Children Exposed to the Arrest of a Family Member: Associations with Mental Health

The arrest of a parent or other family member can be detrimental to children’s health. To study the impact of exposure to the arrest of a family member on children’s mental health and how said association may change across developmental periods, we examined baseline data for children (birth through 11 years) entering family-based systems of care (SOC). Children exposed to the arrest of a family member had experienced significantly more 5.38 (SD = 2.59) different types of potentially traumatic events (PTE) than children not exposed to arrest 2.84 (SD = 2.56). Multiple regression model results showed that arrest exposure was significantly associated with greater behavioral and emotional challenges after controlling for children’s age, gender, race/ethnicity, household income, caregiver’s education, parenting factors, and other PTE exposure. Further analyses revealed differences in internalizing and externalizing behaviors associated with arrest exposure across developmental levels. This study highlights some of the mental health challenges for children exposed to the arrest of a family member, while adding to our knowledge of how such an event affects children across different developmental periods. More trauma-informed, developmentally appropriate systems need to be in place at all levels to assist children and families experiencing arrest.     

Psychopathy: what apology making tells us about moral agency

Psychopathy is often used to settle disputes about the nature of moral judgment. The “trolley problem” is a familiar scenario in which psychopathy is used as a test case. Where a convergence in response to the trolley problem is registered between psychopathic subjects and non-psychopathic (normal) subjects, it is assumed that this convergence indicates that the capacity for making moral judgments is unimpaired in psychopathy. This, in turn, is taken to have implications for the dispute between motivation internalists and motivation externalists, for instance. In what follows, we want to do two things: firstly, we set out to question the assumption that convergence is informative of the capacity for moral judgment in psychopathy. Next, we consider a distinct feature of psychopathy which we think provides strong grounds for holding that the capacity for moral judgment is seriously impaired in psychopathic subjects. The feature in question is the psychopathic subject’s inability to make sincere apologies. Our central claim will be this: convergence in response to trolley problems does not tell us very much about the psychopathic subject’s capacity to make moral judgments, but his inability to make sincere apologies does provide us with strong grounds for holding that this capacity is seriously impaired in psychopathy.     

Ethnic Diversity and Personal Contacts at Work and at School in the Netherlands: a Comparison of Natives and Ethnic Minorities

We examined to what extent ethnic diversity in neighborhoods and municipalities in the Netherlands is related to personal contacts at work and at school with the ethnic in- and out-groups, among the native majority as well as ethnic minorities. Constrict theory, ethnic competition theory, and contact theory are used to derive hypotheses. A unique Dutch dataset with an oversampling of two large minority groups is analyzed with three-level multilevel regression models. The results indicate that ethnic diversity at the municipality level is negatively related to personal contacts with native colleagues and schoolmates, but positively related to personal contacts with colleagues and schoolmates from other ethnic groups. Ethnic diversity at the neighborhood level is not related to personal contacts at work and at school. This applies equally to native respondents and Turks and Moroccans, rejecting Putnam's hunkering down hypothesis and ethnic competition theory. Instead, ethnic diversity increases meeting opportunities with ethnic minorities while decreasing meeting opportunities with the native majority.     

The Impact of Modifying Interpretive Bias on Contamination-Related Obsessive–Compulsive Symptoms

Cognitive-behavioural models of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) propose that a tendency to negatively interpret ambiguous thoughts and situations plays a key role in maintaining the disorder. Moreover, some researchers have proposed that negative interpretive biases may share a common processing mechanism with attentional biases, with changes in one predicted to lead to changes in the other. The current study examined whether training positive (i.e., adaptive) interpretive bias of contamination-related OCD concerns using a cognitive bias modification paradigm (CBM-I) would lead to reductions in contamination concerns, as well as changes in contamination-related attentional bias. Undergraduate students with high levels of contamination-related OCD symptoms were randomly assigned to receive either positive (n?=?31) or neutral (n?=?33) CBM-I training. Participants in the positive training condition, relative to the neutral training condition, showed a significantly greater increase in positive interpretive bias, significantly less within-session behavioural avoidance of contaminants, and significantly reduced contamination-related cognitions (at one-week follow-up). Contrary to expectations, CBM-I training did not differentially impact attentional bias nor self-reported contamination-related OCD symptoms. We discuss future directions in applying CBM-I to contamination-related OCD.

     

The Development and Validation of a Family Wellbeing Index for Hong Kong Chinese Families

Journal of Child and Family Studies - Family wellbeing is studied worldwide. However, there is a dearth of studies on the wellbeing of families in Chinese societies such as Hong Kong, nor is there...     

Do attentional focus instructions affect real-time reinvestment during level-ground walking in older adults?

Cognitive Processing - This study represents the first attempt in exploring whether attentional focus instructions could affect real-time reinvestment (conscious movement processing) in older...     

Delivery of Psychological Interventions by Clinical Neuropsychologists: Current Practice in Australia and Implications for Training

Clinical neuropsychologists are increasingly involved in delivering psychological interventions to people with neurological conditions. This is a key competency for accredited Australian postgraduate neuropsychology courses; however it is not clear how effective courses are in preparing neuropsychologists to deliver interventions. The study aims were to (a) determine the frequency and confidence with which particular types of interventions are delivered by Australian neuropsychologists, (b) examine the availability of opportunities to deliver interventions on clinical placements, (c) identify barriers to delivering interventions in current workplaces; and (d) determine which factors influence the frequency and confidence with which neuropsychologists deliver interventions. An online survey was completed by 114 participants who had graduated from a postgraduate neuropsychology program. Results indicated that respondents delivered different intervention types with varying frequency. They reported limited opportunities to practice these interventions on placements. The majority wanted to be doing more interventions, with lack of time, resources, and adequate training being the major barriers. There were several significant relationships between the frequency and confidence with which respondents delivered interventions and the perceived quality of their postgraduate training. These results highlight the need to consider appropriate postgraduate training options in delivery of interventions, including increasing opportunities to practice interventions on placements.     

Normative Reasons Contextualism

This article argues for the view that statements about normative reasons are context‐sensitive. Specifically, they are sensitive to a contextual parameter specifying a relevant person's or group's body of information. The argument for normative reasons contextualism starts from the context‐sensitivity of the normative “ought” and the further premise that reasons must be aligned with oughts. It is incoherent, I maintain, to suppose that someone normatively ought to φ but has most reason not to φ. So given that oughts depend on context, a parallel view about normative reasons is needed. It is shown that the resulting view solves notorious puzzles involving apparently conflicting but equally plausible claims about reasons. These puzzles arise especially in cases where agents have limited information or false beliefs. In these cases, we feel torn between reasons claims that take into account the limitations of the agent's perspective and apparently conflicting claims that are made from a more objective point of view. The contextualist account developed here accommodates both objectivist and subjectivist intuitions. It shows that all of the claims in question can be true, provided that they are relativized to different values of the relevant information parameter. Also, contextualism yields a fruitful approach to the debate about having reasons and the alleged failure of the so‐called “factoring account”.     

Transmission arguments against knowledge closure are still fallacious

Transmission arguments against closure of knowledge base the case against closure on the premise that a necessary condition for knowledge is not closed. Warfield argues that this kind of argument is fallacious whereas Brueckner, Murphy and Yan try to rescue it. According to them, the transmission argument is no longer fallacious once an implicit assumption is made explicit. I defend Warfield’s objection by arguing that the various proposals for the unstated assumption either do not avoid the fallacy or turn the central premise of the transmission argument, namely that a necessary condition is not closed, into a redundant and superfluous premise. I conclude that Warfield’s advice is still to be heeded: Arguments against closure must not rely essentially on the premise that a necessary condition for knowledge is not closed.