutions in the latter part of the FI interval increased. In Experiment 2, wheel revolutions markedly increased then decreased to a plateau early in the FI interval. Neither manipulation increased temporal control of the pattern of wheel running. Instead, results indicate that operant wheel running is regulated by automatic reinforcement generated by wheel activity and an adjunctive pattern of running induced by the temporal presentation of sucrose. Furthermore, the findings question whether the sucrose contingency regulates wheel running as a reinforcing consequence.     

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as a Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy

This article presents acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) as a spiritually integrated therapeutic modality. ACT is a value‐driven therapy that involves facilitating transcendence of physical, mental, and emotional experience to alleviate human suffering; as such, ACT shares common ground with the domain of spirituality. Approached as a spiritually integrated therapy, ACT can help clients to access spiritual resources and create life meaning as well as aid in the resolution or transformation of spiritual struggles. Given that spiritual struggles, in particular, can have a significant impact on mental health and well‐being, this article provides guidance in how ACT can address such struggles.     

Housing First and Photovoice: Transforming Lives,Communities, and Systems

This article presents findings from a community‐based participatory evaluation of a Housing First program on the Island of O'ahu. In this study, clients in a Housing First program used Photovoice to evaluate the program and to advocate for progressive housing policies. Written together by members of the Housing First Photovoice group, this collaborative article describes the outcomes from both the Housing First program and the Photovoice project and demonstrates the ways in which participatory program evaluations can interact with client‐driven programs like Housing First to produce a cumulative, transformative impact. Findings suggest that community psychologists hoping to re‐engage with community mental health systems through enacting transformative change should consider taking a community‐based participatory approach to program evaluation because increased client voice in community mental health programs and their evaluations can have far‐reaching, transformative impacts for research, practice, and policy.     

Context, Cognition, and Common Method Variance: Psychometric and Verbal Protocol Evidence

Researchers continue to debate the importance of (item) context effects, which are often thought to produce inflated percept-percept correlations in organizational self-reports. Using Feldman and Lynch's (1988) theory of self-generated validity, we propose five conditions under which such context effects are most likely to occur and to have an impact on substantive conclusions. The proposed effects are tested with psychometric and verbal protocol data from 208 subjects responding to an organizational justice questionnaire, using a 3 (types of context) by 2 ("think aloud" versus "silent") experimental design. Psychometric results revealed context effects on scale means, reliabilities, and some of the relations between constructs. Respondents' concurrent verbal protocols from the "think aloud" condition provided evidence for the cognitive basis of these effects.     

Qualitative and Quantitative Shifts in Adolescent Problem Behavior Development: A Cohort-Sequential Multivariate Latent Growth Modeling Approach

The aim of this study was to examine the nature of problem behavior development from late childhood through adolescence, to assess the quantitative development of problem behavior (alcohol use, marijuana use, deviance, academic failure) as well as potential qualitative shifts in problem behavior over time. Multivariate latent growth curve modeling (LGM) analyses and a cohort-sequential design were employed. Data were from the National Youth Survey and included 770 youth from four cohorts (11, 12, 13, 14 years old), assessed annually for 5 years. Results showed significant growth in problem behavior from ages 11 to 18. Alcohol use and marijuana use contributed most, and academic failure contributed least to the problem behavior latent construct. Results of the variant model revealed that the contribution of all four behaviors to the overall problem behavior construct increased similarly as children aged.