Jan Bernheim: a Pioneer/Prophet in Getting Serious Answers to the Serious Question ‘How are you?’

Applied Research in Quality of Life -     

Family‐based Intervention for Legal System‐involved Girls: A Mixed Methods Evaluation

The increased proportion of juvenile court‐involved girls has spurred interest to implement and evaluate services to reduce girls’ system involvement. The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a family‐based intervention by using a dominant sequential mixed methods evaluation approach. First, we examined quantitative data using a quasi‐experimental design to determine whether the family‐based intervention reduced recidivism among court‐involved girls. Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to construct statistically equivalent groups to compare one‐year recidivism outcomes for girls who received the court‐run family‐based intervention (n = 181) to a group of girls on probation who did not receive the intervention (n = 803). Qualitative interviews (n = 39) were conducted to contextualize the quantitative findings and highlighted the circumstances that family‐focused interventions for court‐involved girls. Girls who received the program had slightly lower recidivism rates following the intervention. The qualitative findings contextualized the quasi‐experimental results by providing an explanation as to the girls’ family circumstances and insights into the mechanisms of the intervention. Results highlighted the importance of family‐focused interventions for juvenile justice‐involved girls. These findings have practical and policy implications for the use interventions—beyond the individual level—with adjudicated girls and offer suggestions for ways to improve their effectiveness using a community psychology lens. In addition, this paper includes a discussion of evaluating of juvenile court programming from a community psychology perspective including strengths, challenges, and considerations for future work in this area.     

A systematic review of physical guidance procedures as an open‐mouth prompt to increase acceptance for children with pediatric feeding disorders

This article reviews behavioral treatments of pediatric feeding disorders using physical guidance procedures as an open‐mouth prompt (i.e., jaw prompt, finger prompt, Nuk prompt, side deposit) to increase food acceptance. We identified 9 articles containing 35 systematic evaluations. We coded participant and study characteristics and assessed the experimental rigor, quality, and outcomes of each evaluation. Of the high‐quality research present, the finger prompt variation and side deposit reliably increased acceptance. We found mixed results on the efficacy of the jaw prompt, although it was the most widely researched procedure. Further, authors reported interobserver agreement for 100% of the participants, procedural integrity for 60%, social validity for 80%, fading for 5%, and follow‐up for 55%. Based on the invasive nature of physical guidance, we provide recommendations for researchers and clinicians to increase the quality of their treatment evaluations. We discuss limitations, implications for practice, and future research.     

Influence of maternal depression on children's brooding rumination: Moderation by CRHR1 TAT haplotype

There is growing evidence that brooding rumination plays a key role in the intergenerational transmission of major depressive disorder (MDD) and may be an endophenotype for depression risk. However, less is known about the mechanisms underlying this role. Therefore, the goal of the current study was to examine levels of brooding in children of mothers with a history of MDD (n = 129) compared to children of never depressed mothers (n = 126) and to determine whether the variation in a gene known to influence hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis functioning—corticotropin-releasing hormone receptor 1 (CRHR1) —would moderate the link between maternal MDD and children's levels of brooding. We predicted children of mothers with a history of MDD would exhibit higher levels of brooding than children of mothers with no lifetime depression history but that this link would be stronger among children carrying no copies of the protective CRHR1 TAT haplotype. Our results supported these hypotheses and suggest that the development of brooding among children of depressed mothers, particularly children without the protective CRHR1 haplotype, may serve as an important mechanism of risk for the intergenerational transmission of depression.     

The illness reframing process in an ethnic-majority population of older people with incurable cancer: variations of cultural- and existential meaning-making adjustments

Increasing numbers of older people in Western countries are living with incurable cancer as a chronic disease, receiving palliative care from specialised healthcare contexts. The study's aim was to understand variations of cultural- and existential meaning-making adjustments in a Norwegian majority population of older people with incurable cancer. Semi-structured interviews from 21 participants, aged 70–88, were analysed according to three identified types of belief frames: atheistic/humanistic, religious, and spiritual. Kleinman's medical anthropology cultural framework was adapted and applied deductively together with a reframing metaphor concept in a four-part analytic process. Independent of the differences among the types of belief frames and heterogeneous illness reframing processes, changes in the existential cultural dimension seemed to facilitate psychosocial adjustments in relation to illness, daily living, relationships, and surroundings. The results point to the need for collecting and assessing the function of this type of patient information for better understanding the patient's framework of interpretation, and for identifying treatment-planning resources.     

The degree of disparateness of event details modulates future simulation construction,plausibility, and recall

Several episodic simulation studies have suggested that the plausibility of future events may be influenced by the disparateness of the details comprising the event. However, no study had directly investigated this idea. In the current study, we designed a novel episodic combination paradigm that varied the disparateness of details through a social sphere manipulation. Participants recalled memory details from three different social spheres. Details were recombined either within spheres or across spheres to create detail sets for which participants imagined future events in a second session. Across-sphere events were rated as significantly less plausible than within-sphere events and were remembered less often. The presented paradigm, which increases control over the disparateness of details in future event simulations, may be useful for future studies concerned with the similarity of the simulations to previous events and its plausibility.     

Practical Reason and the Stability Standard

Practical reasoning, reasoning about what to do, is a very familiar activity. When we think about whether to cook or to go out for dinner, to buy a house or rent, or to study law or business, we are engaged in practical reasoning. If the kind of reasoning we engage in is truly a rational process, there must be some norms or standards that govern it; the process cannot be arbitrary or random. In this paper I argue that one of the standards that governs practical reasoning is the stability standard. The stability standard, I argue, is a norm that is constitutive of practical reasoning: insofar as we do not take violations of this norm to be relevant considerations, we do not count as engaged in reasoning at all. Furthermore, I argue that it is a standard we can explicitly employ in order to deliberate about our ends or desires themselves. Importantly, this standard will not require that some ends are prescribed or determined by reason alone. The stability standard, therefore, allows us to retain some of the attractive features of instrumentalism without accepting the implication that there is no rational way to evaluate ends.     

On the Prospects for Democratic Deliberation: Values Analysis Applied to AustralianPolitics

Democratic theorists increasingly stress that democratic legitimacy rests primarily on authentic deliberation. Critics of deliberative democracy believe that this hope is unrealistic—that deliberation either will prove intractable across political differences or will exacerbate instability. This paper deploys some tools of political psychology, notably Q methodology and values analysis, to investigate the conditions under which effective deliberation is likely to occur. These tools are applied to contemporary political debates in Australia, concerned with how the Australian polity should be constituted in light of a reform agenda underpinned by a discourse we term "Inclusive Republicanism." An investigation of the character of the basic value commitments associated with discursive positions in these debates shows that some differences will yield to deliberation, but others will not. When two discourses subscribe to different value bases, deliberation will induce reflection and facilitate positive-sum outcomes. When a discourse has a value base but finds its specific goals opposed by a competitor that otherwise has no value base of its own, deliberation will be ineffective. When one discourse subscribes to a value base that another questions, but without providing an alternative, deliberation can help to bridge idealism and cynicism.     

Creativity, unique designs, and schizotypy in a nonclinical sample

The present study examined whether creativity and novel design construction differ in 60 individuals who scored low and high (based on a median split) on a measure of schizotypy. Groups differed on one measure, total designs made, but not on creativity.