On the longevity of behavioral interventions for challenging behavior

The capacity for a treatment to maintain its effects over time may be the most critical component of behavioral interventions for challenging behavior as treatments that fail to persist are likely to be of little value to society. We reviewed the quality and quantity of different types of post-intervention data for the treatment of challenging behavior in studies published over the last 7 years. We found that for the majority of participants at least one measure of maintenance, fading, or follow-up was reported but with limited information regarding the quality of those measures. Reports of secondary variables related to post-intervention data (e.g., latency to measurement) were also uncommon. We discuss possible explanations for the paucity of post-intervention data, barriers to obtaining post-intervention data, strategies for obtaining these data, and implications for the external validity of behavioral interventions for challenging behavior. We provide recommendations for increasing the probability that post-intervention data are included in applied research on challenging behavior.     

Death by 1000 ‘true fans’: Do marketing laws apply to music listening?

The advice to musicians and marketers is to focus on what they love: a truism for practitioners is to find 1000 ‘true fans’ and make $100 from each of them (Kelly, 2008. 1000 True fans. The Technium). If this advice is correct, we should see musicians with loyal user bases engaging more with their favourite artists and less with other music, suggesting a narrow targeting strategy would suffice. On the other hand, the established marketing laws indicate that the listeners of very different genres should overlap more than conventional wisdom would suggest, supporting the need for a much broader approach to targeting potential audiences. Given these conflicting views, musicians need to know if they should market to their existing listeners, the listeners of music similar to theirs (i.e., the same genre), or if they should try to reach a much wider audience. We turn to established choice patterns from the marketing literature to address these questions in the music context. This study examines 84,000,000 observations of music listening from 27,000 unique global users between 2013 and 2014 and survey data from 2019 containing music listening from over 1000 representative respondents in the United States. The results show that listening follows the Duplication of Purchase law for genres, artists, albums, and songs, at an annual, 6-months, 3-months, 1-month, and 1-week period, with no indication of partitioned music listening. The implication is that musicians should try to reach all potential listeners, regardless of what they already listen to. These findings contribute to the theoretical knowledge about duplication analyses of various durations, extend the contexts of choice behaviour that exhibit this pattern, and managerially, to knowledge about the extent of potential audiences and ‘share of ear’ competition.     

“Being human”: A grounded theory approach to exploring how trainers on clinical psychology doctorate programmes decide whether or not to disclose personal experiences of psychological distress to clinical psychology doctorate trainees

Objective

Recent research and guidelines recommend that trainers on clinical psychology doctorate training programmes consider disclosing personal experiences of psychological distress to trainees. Disclosure is thought to promote cultures of openness, validate and normalise trainee distress, encourage trainee disclosure and help-seeking and challenge stigmatising narratives. However, little is known about how trainers decide whether, what or how to disclose. This study aims to address that gap by exploring the processes and factors involved in trainers deciding whether or not to disclose personal experiences of psychological distress to trainees, generating findings of relevance across counselling, psychotherapy and psychology training courses.

Methods

In-depth interviews were conducted with nine trainers on UK clinical psychology doctorate programmes from around the country and analysed in accordance with constructivist grounded theory methods.

Results

Findings indicated that participants valued disclosure personally and professionally but were wary of the dangers of disclosure. Disclosure decisions were made by judging the context against internally held criteria. If criteria were not met, then disclosures were not made. Outcomes, whether positive or negative, served to reinforce the value of disclosure and the importance of managing risks, creating a positive feedback loop.

Conclusions

The findings of this study suggest factors that are important for trainers to consider when deciding whether or not to disclose. The six-factor framework developed may be useful for trainers to consider within reflective practice, supervision or during guided self-reflection in order to make safe, helpful and ethical decisions.     

The effect of the two-chair dialogue intervention on self-compassion - adding an emotional evocative component to a basic Rogerian condition

Objective

How people relate to themselves when facing distress or failure influences general psychological well-being and vulnerability to psychological disorders. The aim of the present study was to explore the effect of an emotionally evocative intervention on self-compassion.

Methods

The data were retrieved from a larger study of Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) utilising a multiple baseline design comparing two treatment phases. The baseline phase consisted of 5, 7 or 9 therapy sessions where the therapist solely adhered to Rogerian relational conditions, as prescribed in EFT. A two-chair dialogue intervention was then added for five sessions. The sample consisted of 18 self-critical clients with clinically significant symptoms of depression and/or anxiety. The “Self-Compassion Scale” (SCS) was administered pre, mid and post therapy.

Results

The baseline phase did not lead to significant changes in self-compassion. However, the addition of the two-chair dialogue was associated with a significant increase in self-compassion. This increase was due to reductions in the negative subscales, especially the isolation subscale.

Conclusion

The emotionally evocative two-chair dialogue was associated with a significant change in self-to-self relating, compared to relational conditions alone. The two-chair dialogue, thus, seems to be a promising intervention for promoting healthier self-to-self relating.     

Locke and “ad”

In IV, xvii, 19–22 of his Essay, Locke employs Latin labels for four kinds of argument, of which one (ad hominem) was already in circulation and one (ad judicium) has never had much currency. The present proposal seeks to locate and clarify what Locke was aiming to describe, and to contrast what he says with some subsequent uses that have been made of these labels as if they named fallacies. Though three of the four kinds of argument that Locke picks out are often less than decisive, he casts no aspersion on the legitimacy of their use in debate.

     

Tightness shifts in the U.S. and China: Implications of tightening or loosening norms during the coronavirus pandemic

Emergent research identifies cultural tightness-looseness as an important factor for understanding cross-national outcome differences during the coronavirus pandemic. Because perceived tightness-looseness can be measured as an individual-level difference rather than a nation-level difference, and because tightness-looseness may shift during large-scale crises, we investigated whether such shifts occurred early in the coronavirus pandemic in both China (a relatively tight nation, n = 3642) and the U.S. (a relatively loose nation, n = 3583) across three cohorts. Tightness increased across cohorts in China and reduced across cohorts in the U.S. These changes transmitted corresponding indirect effects whereby compliance and institutional trust (scientific and government) about the pandemic were increased in China across cohorts, but decreased in the U.S. across cohorts. These patterns extend advice that national governments can increase compliance and trust via “tightening” by cautioning against norm-setters signaling the reverse (that norms about compliance are loose) given the outcomes observed in the U.S. samples.     

Stroke damages attentional maintenance in working memory

Stroke is the main cause of acquired disability in adults, and specific deficits in working memory (WM) are among the most common cognitive consequences. In neuropsychological routine, WM is most of the time investigated in the framework of the multicomponent model (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974, The psychology of learning and motivation, 47). Using a more recent theoretical WM model, the time-based resource-sharing (TBRS) model (Barrouillet et al., 2011, Psychol. Rev., 118, 175), the aim of the present study was to investigate in young post-stroke patients to which extent attentional maintenance is impaired in WM. To address this question, we discarded other factors known to directly influence WM performance, that is processing speed and short-term memory span. We proposed to 53 post-stroke patients and to 63 healthy controls a complex span paradigm in which participants were asked to alternate between the memorization of a series of images and a concurrent parity judgement task of a series of digits. To investigate the attentional maintenance processes, we manipulated the cognitive load (CL) of the concurrent task. CL effect is typically interpreted as the involvement of attentional maintenance processes. The task was adapted to each participant according to their processing speed and memory span. As expected, the results showed higher recall performance in healthy controls compared with post-stroke patients. Consistent with the literature, we also observed higher performance when the CL was low compared with high. However, the improvement in recall at low CL was smaller for post-stroke patients compared with controls, suggesting that post-stroke WM deficit could be in part due to a deficit of the attentional maintenance processes.