Promoting the Culturally Sensitive Diagnosis of Mexican Americans: Some Personal Insights

This article presents a series of personal guidelines for promoting the culturally sensitive psychiatric diagnosis of Mexican American/Chicano clients. These guidelines are primarily based on the authors' collective experiences in diagnosing and treating this population.     

Performance of typical and superior face recognizers on a novel interactive face matching procedure

Unfamiliar simultaneous face matching is error prone. Reducing incorrect identification decisions will positively benefit forensic and security contexts. The absence of view-independent information in static images likely contributes to the difficulty of unfamiliar face matching. We tested whether a novel interactive viewing procedure that provides the user with 3D structural information as they rotate a facial image to different orientations would improve face matching accuracy. We tested the performance of ‘typical’ (Experiment 1) and ‘superior’ (Experiment 2) face recognizers, comparing their performance using high-quality (Experiment 3) and pixelated (Experiment 4) Facebook profile images. In each trial, participants responded whether two images featured the same person with one of these images being either a static face, a video providing orientation information, or an interactive image. Taken together, the results show that fluid orientation information and interactivity prompt shifts in criterion and support matching performance. Because typical and superior face recognizers both benefited from the structural information provided by the novel viewing procedures, our results point to qualitatively similar reliance on pictorial encoding in these groups. This also suggests that interactive viewing tools can be valuable in assisting face matching in high-performing practitioner groups.     

Two Factor Additive Conjoint Measurement with One Solvable Component

This paper addresses conditions for the existence of additive separable utilities. It considers mainly two-dimensional Cartesian products in which restricted solvability holds w.r.t. one component, but some results are extended to n-dimensional spaces. The main result shows that, in general, cancellation axioms of any order are required to ensure additive representability. More precisely, a generic family of counterexamples is provided, proving that the (m+1)st order cancellation axiom cannot be derived from the mth order cancellation axiom when m is even. However, a special case is considered in which the existence of additive representations can be derived from the independence axiom alone. Unlike the classical representation theorems, these representations are not unique up to strictly positive affine transformations, but follow Fishburn's (1981) uniqueness property. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.     

Communication flow and change theory within a family therapy supervision model

This article portrays a model of family therapy clinical supervision using change theory that is most appropriate for use with the videotape, audiotape, case presentation and debriefing from the live session. The most powerful tool during this process is that of communication and assessment of change theorys tools of confidence and conviction. The concepts presented are meant to add an additional dimension to family therapy supervision in cooperation of other theories, not as an end in themselves.Special thanks to Ms. Geri Koncilja of the Informational Technology Center at Colorado State University, Pueblo for illustration and graphic assistance.     

Revisiting Hispanic Adolescents' Resilience to the Effects of Parental Problem Drinking and Life Stress

Two previous studies found that life stress and parental alcoholism were not as highly related to distress for Hispanic adolescents as they were for European American adolescents (M. Barrera Jr., S. A. Li, and L. Chassin, 1993, 1995). Those findings could be interpreted as evidence of Hispanic youths' resilience, but limitations of the stress measure and the homogeneity of the Hispanic sample threatened this interpretation. The present study improved on those previous studies by using a new measure of uncontrollable stressors and a more heterogeneous Mexican American sample. Participants in this study were 175 Mexican American and 59 European American adolescents and their parents. Unlike the previous studies, results did not show that Mexican American adolescents were more resilient to parental problem drinking or life stress than were European American adolescents. Overall, life stress was related to adolescents', mothers', and fathers' reports of adolescents' psychological distress above and beyond the effects of ethnicity and socioeconomic factors.     

Integrity, conscientiousness, and honesty

Undergraduate volunteers from the Psychology participant pool (N=86, age M=22.7, SD=4.8 yr.; 72 of 86 were female) took two tests, a commercially available integrity test (the Personnel Selection Inventory) and the NEO-Five Factor Inventory. Later in the study, each participant was given an opportunity to report dishonestly the amount of time spent in the laboratory and thus to receive more extra-credit points than earned. An observer recorded participants' actual times in the laboratory to provide an accurate assessment of participants' honesty. Analysis indicated that the Personnel Selection Inventory did not predict whether the participant was honest or dishonest in reporting time spent. Conscientiousness as measured by the NEO-Five Factor Inventory, however, not only predicted behavior, but did so significantly better than did the Personnel Selection Inventory. The study provides new information about the value of integrity tests by comparing integrity and personality tests in the simultaneous prediction of a specific criterion.     

Parents’ Influence on Infants’ Gender-Typed Toy Preferences

Gender socialization influences children at early ages, shaping their developing identities. The toys provided by parents deliver some of the earliest gender-based messages by encouraging children to engage in activities associated with, for example, dolls and trucks. In the current study, we measured the influence of parental socialization by assessing 5- and 12 ½-month-old infants’ exposure to dolls and trucks and by experimentally manipulating parents’ encouragement to play with these toys. We found that infants displayed gender-typical toy preferences at 12 ½, but not 5 months, a pattern characteristic of previous studies. However, brief encouragement by a parent to play with toys from each category was ineffective in altering infants’ preferences. Rather, the types of toys present in the home predicted preferences, suggesting that at-home exposure to toys may be influential in the development of toy preferences. These findings reveal that socialization processes may indeed play a role in the formation of early gender-typical toy preferences and highlight the importance of equal toy exposure during infancy to ensure optimal development.     

Live Showups and Their Influence on a Subsequent Video Line‐up

A live showup (known as a street identification in the UK) allows the perpetrator to be identified shortly after a street crime. If the suspect disputes the identification, a video line‐up often ensues. Four experiments examined the reliability of live showups and their influence on a subsequent video line‐up using realistic procedures and conditions. Similar proportions of culprits and innocent suspects were identified from live showups and video line‐ups. Both culprits and innocent suspects previously identified were likely to be identified again in a subsequent line‐up, with delays from a few minutes to a month. Only a weak effect of clothing bias was observed. There was strong evidence of commitment to a previous identification but no reliable evidence of source monitoring errors. The results suggest that a live showup is not less fair than a line‐up, but the use of repeated identification procedures introduces an unfair bias against innocent suspects. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Economic Hardship, Neighborhood Context, and Parenting: Prospective Effects on Mexican�CAmerican Adolescent��s Mental Health

This study examined family and neighborhood influences relevant to low-income status to determine how they combine to predict the parenting behaviors of Mexican-American mothers and fathers. The study also examined the role of parenting as a mediator of these contextual influences on adolescent internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Study hypotheses were examined in a diverse sample of Mexican-American families in which 750 mothers and 467 fathers reported on their own levels of parental warmth and harsh parenting. Family economic hardship, neighborhood familism values, and neighborhood risk indicators were all uniquely associated with maternal and paternal warmth, and maternal warmth mediated the effects of these contextual influences on adolescent externalizing symptoms in prospective analyses. Parents' subjective perceptions of neighborhood danger interacted with objective indicators of neighborhood disadvantage to influence maternal and paternal warmth. Neighborhood familism values had unique direct effects on adolescent externalizing symptoms in prospective analyses, after accounting for all other context and parenting effects.