Accreditation Standards for University and College Counseling Centers

The accreditation standards outlined in the article are used by the International Association of Counseling Services, Inc., as the basis for the formal accreditation of college and university counseling programs throughout the United States and Canada. They reflect the program elements and practice standards that are deemed essential in a counseling center that provides high-quality services to students.     

Reaching the Champions of Social Justice

Since the formation of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1948, the ecumenical voice against social injustice in the church and society has been strengthening. As one expression of unity among the fellowship, the WCC embarked in 2013 on a Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace to work, pray, and walk together for life-affirming economies, climate change, nonviolent peace building, and reconciliation and human dignity. Champions of these issues exist within the ecumenical movement. Yet one also finds that champions of one theme are pushing back on another theme. Sometimes it is due to diversity of contexts and biblical and theological interpretations. At other times it is due to unconscious bias about the holistic nature of God's mission of justice for all God's people and creation. This paper grapples with this question: Why are people who are so alive to economic and ecological injustice sometimes blind to racial and gender injustice? To answer this, I explore the existence of conscious and unconscious bias despite the many powerful ecumenical statements that have been issued on racial justice.     

Dimensions of depression and perfectionism in pregnant and nonpregnant women: their levels and interrelationships and their relationship to marital satisfaction

The authors studied S. J. Blatt's (1974) 2 dimensions of depression (anaclitic and introjective), P. L. Hewitt and G. L. Flett's (1991b) 3 dimensions of perfectionism (socially prescribed, self-oriented, and other-oriented), and the relationship between these and marital satisfaction in 100 married women in the last trimester of their first pregnancy and in 50 married women who had not yet experienced pregnancy. The measures used were the Depressive Experiences Questionnaire (S. J. Blatt, J. P. D'Afflitti, & D. M. Quinlan. 1976a, 1976b), the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (P. L. Hewitt & G. L. Flett, 1989), and G. B. Spanier's (1976) Dyadic Adjustment Scale. Pregnant and nonpregnant women did not differ in anaclitic depression, but the level of introjective depression of pregnant women was lower than that of nonpregnant women. The two groups did not differ in level of marital satisfaction or in any of the dimensions of perfectionism. For both groups, introjective depression was positively correlated with socially prescribed perfectionism and negatively correlated with marital satisfaction. Self-oriented perfectionism was positively related to introjective depression and negatively related to marital satisfaction for nonpregnant women. For the pregnant women, there was a negative relationship between socially prescribed perfectionism and marital satisfaction. Anaclitic depression and other-oriented perfectionism were unrelated to any of the other variables studied.     

Event-related potential and behavioral measures of attention in 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds

In 2 experiments, the development of auditory selective attention in children was assessed. The participants, aged 5, 7, and 9 years, responded to target stimuli in the left ear for 1 series (ignoring the standard stimuli) and in the right ear for the other series. In Experiment 1, event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked by the auditory stimuli were recorded from frontal, central, and parietal sites. The 9-year-olds showed a greater processing negativity (Nd) to the attended channel compared with the 5-year-olds. Both 7- and 9-year-olds showed significantly larger amplitudes for the P3 component of ERPs in the attended vs. ignored condition. Behaviorally, the 5-year-olds made fewer hits and more false alarms than did older children, and the 9-year-olds made significantly more false alarms than did the 7-year-olds. The results of Experiment 2 showed that the detriment in the performance of the 9-year-olds was a result of task parameters. The inability of 5-year-olds to attend selectively appears to involve problems with the inhibition of the processing of irrelevant information and with selection of the correct response.     

Bursting with anxiety: adult social referencing in an interpersonal balloon analogue risk task (BART)

This study developed an interpersonal modification of the balloon analogue risk task (BART) to assess effects of a friend's real-time facial expressions on coparticipants' risk-taking. Twenty pairs of male friends and 20 pairs of female friends completed two counterbalanced versions of BART, one framed in terms of monetary gain, and the other framed in terms of avoiding loss. Each pair included a player who performed the task across both trials and a reference person in a separate cubicle connected via a soundless video link. In the suppression condition, reference persons were told to minimize facial expressions of anxiety as balloons inflated. In the expression condition, they were told to freely express anxiety. As predicted, players took greater risks and burst more balloons in the suppression condition, but only under the gain frame. Players' BART scores across both frames were also significantly negatively correlated with reference persons' scores on a questionnaire measure of dispositional expressivity (BEQ), confirming that other people's expressions can moderate one's own risk-taking.     

A Family Literacy Intervention to Support Parents in Children's Early Literacy Learning

This study examines a family literacy intervention conducted in two first-grade classrooms with culturally diverse student populations. In the treatment and control classrooms, six parents and a classroom teacher learned practices for building home-school partnerships. Data were analyzed to determine changes in home-literacy practices, increases in parents' knowledge literacy instruction, and changes in children's literacy achievement. Data analyses demonstrated that participating parents showed significantly greater usage of effective storybook reading strategies before and after reading. Parental and teacher participation resulted in statistically significant differences in students' scores on the Concepts of Print assessment, compared to students in the control classroom.     

Present Moment Contact and Nonjudgment: Pilot Data on Dismantling Mindful Awareness in Trauma-Related Symptomatology

Conventional views purport that mindfulness includes two components: present moment contact (PMC) and nonjudgment. While mindfulness-based interventions that target a broad spectrum of psychopathology, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), emphasize “being present” as a key mechanism toward wellness, researchers have struggled to measure PMC and assess its clinical utility. Is there any inherent value in PMC or is its clinical utility contingent upon simultaneously engaging in nonjudgment? This pilot study introduces an experimental paradigm designed to dismantle mindfulness and examine the utility of these two components. Forty women with interpersonal victimization histories were assigned to either a nonjudgment condition or a control condition. Next, participants recalled their trauma and then wrote down whatever information was present in their awareness. PMC was measured in both conditions by assessing the frequency of present tense verbs used within these written protocols. As predicted, in the absence of nonjudgment, PMC was related to high negative affect and low positive affect, though unrelated to trauma intrusion frequency. In the nonjudgment condition, PMC was no longer related to state affect and inversely related to trauma intrusion frequency. These pilot data suggest that isolating PMC from nonjudgment may be unhelpful and perhaps iatrogenic.