FUNCTIONAL ASSESSMENT,CURRICULAR REVISION,AND SEVERE BEHAVIOR PROBLEMS

An adolescent female with multiple handicaps and a long history of severely disruptive behavior participated in a functional assessment linked directly to specific revisions in her school curriculum. During Phase 1, reversal designs were used to test hypotheses pertaining to antecedent and auricular influences on problem behavior. During Phase 2, a multiple baseline across afternoon and morning time periods demonstrated that the auricular revisions were effective in eliminating severely disruptive behavior and increasing on-task responding. Data also showed that inappropriate “psychotic” speech was reduced and appropriate social interactions were increased. Follow-up results showed that the changes were maintained throughout the school year. Questionnaire data provided social validation of the procedures and outcomes. The findings are discussed in relation to their implications for functional assessment, individualized curricula, and positive programming for students with disabilities and serious behavior problems.     

New assessment systems for residential treatment,management, research,and evaluation: A symposium

An introduction and overview are presented to new observational assessment systems for ongoing assessment and monitoring of both staff and resident (client or patient) functioning in residential treatment programs for emotionally disturbed and mentally retarded adults.Preparation of articles and the research and development on which the articles are based was supported, in part, by Public Health Service Grants MH-15553 and MH-25464 from the National Institute of Mental Health, and by grants from the Joyce Foundation and the Illinois Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities.A symposium presented at the 87th Annual Meetings of the American Psychological Association, New York City, September 1979.     

Systems use to objectify program evaluation,clinical, and management decisions

The utility of the observational assessment systems at different levels — from local clinical to systemwide management — is outlined. An overview is provided of TSBC information applied to individualized problem identification and programming/monitoring, discharge and competency determinations, and both absolute and comparative program evaluation. The utility of SRIC information for prgoramming/monitoring and for staff training and evaluation is outlined in addition to the applied uses of the information of the assessment systems in combination. Once implemented, the continuous data from the systems allow for empirically based self-corrective improvements in the quality of mental health services while automatically providing a basis for legal documentation and accurate cost/effectiveness comparisons of mental health programs.Preparation of this article and the research and development on which the article is based were supported, in part, by Public Health Service Grants MH-15553 and MH-25464 from the National Institute of Mental Health, and by grants from The Joyce Foundation and the Illinois Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities.Presented at the 87th Annual Meetings of the American Psychological Association, New York City, September 1979, as part of a symposium on New assessment systems for residential treatment, management, research, and evaluation.     

人工智能辅助下的心理健康新型测评

近年来,人工智能技术的飞速发展及应用催生了"智能化心理健康测评"这一领域。智能化心理健康测评能够弥补传统方法的不足,降低漏诊率并提高诊断效率,这对于心理健康问题的普查及预警具有重大意义。目前,智能化心理健康测评处于初步发展阶段,研究者基于在线行为数据、便携式设备数据等开展主要以数据驱动为导向的探索研究,旨在实现更高的预测准确率,但是测评结果的可解释性等指标尚不够理想。未来的智能化心理健康测评需要强调心理学领域知识和经验的深度介入,提高测评的针对性和精细化程度,加强信效度检验,这对于智能化心理健康测评工具的进一步发展和应用至关重要。     

《中学生心理健康诊断测验》结构的探索及修改

在浙江省8个城市的6所高中和6所初中,采取分层整群抽样方法选取初一到高三600名学生,用修改后的《心理健康诊断测验》(MHT)进行了测查,着重检验该测验的结构。结果发现,因素分析所获取的因素与原测验相一致,但对原测验的项目进行了一些删减。因素分析和相关分析结果以及内部一致性系数显示,修改后的问卷具有较高的信度,其效度也符合心理测量的要求。     

Who drops-out? Do measures of risk to self and to others predict unplanned endings in primary care counselling?

Aims: Unplanned endings, where clients unilaterally end therapy, are of concern for psychological therapy services generally as they raise questions about the appropriateness of the treatment and it's delivery for some clients. Limited available data indicates that those who drop-out often have more severe symptoms at entry, and have poorer clinical outcomes. This raises further questions about risk to self and others for those clients who leave therapy prematurely and how these clients might be identified and kept engaged. Method: This paper uses a large dataset of CORE data collected routinely in a primary care counselling service between 2000 and 2003. Logistic regression was utilised to consider different measures of risk and other client characteristics recorded at assessment to predict drop-out from the service. Results: These indicate that younger age, greater psychological distress at assessment, an addiction problem and greater risk to others, are associated with an unplanned ending. However, no reliable logistic regression model could be produced. This may be partly due to data quality issues or important characteristics not being available in the data. Implications for practice: The paper concludes that counsellors should actively seek to minimise unplanned endings, as amongst them may be represented the more distressed and risky clients referred to primary care counselling.     

Using a Fork as a Hairbrush: Investigating Dual Routes to Release from Functional Fixedness

Functional fixedness involves difficulty with conceptualizing creative object uses. When it obstructs problem‐solving, individuals must reframe their approach. We examined how different training techniques—chunk decomposition (i.e., considering an object’s basic parts and physical properties) and constraint relaxation (i.e., considering an object’s different functions)—might rely upon different routes to creative reframing. Additionally, we investigated how different forms of cognitive load interact with these dual routes. Participants learned one of three techniques. Chunk decomposition participants created object breakdown diagrams; constraint relaxation participants created object functions lists; and free association (control) participants wrote a word that they associated with each of several concrete nouns. After training, participants attempted to solve five functional fixedness problems. E1 investigated how increasing germane cognitive load via either direct or indirect prompting affected training transfer. Experiment 2 investigated how reducing extraneous cognitive load by providing no transfer instructions and using an eye‐closure strategy. Across both experiments, results supported differences in accuracy and response latency by training. However, chunk decomposition and constraint relaxation did not follow the same pattern, suggesting different mechanisms of the effect. We discuss possible applications to increase innovation in real‐world domains such as education, business, and engineering.     

What is agentic about the Spatial Agency Bias? How pragmatic relevance contributes to the spatial representations of actions

The mental imagination of (social) actions has been shown to follow a left‐to‐right trajectory, with the thematic agent associated with the left position (Spatial Agency Bias, Suitner & Maass in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 53, 2016, p. 245–301). For example, individuals asked to choose a picture that visualizes the sentence “Tom kicks George” tend to choose an image where the agent, Tom, is positioned on the left‐hand side rather than on the right‐hand side. However, as an alternative to the thematic role of the agent, such findings may reflect a mental representation following pragmatic relevance. Specifically, a pragmatic perspective holds that word order and syntactic functions are strategic devices to communicate that the element is important for the sentence. Thus, positioning in the described picture‐matching task may actually reflect the agent's pragmatic relevance instead of agency per se. As a test, we vary whether sentences are written in the active versus the passive voice. Results from five studies indicate that the passive voice results in the tendency to place the agent on the right‐hand side rather than on the left‐hand side of a picture. Instead, the acted‐upon person is positioned on the left‐hand side of a picture. A sixth experiment reveals that for the passive voice, the agent is still seen as more agentic than the receiver, but is considered less relevant. The findings are congruent with the proposed pragmatic relevance account. Implications for the Spatial Agency Bias as well as for building mental representations in general are discussed.     

Active or Inert? An Experimental Comparison of Creative Ideation across Incubation Periods

The primary objective of this study was to contribute to the growing research discipline investigating the effects of physical exercise on divergent thinking creativity performance. Thirty‐two students participated in this two‐visit, within‐subject intervention. Individuals consented to participate in two randomized, and counterbalanced, experimental conditions, consisting of 15 min of active treadmill walking and an inert, seated control incubation period. Creativity was assessed at baseline and post‐exercise (and control) via the Instances Creativity Task (ICT). Creativity scores for changes in fluency (F(1, 31) = 2.90, p = .10) were not statistically significant across the experimental conditions. Originality scores were higher at baseline and follow‐up when compared to the exercise condition (F(1, 31) = 6.82, p = .01). However, there was no statistically significant condition × time interaction effect (F(1, 31) = 1.78, p = .19). Further analyses demonstrated that there was no statistically significant difference between the experimental conditions on recall score (F(1, 31) = 1.04, p = .32). All models indicated statistically significant main effects for time: fluency (F(1, 31) = 131.17, p < .001); originality (F(1, 31) = 36.54, p < .001); and recall (F(1, 31) = 51.75, p < .001). These findings suggest that both active and inert creative incubation periods may similarly enhance subsequent divergent thinking performance.