The Viability of Structural Family Therapy in the Twenty-first Century: An Analysis of Key Indicators

This paper examines the degree to which structural family therapy has adapted effectively to client families and professional demands of the twenty-first century. A review of the current professional literature was conducted to assess the structural model’s continued clinical relevance, how the model has changed in adapting to contemporary social and professional contexts, and whether or not the integrity of the model’s core proposition has been eroded or confounded as a result of adaptive changes.     

Elephant resource-use traditions

African elephants (Loxodonta africana) use unusual and restricted habitats such as swampy clearings, montane outcrops and dry rivers for a variety of social and ecological reasons. Within these habitats, elephants focus on very specific areas for resource exploitation, resulting in deep caves, large forest clearings and sand pits as well as long-established and highly demarcated routes for moving between resources. We review evidence for specific habitat exploitation in elephants and suggest that this represents socially learned cultural behaviour. Although elephants show high fidelity to precise locations over the very long term, these location preferences are explained neither by resource quality nor by accessibility. Acquiring techniques for exploiting specific resource sites requires observing conspecifics and practice and is evidence for social learning. Elephants possess sophisticated cognitive capacities used to track relationships and resources over their long lifespans, and they have an extended period of juvenile dependency as a result of the need to acquire this considerable social and ecological knowledge. Thus, elephant fidelity to particular sites results in traditional behaviour over generations, with the potential to weaken relationships between resource quality and site preferences. Illustrating the evidence for such powerful traditions in a species such as elephants contributes to understanding animal cognition in natural contexts.     

Understanding Women's Experiences of Defending Against Eating Disorder Symptoms: An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis

Body dissatisfaction predicts eating disorder symptomatology for some women but not for others. To better understand this disparity, the authors interviewed 7 college women who reported body dissatisfaction and no engagement in eating disorder symptoms. The authors identified 4 factors that may protect body‐dissatisfied women from engaging in eating disorder symptoms.     

Posttraumatic stress and physical health among adults: The role of coping mechanisms

The purpose of the present study was to examine whether coping mechanisms predict physical health, after controlling for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom clusters in a non-clinical sample of adults. Data were collected from 483 adults through an online survey. Most of the participants (66.7%) reported lifetime exposure to at least one traumatic event. The final sample of this study included 319 trauma-exposed individuals. Results indicated that PTSD symptoms on the avoidance and hyperarousal clusters had significant positive relationships with self-reported physical health symptoms. After controlling for gender and PTSD, denial, behavioral disengagement, and self-blame significantly and positively predicted physical health symptoms.     

Do handwritten words magnify lexical effects in visual word recognition?

An examination of how the word recognition system is able to process handwritten words is fundamental to formulate a comprehensive model of visual word recognition. Previous research has revealed that the magnitude of lexical effects (e.g., the word-frequency effect) is greater with handwritten words than with printed words. In the present lexical decision experiments, we examined whether the quality of handwritten words moderates the recruitment of top-down feedback, as reflected in word-frequency effects. Results showed a reading cost for difficult-to-read and easy-to-read handwritten words relative to printed words. But the critical finding was that difficult-to-read handwritten words, but not easy-to-read handwritten words, showed a greater word-frequency effect than printed words. Therefore, the inherent physical variability of handwritten words does not necessarily boost the magnitude of lexical effects.     

Correction to: Examining the Relationship between Helicopter Parenting and Emerging Adults’ Mindsets Using the Consolidated Helicopter Parenting Scale

Journal of Child and Family Studies -     

Visual search for drowning swimmers: Investigating the impact of lifeguarding experience

How does domain expertise influence dynamic visual search? Previous studies of visual search often use abstract search arrays that are devoid of applied context, with comparatively few studies exploring applied naturalistic and dynamic settings. The current research adds to this literature by examining lifeguard drowning‐detection across two studies using naturalistic, dynamic search tasks. Behavioural responses and eye‐movement data were recorded as participants watched staged video clips and attempted to identify if a swimmer was drowning. The results demonstrate lifeguard superiority in response times to drowning events, compared to non‐lifeguards. No differences between lifeguard and non‐lifeguard eye‐movements were noted however. This suggests that the experiential benefit in response times results from other underlying processes, rather than any scanning benefits. This research highlights the complex nature of naturalistic and dynamic searches, while demonstrating the robust nature of simulated videos in producing experience effects in visual search.     

Mental Health Identification Practices of Jails: The Unmet Needs of the “Silent” Population

The overrepresentation of individuals with mental illness in the criminal/legal system is well documented. While professional associations urge diversion towards treatment, little is known about the practices these institutions use to identify this population. One understudied space in the criminal/legal continuum is jails. This exploratory study compares two types of mental health identification at jail booking to assess jail‐ and community‐based service outcomes by identification type (N = 2956): (a) staff observation and (b) a standardized screening instrument. Individuals identified through staff observation were significantly more likely to receive jail‐ and community‐based services, even though current symptomology and substance misuse were both significantly higher for individuals identified only by the screening instrument. These findings point to the importance of jails in providing stabilizing services during incarceration, but further, show the impact that identification practices have on individuals as they transition to the community. Community context showed varied rates of jail staff observations of mental illness, showing greater risks for individuals in rural communities. Implications include a need for system‐level changes by instituting evidence‐based identification practices in jails, and improving professional collaboration practices between mental health and criminal/legal practitioners as individuals enter and exit jails.     

Cortisol Rhythm in Preschoolers: Relations with Maternal Depression and Child Temperament

Evidence supports associations between deviations from the normative daily cortisol rhythm and depression. We examined associations between multiple indices of daily cortisol in 146 preschool-aged children and two well-established risk factors for depression: maternal depression and early child temperament (negative emotionality/NE and positive emotionality/PE). Offspring of mothers with current depression demonstrated lower waking cortisol and lower total post-awakening cortisol. Child PE was negatively associated with waking cortisol. The combination of maternal depression history and high child NE was associated with higher levels of evening cortisol. Findings suggest that an interplay between familial risk for depression and child temperamental vulnerability may be related to neuroendocrine functioning in young children and highlight important methodological considerations in the assessment of children’s basal cortisol activity. It will be critical for future research to map the developmental progression from early disruptions in children’s cortisol rhythm to the emergence of psychopathology.     

The Effect of Lifeguard Experience upon the Detection of Drowning Victims in a Realistic Dynamic Visual Search Task

Lifeguard surveillance is a complex task that is crucial for swimmer safety, though few studies of applied visual search have investigated this domain. This current study compared lifeguard and non‐lifeguard search skills using dynamic, naturalistic stimuli (video clips of confederate swimmers) that varied in set size and type of drowning. Lifeguards were more accurate and responded faster to drowning targets. Differences between drowning targets were also found: Passive drownings were responded to less often, but more quickly than active drownings, highlighting that passive drownings may be less salient but are highly informative once detected. Set size effects revealed a dip in reaction speeds at an intermediate set‐size level, suggesting a possible change in visual search strategies as the array increases in size. Nonetheless, the ability of the test to discriminate between lifeguards and non‐lifeguards offers future possibilities for training and assessing lifeguard surveillance skills. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.