Community implementation of PMTO™: Impacts on referrals to specialist services and schools

Sigmarsdóttir, M. & Björnsdóttir, A. (2012). Community implementation of PMTO?: Impacts on referrals to specialist services and schools. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 53, 506–511. In 2000, the city of Hafnarfjörður, Iceland, implemented Parent Management Training – Oregon Model (PMTO^?) to prevent and treat behavioral problems among children. This paper describes the implementation and findings regarding impacts in the community. As hypothesized, findings showed that the number of referrals to specialist services decreased in Hafnarfjörður following PMTO implementation and increased in two comparison communities not implementing the method. Within the Hafnarfjörður community, recorded instances of behavior problems reduced in elementary schools working in line with PMTO. The results presented are the first such findings in Iceland and suggest the kinds of systematic changes communities may experience following the implementation of an evidence‐based program.     

目标性意图与执行性意图调节情绪反应的效果比较

目标性意图和执行性意图作为目标的不同形式,对情绪调节的影响有待探讨。本研究试图考察目标性意图和执行性意图与表达抑制相结合之后,在调节情绪反应方面的作用。实验采用主观报告和生物反馈的方法对58名大学生进行测试。结果发现：（1）执行性意图组被试在观看负性和中性图片时对自身情绪唤醒度的评价均显著低于目标性意图组,在观看负性图片时其情绪唤醒度也显著低于控制组。（2）执行性意图组被试在各项生理反应指标上均显著低于目标性意图组和控制组,主要表现为形成执行性意图的个体在皮肤电导增加量、皮温降低量和指脉增加量上均显著低于形成目标性意图或不形成任何意图的个体。上述结果表明,相较于仅仅给出情绪体验下调目标的目标性意图,与表达抑制结合在一起的执行性意图能有效下调个体的负性情绪反应。     

Pushing the frontiers of multicultural training in community psychology

Suarez-Balcazar, Durlak, and Smith (1994) have provided the field with important baseline information regarding multicultural training practices in community psychology. This report can serve as a catalyst in our quest to place an understanding of human diversity, in particular, ethnic-cultural diversity, at the heart of community psychology. To do so, we need to move beyond the teaching of culturally sensitive research and practice to a reconceptualization of the knowledge base and methods of community psychology, to an examination of the conflicts engendered by the inclusion of multiple voices, and to the implementation of institutional arrangements that can support such a challenging task in constructive ways.     

Opening the Black Box: Using Process Evaluation Measures to Assess Implementation and Theory Building

The past decade has seen increasing recognition in prevention science of the need to move away from a black box approach to intervention evaluation and toward an approach that can elaborate on the mechanisms through which changes in the outcomes operate (Chen & Rossi, 1989; Durlak & Wells, 1997; Spoth et al., 1995). An approach that examines issues of program implementation is particularly critical in the design of efficacy studies of school-based preventive interventions. Numerous preventive intervention strategies are now delivered within the schools, often by regular classroom teachers. The extent to which teachers faithfully deliver a particular curriculum or incorporate instructional strategies emphasized by an intervention is a critical question for the overall project evaluation. This article illustrates the utilization of process measures from a multicomponent school-based prevention program to examine implementation of a teaching staff development intervention, and the program's underlying theoretical basis. Given the nested study design, the analyses utilize hierarchical linear models (Bryk & Raudenbush, 1992) to examine changes in teaching strategies by condition and investigate the hypothesized relationships between teaching practices and student behaviors based on the program's theoretical framework. Results suggest that teaching practices in two of the six intervention focus areas were positively impacted in the first 18 months of the project. Findings also support th relationships between teachers' instructional practices and students' behaviour.     

The Implementation of the Fast Track Program: An Example of a Large-Scale Prevention Science Efficacy Trial

In 1990, the Fast Track Project was initiated to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of a comprehensive, multicomponent prevention program targeting children at risk for conduct disorders in four demographically diverse American communities (Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group [CPPRG], 1992). Representing a prevention science approach toward community-based preventive intervention, the Fast Track intervention design was based upon the available data base elucidating the epidemiology of risk for conduct disorder and suggesting key causal developmental influences (R. P. Weissberg & M. T. Greenberg, 1998). Critical questions about this approach to prevention center around the extent to which such a science-based program can be effective at (1) engaging community members and stakeholders, (2) maintaining intervention fidelity while responding appropriately to the local norms and needs of communities that vary widely in their demographic and cultural/ethnic composition, and (3) maintaining community engagement in the long-term to support effective and sustainable intervention dissemination. This paper discusses these issues, providing examples from the Fast Track project to illustrate the process of program implementation and the evidence available regarding the success of this science-based program at engaging communities in sustainable and effective ways as partners in prevention programming.     

The impurity of “pure” indexicals

Within the class of indexicals, a distinction is often made between “pure” or “automatic” indexicals on one hand, and demonstratives or “discretionary” indexicals on the other. The idea is supposed to be that certain indexicals refer automatically and invariably to a particular feature of the utterance context: ‘I’ refers to the speaker, ‘now’ to the time of utterance, ‘here’ to the place of utterance, etc. Against this view, I present cases where reference shifts from the speaker, time, or place of utterance to some other object, time, or place. I consider and reject the claim that these counterexamples to the automatic indexical theory all involve non-literal uses of indexicals and argue that they cannot be explained away on the grounds that they involve conversational implicature or pretense.     

A Survey of Management Educators’ Perceptions of Unethical Faculty Behavior

To help academic associations in management develop, refine, and implement a code of ethics, we conducted a survey of management educators’ perception of the ethicality of 142 specific behaviors in teaching, research, and service. The results of the survey could be used to inform ethics committees of these associations regarding the level of acceptability of such conduct. The potential value of our study for the Academy of Management or similar management associations lie in our (1) systematically involving the members in building support for the code of ethics, (2) assessing members’ ethical judgments on both cross-sectional and longitudinal bases so as to identify areas needing particular attention in ethical training, (3) providing an extensive list of specific examples of questionable and potentially unethical behaviors so as to make it easier to implement the code, and (4) providing a template survey document for potential use in involving more stakeholder groups in the development of codes of ethics.

Short-term action intentions overrule long-term semantic knowledge

In the present study, we investigated whether the preparation of an unusual action with an object (e.g. bringing a cup towards the eye) could selectively overrule long-term semantic representations. In the first experiment it was found that unusual action intentions activated short-term semantic goal representations, rather than long-term conceptual associations. In a second experiment the reversal of long-term priming effects was replicated, while reducing the need for internal verbalization as a possible strategy to accomplish the task. Priming effects in the first two experiments were found to involve the selection of object knowledge at a semantic level, rather than reflecting a general effect of action preparation on word processing (Experiment 3). Finally, in a fourth experiment short-term priming effects were shown to extend beyond a lexical level by showing faster responses to pictures representing the short-term action goal. Together, the present findings extend the ‘selection-for-action’ principle previously used in visual attention to a semantic level, by showing that semantic information is selectively activated in line with the short-term goal of the actor.     

EVENT SEGMENTATION

ABSTRACT— One way to understand something is to break it up into parts. New research indicates that segmenting ongoing activity into meaningful events is a core component of perception and that this has consequences for memory and learning. Behavioral and neuroimaging data suggest that event segmentation is automatic and that people spontaneously segment activity into hierarchically organized parts and subparts. This segmentation depends on the bottom-up processing of sensory features such as movement and on the top-down processing of conceptual features such as actors' goals. How people segment activity affects what they remember later; as a result, those who identify appropriate event boundaries during perception tend to remember more and to learn more proficiently.