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.     

Social Norms and Engagement in Protective Health Behaviors Among Rural Health Providers

Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings - The COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching effects for individuals and healthcare systems in the United States. Increasing and sustaining...     

A Latent Growth Curve Modeling Approach to Pooled Interrupted Time Series Analyses

This paper presents a latent variable approach for the estimation of treatment effects within a pooled interrupted time series (ITS) design. Although considered quasi-experimental, the ITS design has been noted as representing one of the strongest alternatives to the randomized experiment, making it highly appropriate for use in documenting the presence of effects that might warrant further evaluation in a large-scale randomized study. Results suggest that the latent variable growth modeling (LGM) is capable of detecting simultaneous differences in both level and slope, and provides tests of significance for these two necessary indicators of an ITS intervention effect. As shown in the analyses, the LGM framework provides a comprehensive and flexible approach to research design and data analysis, making available to a wide audience of researchers an analytical framework for a variety of analyses of growth and developmental processes.     

How clinicians make (or avoid) moral judgments of patients: implications of the evidence for relationships and research

Physicians, nurses, and other clinicians readily acknowledge being troubled by encounters with patients who trigger moral judgments. For decades social scientists have noted that moral judgment of patients is pervasive, occurring not only in egregious and criminal cases but also in everyday situations in which appraisals of patients' social worth and culpability are routine. There is scant literature, however, on the actual prevalence and dynamics of moral judgment in healthcare. The indirect evidence available suggests that moral appraisals function via a complex calculus that reflects variation in patient characteristics, clinician characteristics, task, and organizational factors. The full impact of moral judgment on healthcare relationships, patient outcomes, and clinicians' own well-being is yet unknown. The paucity of attention to moral judgment, despite its significance for patient-centered care, communication, empathy, professionalism, healthcare education, stereotyping, and outcome disparities, represents a blind spot that merits explanation and repair. New methodologies in social psychology and neuroscience have yielded models for how moral judgment operates in healthcare and how research in this area should proceed. Clinicians, educators, and researchers would do well to recognize both the legitimate and illegitimate moral appraisals that are apt to occur in healthcare settings.     

The Basics of Brain Development

Over the past several decades, significant advances have been made in our understanding of the basic stages and mechanisms of mammalian brain development. Studies elucidating the neurobiology of brain development span the levels of neural organization from the macroanatomic, to the cellular, to the molecular. Together this large body of work provides a picture of brain development as the product of a complex series of dynamic and adaptive processes operating within a highly constrained, genetically organized but constantly changing context. The view of brain development that has emerged from the developmental neurobiology literature presents both challenges and opportunities to psychologists seeking to understand the fundamental processes that underlie social and cognitive development, and the neural systems that mediate them. This chapter is intended to provide an overview of some very basic principles of brain development, drawn from contemporary developmental neurobiology, that may be of use to investigators from a wide range of disciplines.     

Readiness to adaptively change under three conditions: Clinical,careers, and natural change situations

The Adaptive Change Model (ACM) was developed as an alternative form of the Transtheoretical Model of Change to address some of the criticisms of early operationalisation. Both models provide a framework for measuring the potentialities of change and to facilitate targeted behaviour change in general and clinical settings. In this research, the eight factors of the Adaptive Change Questionnaire (ACQ) operationalising the ACM were validated using confirmatory factor analysis, involving 238 respondents. The findings indicated a good fit between the model and data. A comparison of the mean scores of the factors of the ACM showed respondents seeking clinical therapy (n = 85) were lower on self‐rating of factors related to adaptive change than a group receiving career counselling (n = 88) and a non‐therapy group (n = 65). The ACQ factors correctly predicted the allocation of 79.3% of the clinical and non‐therapy respondents which confirmed previous research. The relevance of the findings for therapeutic interventions and future research are discussed.     

Young children’s analogical reasoning across cultures: Similarities and differences

A cross-cultural comparison between U.S. and Hong Kong preschoolers examined factors responsible for young children’s analogical reasoning errors. On a scene analogy task, both groups had adequate prerequisite knowledge of the key relations, were the same age, and showed similar baseline performance, yet Chinese children outperformed U.S. children on more relationally complex problems. Children from both groups were highly susceptible to choosing a perceptual or semantic distractor during reasoning when one was present. Taken together, these similarities and differences suggest that (a) cultural differences can facilitate better knowledge representations by allowing more efficient processing of relationally complex problems and (b) inhibitory control is an important factor in explaining the development of children’s analogical reasoning.     

Environmental attitude as a mediator of the relationship between psychological restoration in nature and self-reported ecological behavior

Environmental attitude and ecological behavior were investigated in relation to the use of nature for psychological restoration. Specifically, with survey data from 468 German university students, the role of environmental attitude was investigated as a mediator of the restoration-behavior relationship. Assuming that positive experiences in nature can have a broad influence on environmental attitudes, the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) scale, an attitudinal measure with broad scope, was adopted. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated partial mediation by environmental concern. The study helps to consolidate the restoration theme in the growing literature on positive motivations for ecological behavior.