Feasibility and acceptability of a brief suicide intervention for youth involved with the family court

As efforts to develop models for suicide prevention and intervention in the juvenile justice (JJ) system continue to grow, research to understand the feasibility and acceptability of implementing these models is critical. Examining organizational readiness for implementation, ensuring leadership and staff buy‐in for delivering the intervention, and planning for sustainability of staff participation in implementation efforts is essential. The current study involved semi‐structured formative evaluation interviews with key JJ stakeholders (n = 10) to determine perspectives on the acceptability (perceived need and fit of the intervention) and feasibility (organizational readiness for change) of a proposed brief safety planning intervention for youth with suicidal ideation delivered by nonclinical staff and integrated into the existing system. Qualitative data revealed stakeholders' perceived need for the intervention in the family court context and their agreement that the aims of the intervention were congruent with the goals of the family court. Some barriers to successful implementation were noted, which, addressed through selection of appropriate implementation strategies, can be overcome in a future test of the safety intervention.     

Prior experiences and perceived efficacy influence 3-year-olds' imitation

Children are selective and flexible imitators. They combine their own prior experiences and the perceived causal efficacy of the model to determine whether and what to imitate. In Experiment 1, children were randomly assigned to have either a difficult or an easy experience achieving a goal. They then saw an adult use novel means to achieve the goal. Children with a difficult prior experience were more likely to imitate the adult's precise means. Experiment 2 showed further selectivity--children preferentially imitated causally efficacious versus nonefficacious acts. In Experiment 3, even after an easy prior experience led children to think their own means would be effective, they still encoded the novel means performed by the model. When a subsequent manipulation rendered the children's means ineffective, children recalled and imitated the model's means. The research shows that children integrate information from their own prior interventions and their observations of others to guide their imitation.     

Dimensions of the Mysticism Scale: Confirming the Three-Factor Structure in the United States and Iran

In a mostly Christian American sample (N = 1,379), confirmatory factor analysis of Hood's (1975) Mysticism Scale verified the existence of Stace's (1960) introvertive and extrovertive dimensions of mystical phenomenology along with a separate interpretation factor. A second study confirmed the presence of these three factors in not only another group of Americans (N = 188), but also in a sample of Iranian Muslims (N = 185). Relationships of the introvertive and extrovertive factors with the interpretation factor were essentially identical across these two cultures, but the Americans displayed a stronger association between the two phenomenology factors. In both samples, the interpretation factor correlated positively with an intrinsic and negatively with an extrinsic religious orientation, and the introvertive factor predicted psychological dysfunction. Associations of the interpretation factor with relative mental health appeared only in the Iranians. These data offered general support for Stace's phenomenology of mysticism, although the ineffability he linked with interpretation proved to be as much or even more a feature of the introvertive experience, as hypothesized by Hood.     

Margins for Error: A Reply

I address Peter Mott's 'Margins for Error and the Sorites Paradox' ( The Philosophical Quarterly , 48 (1998), pp. 494–503). Mott criticizes my account of inexact knowledge, on which it satisfies margin for error principles of the form 'If one knows in a given case, one avoids false belief in sufficiently similar cases'. Mott's arguments are shown to be fallacious because they ignore the fact that our knowledge of inexact knowledge is itself inexact. In the examples discussed, the first-level inexact knowledge is perceptual. Since my defence of an epistemicist theory of vagueness explains our ignorance of truth-values in borderline cases as the result of knowledge the inexactness of which has a conceptual source, the paper also contributes to the defence of epistemicism about vagueness.     

Changing Views of Serpent Handling: A Quasi-Experimental Study

Knowledge about serpent handling sects (SHS) even among social scientists and legislators has been largely influenced by biased media reports. Our own field research suggests that factual knowledge about SHS is effective in changing stereotypes about serpent handling and in altering views as to the rights of believers to handle serpents in church. In a quasi-experimental study, participants were pretested with respect to both prejudicial and reasoned evaluative views about SHS. Participants saw either a video of contemporary SHS in which handlers demonstrated and explained their faith, or a control tape in which contemporary SHS were shown but serpent handling was neither demonstrated nor defended. As predicted, viewing the serpent handling video was effective in reducing stereotyping of SHS and in changing attitudes regarding the sincerity of the believers and the right of SHS to practice their faith without legal constraints. Appropriate controls indicated that changes were not simply a function of a pretest by treatment interaction. The relevance of these data for altering laws against the practice of serpent handling is discussed.     

Conditionals and Actuality

It is known that indicative and subjunctive conditionals interact differently with a rigidifying “actually” operator. The paper studies this difference in an abstract setting. It does not assume the framework of possible world semantics, characterizing “actually” instead by the type of logically valid formulas to which it gives rise. It is proved that in a language with such features all sentential contexts that are congruential (in the sense that they preserve logical equivalence) are extensional (in the sense that they preserve material equivalence). For a subjunctive conditional, the natural conclusion to draw is that it is non-congruential. It is much harder to defend the claim that an indicative conditional is non-congruential. The pressure to treat the indicative conditional as truth-functional is correspondingly greater. The implications of these results for attempts to interpret the indicative conditional as an epistemic or doxastic operator are assessed.

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The impact of music on learning and consolidation of novel words

Music can be a powerful mnemonic device, as shown by a body of literature demonstrating that listening to text sung to a familiar melody results in better memory for the words compared to conditions where they are spoken. Furthermore, patients with a range of memory impairments appear to be able to form new declarative memories when they are encoded in the form of lyrics in a song, while unable to remember similar materials after hearing them in the spoken modality. Whether music facilitates the acquisition of completely new information, such as new vocabulary, remains unknown. Here we report three experiments in which adult participants learned novel words in the spoken or sung modality. While we found no benefit of musical presentation on free recall or recognition memory of novel words, novel words learned in the sung modality were more strongly integrated in the mental lexicon compared to words learned in the spoken modality. This advantage for the sung words was only present when the training melody was familiar. The impact of musical presentation on learning therefore appears to extend beyond episodic memory and can be reflected in the emergence and properties of new lexical representations.     

Bidirectional Associations Between Newlyweds' Marital Satisfaction and Marital Problems over Time

Prevailing views of marital functioning generally adopt the view that marital problems predict decreases in marital satisfaction, but alternative theoretical perspectives raise the possibility that lowered satisfaction can also predict increases in problems. The current study sought to integrate and compare these perspectives by examining the bidirectional cross‐lagged associations between newlyweds' reports of their marital satisfaction and marital problems over the first 4 years of marriage. Using annual assessments from 483 heterosexual newlywed couples, we find evidence for problem‐to‐satisfaction linkages as well as satisfaction‐to‐problem linkages. Satisfaction was a stronger predictor of marital problems early in marriage but not as time passed; by Year 4 only problem‐to‐satisfaction linkages remained significant. These findings are consistent with the idea that couples with more problems go on to report lower levels of satisfaction and couples with lower levels of satisfaction go on to report more marital problems. This dynamic interplay between global judgments about relationship satisfaction and ongoing specific relationship difficulties highlights the value of examining bidirectional effects to better understand marital functioning over time.     

Slower eating rate reduces the food intake of men, but not women: implications for behavioral weight control

This study tested a central tenet of behavioral weight control: does slower eating rate reduce food intake and positively affect appetite ratings. This study used direct behavioral observation of participants' (n=48; 25BMI35) eating behavior using Universal Eating Monitors. Food intake and ratings of "desire to eat" (collected each minute during meals) were represented as a function of time. Based on an acclimation meal, participants' eating rate was modified by instructing them to eat a bite of food when prompted by a computer, which generated three types of meals: (1) baseline (eating rate was the same as the acclimation meal), (2) reduced-rate (eating rate was reduced by 50%), and (3) combined-rate (eating rate at the beginning of the meal was identical to that of the acclimation meal, subsequently eating rate was reduced by 50%). All meals were ad libitum. Slower eating rate during the reduced-rate and combined-rate meals resulted in less food intake compared to the baseline meal for men, but not women. Ratings of desire to eat, normalized for the amount of food consumed, were lower during the combined-rate meal for men and women. Thus, this basic premise of behavioral weight control was supported for men, but not for women.