On wisdom

This article explores some of the features involved in making wise decisions in couples and family therapy. Delineating what qualities are involved in making wise decisions in life--so as to live the "good life" in the polis, and the necessary contributions of life experiences in this task--was first discussed by Aristotle. A major problem that therapists face today is that our society offers many different ways of living well--or for that matter, badly--and our theories do the same. Family therapy theories are not value free. I clarify that different family theories embody different values: clear boundaries, good attachments, the ability to communicate, and so on. If our theories foster certain values, then, as Isaiah Berlin has made clear, seeking to achieve a particular value leads to placing less value on another. The article concludes with some thoughts about values that therapists could appropriately follow in their work.     

Learning a new human-computer alphabet: the role of similarity and practice

Two purposes motivated this study: (a) to quantify the difficulty in learning various symbols of the alphabet used to enter data into a personal digital assistant (PDA), and (b) to investigate the interaction of item difficulty with practice conditions that promote varying levels of cognitive effort. Levels of compatibility between members of the PDA alphabet and English were quantified through introspective ratings in Experiment 1 and objective performance measures in Experiment 2. Three levels of item compatibility were learned under conditions of proactive or retroactive augmented information in Experiment 3. Contrary to expectations, the item similarity effect did not interact with practice schedules—a retroactive augmented information condition resulted in degraded levels of acquisition performance, but superior retention levels, compared to the proactive condition. These findings are discussed in terms of the relative merits of cognitive effort in skill acquisition.     

Personality disorders and response to outpatient treatment of chronic pain

As part of a comprehensive interdisciplinary evaluation conducted prior to participation in an outpatient chronic pain treatment program, the psychological status of 101 persons was assessed. The majority of participants was found to have a form of personality disorder, determined by conservative cutoff scores applied to their Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI) profiles. DSM-III-R Cluster C disorders (i.e., Avoidant, Dependent, Obsessive-Compulsive, and Passive-Aggressive) were overrepresented in this sample. Subsequent analyses revealed that personality disorders were related to higher levels of self-reported distress and pain at both the beginning and the end of outpatient treatment. Differential responses to treatment were observed on self-report measures; however, few relations were found between personality disorder and physical therapist ratings of impairment and improvement. Implications for the assessment of personality disorders in outpatient pain treatment programs are discussed and appropriate intervention strategies are considered.     

A response Consistency statistic for the millon clinical multiaxial inventory (MCMI)

Response style in objective psychological testing is an important issue in the reliability and validity of tests as well as in the interpretation of test results. The MCMI provides two response-style indices, the validity scale and the weight factor. The present work presents an additional statistic to assess random response in subjects. The Consistency Coefficient is the correlation between the subjects' endorsement of even and odd items across the 20 MCMI scales. The distributions of 500 patient and 500 randomly generated profiles were compared. Good separation between these distributions was found. The subject data were extremely negatively skewed, whereas the randomly generated data were normally distributed. Data are presented that display positive and negative predictive values, as well as sensitivity and specificity across ranges of prevalence and cut score. These data facilitate the identification of subjects who respond to the MCMI in a random manner so that their scores can be interpreted accordingly.     

Measurement invariance of WISC-IV across normative and clinical samples

Measurement invariance of the WISC-IV second-order factorial structure between normative and clinical samples was investigated using WISC-IV core subtests and a total of 1100 children aged 6-16. Multi-group higher order analysis of mean and covariance structure (MG-MACS) models were used to analyze these data. Results supported measurement invariance. Only Coding and Comprehension subtest intercepts varied slightly between groups. The hypothesized WISC-IV factor model described the data well. Factor patterns, first- and second-order factor loadings, intercepts, residual variances of measured subtests, and disturbances of first-order factors of the WISC-IV were generally invariant. Results suggested that WISC-IV index scores and subtests have the same meaning for children in both normative and clinical groups.     

Applications of Collaborative Helping Maps: Supporting Professional Development,Supervision and Work Teams in Family‐Centered Practice

Collaborative, family‐centered practice has become an influential approach in helping efforts across a broad spectrum of human services. This article draws from previous work that presented a principle‐based, practice framework of Collaborative Helping and highlighted the use of Collaborative Helping maps as a tool both to help workers think their way through complex situations and to provide a guideline for constructive conversations between families and helpers about challenging issues. It builds on that work to examine ways to utilize Collaborative Helping maps at worker, supervisory, and organizational levels to enhance and sustain collaborative, family‐centered practice and weave its core values and principles into the everyday fabric of organizational cultures in human service agencies and government agencies that serve poor and marginalized families and communities.     

Upon Further Reflection: View from the Other Side of “Windows on the 21st Century”

Three points discussed in Glenn (1993) are reviewed in the context of current events: the discipline of behavior analysis as a cultural system, the importance of that discipline in the training and regulation of behavior analytic practitioners, and Association for Behavior Analysis International (ABAI) as a cultural subsystem that links to all the other parts and therefore links the other parts to one another. Noting similarities between behavior analysis and biology, I consider the growth of biological sciences as a model for behavior analysis. Of particular importance for biology has been the role of basic biological sciences in the practice of medicine and the resulting feedback loops that have developed among its basic sciences, applied sciences, and medical practice. I suggest that behavior analysis explicitly follow this model and that ABAI has a critical role to play in leading the field to developing the feedback loops that have integrated the biological sciences and medicine.     

From childhood to senior professional football: A multi-level approach to elite youth football players’ engagement in football-specific activities

ObjectivesThe main aim of this study was to identify the development of engagement in football-specific activities of elite youth association football (soccer) players who have made the transition to senior professional status or not.DesignComparative research design.MethodData were collected from all elite youth players (N = 745) within the age-range of 14–21 years from all Norwegian Premier League clubs, using a retrospective questionnaire. A within elite-group comparison of players who had obtained a senior professional contract or not was conducted by using multi-level modeling (n = 491).ResultsThe results showed that although the professional players reported to have accumulated more overall practice hours than non-professionals from ages 6 to 19 years, none of these differences were significant. The professional players reported to have accumulated significantly more hours in play and coach-led practice at the youngest age categories. No significant differences were identified at older age categories or for other types of football-specific practice at any age.ConclusionsDifferences in performance attainment may be due to variation in the amount and types of football practice at the earliest years of participation, but may also be related to other factors than the number of hours spent in certain football-specific activities. We argue that implementation of multi-level modeling represents an important progression within practice history research, and is necessary to account for the actual individual’s development over time in addition to identify how different variables may affect the developmental process.