The Effectiveness of Functional Family Therapy for Adolescent Behavioral and Substance Misuse Problems: A Meta‐Analysis

A systematic review of published and unpublished English language articles identified 14 studies containing 18 comparisons between functional family therapy (FFT) and another condition in the treatment of adolescent disruptive behavior and substance use disorders. In 11 of these comparisons, assignment to conditions was random, while nonrandom assignment occurred in seven studies. For both random and nonrandom comparisons, separate meta‐analyses were conducted for subgroups of studies depending on the type of comparison group used. Data from studies of untreated control groups (CTL), treatment as usual (TAU), and well‐defined alternative treatments (ALTs) were analyzed separately. Effect sizes from these six meta‐analyses were as follows: random assignment FFT versus CTL (k = 3, d = 0.48, p < .01); random assignment FFT versus TAU (k = 3, d = .20, ns); random assignment FFT versus ALT (k = 5, d = .35, p < .05); nonrandom assignment FFT versus CTL (k = 2, d = .90, ns); nonrandom assignment FFT versus TAU (k = 2, d = .08, ns); and nonrandom assignment FFT versus ALT (k = 3, d = .75, p < .001). These results provide support for the effectiveness of FFT compared with untreated controls and well‐defined ALTs, such as cognitive behavior therapy, other models of family therapy, and individual and group therapy for adolescents.     

What Are They Thinking? A National Study of Stability and Change in Divorce Ideation

This study reports on a nationally representative sample of married individuals ages 25–50 (N = 3,000) surveyed twice (1 year apart) to investigate the phenomenon of divorce ideation, or what people are thinking when they are thinking about divorce. Twenty‐eight percent of respondents had thought their marriage was in serious trouble in the past but not recently. Another 25% had thoughts about divorce in the last 6 months. Latent Class Analysis revealed three distinct groups among those thinking about divorce at Time 1: soft thinkers (49%), long‐term‐serious thinkers (45%), and conflicted thinkers (6%). Yet, divorce ideation was not static; 31% of Time 1 thinkers were not thinking about it 1 year later (and 36% of nonthinkers at Time 1 were thinking about it 1 year later). Also, Latent Transition Analysis revealed 49% of Time 1 long‐term‐serious thinkers, 56% of soft thinkers, and 51% of conflicted thinkers had shifted groups at Time 2, mostly in the direction of less and softer thinking about divorce. Overall, divorce ideation is common but dynamic, and it is not necessarily an indication of imminent marital dissolution.     

Making sense of one’s actions in an explanatory vacuum: The interpretation of nonconscious goal striving

Previous research has found that performing norm-violating behaviors based on a nonconsciously-activated goal elicits negative affect (Oettingen, Grant, Smith, Skinner, & Gollwitzer, 2006). In the present research we explored whether this negative affect is eliminated when an earlier conscious goal with congruent behavioral effects can be used to explain the norm-violating behavior. Our findings suggest that applicable conscious goals are indeed used to interpret nonconsciously-activated goal striving (Study 1), and that this interpretation occurs reflexively rather than reflectively (Study 2), with implications for interpersonal behavior (Study 3). The role of social norms, applicable conscious goals, and negative affect in the interpretation of nonconscious goal pursuit is discussed.     

Modeling differentiation of cognitive abilities within the higher-order factor model using moderated factor analysis

Receptive foreign language proficiency is usually measured with reading and listening comprehension tasks. A novel approach to assess such proficiencies – viewing comprehension – is based on the presentation of short instructional videos followed by one or more comprehension questions concerning the preceding video stimulus. In order to evaluate a newly developed viewing comprehension test 485 German high school students completed reading, listening, and viewing comprehension tests, all measuring the receptive proficiency in English as a foreign language. Fluid and crystallized intelligence were measured as predictors of performance. Relative to traditional comprehension tasks, the viewing comprehension task has similar psychometric qualities. The three comprehension tests are very highly but not perfectly correlated with each other. Relations with fluid and crystallized intelligence show systematic differences between the three comprehension tasks. The high overlap between foreign language comprehension measures and between crystallized intelligence and language comprehension ability can be taken as support for a uni-dimensional interpretation. Implications for the assessment of language proficiency are discussed.     

Mental control and visual illusions: Toward explaining race-biased weapon misidentifications

People are biased to misidentify harmless objects as weapons when the objects are associated with African Americans (Payne, 2001). Two studies examined the processes underlying this bias. The illusory perception hypothesis argues that stereotypes alter the subjective construal of the object. In contrast, the executive failure hypothesis argues that even when perception of the item is intact, misidentifications can result from failures to control responses. Immediately after making an error, participants were able to accurately express that they had made a mistake via confidence ratings (Experiment 1) and by correcting their judgment (Experiment 2). Subjective confidence judgments were extremely well calibrated to accuracy, and participants virtually never believed their own mistakes. Conditions likely to create errors through both illusions and control failures are discussed.     

Kicking the habit: Effects of nonstereotypic association training and correction processes on hiring decisions

The primary aim of the present research was to examine the effect of training in associating nonstereotypic traits with men and women on hiring decisions. While previous findings demonstrate that training can reduce the uncontrolled activation of stereotypes, the present results show that training by itself may not reduce the more controlled application of stereotypes. Across both no training and training conditions, participants chose male over female candidates for a leadership function. However, extensive nonstereotypic training did reduce sex discrimination when the training phase was disassociated from the choice of candidate task or when the participant's cognitive capacity was limited. These findings provide further evidence for the effectiveness of training in decreasing intergroup biases and for the potential influence of mental correction in moderating the effects of nonstereotypic training.     

The behavioural self-regulation strategies of Indian South African university students: An exploratory study

This study explored the race-related self-regulation strategies of eight Indian South African university students (females: n = 4) attending a historically white university. Interactive qualitative analysis of their race-related experiences revealed that the students felt that they had been judged as being different, which resulted in overwhelming unwanted emotions, primarily anger and sadness. Moreover, the students reported the use a range of self-regulation strategies (such as introspection, engaging with trusted others, managing the situation, tolerating the experience of being judged, and making friends with people from other races) in a specific sequence to enhance their social acceptance on the campus. The findings suggest that adaptive self-regulation may enhance the social outcomes of historically disadvantaged, racial minority students.     

Automatic skin lesions segmentation based on a new morphological approach via geodesic active contour

Automatic disease classification has been one of the most intensively searched in recent years due to the possibility of quickly providing a diagnosis to the patient. In this process, the segmentation of regions of interest of these diseases has a fundamental role in their subsequent classification. With skin lesions segmentation it is no different and in recent years many studies have achieved interesting results, becoming an important tool in aiding the medical diagnosis of skin diseases. In this work, a morphological geodesic active contour segmentation (MGAC) method is proposed with automatic initialization, using mathematical morphology which is a great partial differential equation approximation, with lower computational cost, no stability problems and fully automatic. The proposed method was tested in a stable and well-known dermoscopic images database provided by Pedro Hispano Hospital (PH2) and was compared with both methods that make use of machine learning or deep learning techniques such as fully convolutional networks (FCN), full resolution convolutional networks (FrCN), deep class-specific learning with probability based step-wise integration (DCL-PSI), and others, and also traditional methods like JSEG, statistical region merging (SRM), Level Set, ASLM and others. The MGAC showed good results in all similarity metrics compared in this work like Jaccard Index (86.16%), Dice coefficient (92.09%) and Matthew correlation coefficient (87.52%), and also achieves good results in sensitivity (91.72%), specificity (97.99%), accuracy (94.59%) and F-measure (93.82%). Thus, the proposed method presented better results in relation to all these metrics when compared to the traditional methods and still presented better results in relation to the methods that use machine learning or deep learning techniques in Jaccard Index, Dice coefficient and specificity. This confirm that the MGAC can efficiently segment skin lesions, presenting great potential to be applied in the aid of the medical diagnosis.     

青少年学生焦虑敏感与睡眠质量的关系及其内在机制

采用中学生、大学生焦虑敏感问卷和匹兹堡睡眠质量指数量表(PSQI),分别对1011名中学生和607名大学生进行调查。结果显示高焦虑敏感学生的PSQI总分显著高于低焦虑敏感学生,焦虑敏感及其三个因子与PSQI的相关都是中效应,焦虑敏感对青少年学生睡眠质量指数具有显著的正向预测作用,焦虑敏感水平越高,其睡眠质量越差。焦虑敏感可能以应激事件和健康问题作为致敏源,以焦虑等负性情绪作为敏感内容,在消极自动认知觉察与思维的介入下,进一步放大对有关负性情绪的感受与体验,从而影响青少年学生的睡眠质量。