Teaching minority high school students to recruit helpers to attain personal and educational goals

Recruiting help from mentors and other potential helpers is a promising strategy for helping disadvantaged and minority youths meet their personal and educational goals. Three African-American high school seniors participated in a project designed to evaluate the effectiveness of training procedures that would allow them to ask for help in attaining educational and other personal goals. A behavioral training procedure that included instructional materials, role-play practice, praise, and feedback was used. Targeted skills included goal setting and 30 responses involved in the process of meeting with a potential helper. Role-play situations were used to evaluate participants' help-recruiting skills before and after training. Participants increased their help-recruiting skills from an average of 38% during baseline, to an average of 75% after training. Self-reported measures of goal attainment suggested that the students benefited from the training. Implications for mentoring programs designed to increase minority students' opportunities to reach educational goals were discussed.     

Do dogs rescue their owners from a stressful situation? A behavioral and physiological assessment

Animal Cognition - Rescue behavior is considered a type of pro-social response, defined as a voluntary action directed to benefit another individual who is in a stressful or dangerous situation. In...     

Memory traces compete under regimes of limited Arc protein synthesis: Implications for memory interference

Recently encoded information can be lost in the presence of new information, a process called 'retrograde interference'. Retrograde interference has been extensively described for more than a century; however, little is known about its underlying mechanisms. Different approaches agree on the need of the synthesis of plasticity related proteins (PRPs) to consolidate a long-term memory (LTM). Our hypothesis is that when PRPs are limited, interference of a task over LTM formation of another may be due to the utilization of protein resources common to both tasks. Here, by combining the tasks of inhibitory avoidance (IA) and open field (OF) exploration in rats, we show that memory traces compete for their stabilization if PRPs are limited. As a result, LTM is formed for only one of the tasks with a consequent decrease in the memory for the other. Furthermore, infusing Arc antisense oligonucleotide into the dorsal hippocampus, we found that Arc is necessary for LTM formation of these two types of learning tasks and is one of the PRPs that can be shared between them when animals are trained in both OF and IA. In sum, these findings suggest that under conditions of reduced protein availability, a learning task interferes with LTM formation of another by using the available PRPs.     

Building International Collaborative Capacity: Contributions of Community Psychologists to a European Network

Europe is in the process of building a more participative, just, and inclusive European Union. The European Social Fund, which is an initiative developed to actively promote multinational partnerships that address pressing social issues, is a good example of the European transformation. This article describes the steps taken to develop and evaluate the activities of an international network promoting collaborative capacity among regional partners involved in the prevention of labor discrimination toward immigrants in three European countries—Spain, Belgium, and Italy. An international team of community psychologists proposed an empowering approach to assess the collaborative capacity of the network. This approach consisted of three steps: (1) establishing a collaborative relationship among partners, (2) building collaborative capacity, and (3) evaluating the collaborative capacity of the network. We conclude with lessons learned from the process and provide recommendations for addressing the challenges inherent in international collaboration processes.     

Empowering people with physical disabilities through advocacy skills training

Members of an advocacy organization for people with physical disabilities were trained to identify and report issues at group meetings. In addition, two consecutive chairpersons were trained to conduct action-oriented meetings. Measures of group members' activities outside meetings and related outcomes on identified issues were also collected. Results indicated increases in the number of disability-related issues reported by trained members and consistent improvements in chairperson performance following training. Retrospective interviews and permanent records showed that advocacy activities, as well as the outcomes of members' actions, increased after training. These findings and their implications for the empowerment of people with disabilities are discussed.     

Simulated Visual Field Loss Does Not Alter Turning Coordination in Healthy Young Adults

Turning, while walking, is an important component of adaptive locomotion. Current hypotheses regarding the motor control of body segment coordination during turning suggest heavy influence of visual information. The authors aimed to examine whether visual field impairment (central loss or peripheral loss) affects body segment coordination during walking turns in healthy young adults. No significant differences in the onset time of segments or intersegment coordination were observed because of visual field occlusion. These results suggest that healthy young adults can use visual information obtained from central and peripheral visual fields interchangeably, pointing to flexibility of visuomotor control in healthy young adults. Further study in populations with chronic visual impairment and those with turning difficulties are warranted.     

The Need for Action When Conducting Intervention Research: The Multiple Roles of Community Psychologists

In choosing to implement empowering interventions with marginalized populations, community psychologists often have to merge research and action. We present three case stories that exemplify empowerment efforts in the context of a multi-year school intervention designed to develop the advocacy skills of ethnic minority students' with disabilities and promote attainment of transition-related goals. In the process of implementing the intervention, our research team had to instigate change, advocate, and/or mediate in multiple conflictual interactions between the various stakeholders in the schools. We faced both positive and negative consequences for our actions. We discuss the responsibilities of community psychologists in the process of empowering others and the implications for the practice of community research.     

On Becoming Scholars and Activists for Disability Rights

In this paper, the authors discussed the nexus between the Americans with Disabilities Act and the founding of the field of Community Psychology. Contributions of the latter and future areas of research are reviewed here in three areas of importance to both fields: Community living and participation, employment, and transition from high school. Community psychology can make potential contributions to advancing research in these three areas. Implications for future research are discussed.