The church and prevention of alcoholism

Conclusion The task of the church is to join a coalition for the improvement of community resources for the alcoholic through legislation and appropriation of funds; to train a task force of clergymen and lay counselors who are able to assist mental health professionals and A. A. members; and to communicate the Word of Reconciliation to those who are hungering and thirsting for the right life. We are able to help the alcoholic as he discovers new values and experiences without compulsive drinking. Clinebell summarizes the ministry of the church to the alcoholic when he points out: The most important thing a congregation must give a recovering alcoholic is a sense of acceptance in the fellowship. Such direct involvement in helping deeply troubled people forces a congregation to test the reality of its dedication to loving God and neighbor.⁴² May God help the church to be the church for the alcoholic.a pilot project sponsored by the Makiki Christian Church, is also a staff member of the Diamond Head Mental Health Clinic, a research and training facility cooperating with the University of Hawaii School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry. He is a member of the American Psychological Association and the National Rehabilitation Association and an associate member of the Academy.     

Procedural learning in children with developmental coordination disorder

Despite the fact that developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is characterised by a deficit in the ability to learn or automate motor skills, few studies have examined motor learning over repeated trials. In this study we examined procedural learning in a group of 10 children with DCD (aged 8-12 years) and age-matched controls without DCD. The learning task was modelled on that of Nissen and Bullemer. Children performed a serial reaction time (SRT) task in which they were required to learn a spatial sequence that repeated itself every 10 trials. Children were not aware of the repetition. Spatial targets were four (horizontal) locations presented on a computer monitor. Children responded using four response keys with the same horizontal mapping as the stimulus. They were tested over five blocks of 100 trials each. The first four blocks presented the same repeating sequence, while the fifth block was randomised. Procedural learning was indexed by the slope of the regression of RT on blocks 1-4. Results showed that most children displayed strong procedural learning of the sequence, despite having no explicit knowledge about it. Overall, there was no group difference in the magnitude of learning over blocks of trials - most children performed within the normal range. Procedural learning for simple sequential movements appears to be intact in children with DCD. This suggests that cortico-striatal circuits that are strongly implicated in the sequencing of simple movements appear to be function normally in DCD.     

The role of verbal and nonverbal memory in the Family Pictures Subtest: Data from children with specific language impairment

This study examined the contribution of verbal and visual memory to performance on the Family Pictures subtest of the Children’s Memory Scale. This subtest purports to assess declarative memory functioning in the visual/nonverbal domain. A total of 115 nine-year-old children participated in this study. Fifty-eight had specific language impairment (SLI), whilst the remaining 57 were typically developing (TD), with no history of language difficulties. Results showed that the children with SLI, who had intact declarative memory for visual but not verbal information, obtained significantly lower scores on the Family Pictures subtest when compared to the TD group. Regression analyses revealed that across the entire sample, individual differences on the Family Pictures subtest was best predicted by a measure of verbal working memory. These results question whether the Family Pictures subtest can be considered a measure of visual memory in pediatric populations. These results have implications for the interpretation of scores on this subtest regarding the nature of the types of neurocognitive difficulties children may exhibit.     

The Use of Self of the Therapist

This article explores how the Satir model facilitates the development of the self of the therapist, which Virginia Satir strongly advocated. Discovering and developing creative ways to externalize the internal hidden processes of people, she invited therapists to work on their own unresolved issues in their training through various methods such as: family of origin, family reconstruction, ingredients of an interaction, and parts party. Her goal was to increase self-esteem, foster better choice making, increase responsibility, and facilitate personal congruence through a therapeutic process. Although very relevant in the training and professional development of therapists, there has been little exploration or research of this topic.     

Is counter-terrorism policy evidence-based? What works, what harms, and what is unknown

Is counter-terrorism policy evidence-based? What works, what harms, and what is unknown. One of the central concerns surrounding counter-terrorism interventions today, given the attention and money spent on them, is whether such interventions are effective. To explore this issue, we conducted a general review of terrorism literature as well as a Campbell systematic review on counter-terrorism strategies. In this article, we summarize some of our findings from these works. Overall, we found an almost complete absence of evaluation research on counter-terrorism strategies and conclude that counter-terrorism policy is not evidence-based. The findings of this review emphasise the need for government leaders, policy makers, researchers, and funding agencies to include and insist on evaluations of the effectiveness of these programs in their agendas.     

New challenges in mental health of children for church and community

Conclusion The church has a ministry to implant a sense of fatherhood and motherhood to persons who are able to minister to children. If there is a total effort on the part of the church and community mental health resources toward youth, we shall be able to meet the crisis in the mental health of children. Of course, to hope that we can eradicate mental illness for successive generations is out of the question. At best, we shall have sounded the note for the mental health of the family. To impart a meaningful way of life for a child means that he must encounter responsible and loving persons who are able to relate and share various learning experiences. Adults need to have fun with children and affirm them as delightful and precious. Revitalizing a sense of being a therapeutic agent to children and families is another expression of renewal for the local church.     

Asian American college women's body image: a pilot study

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of values acculturation and the influence of media on Asian American college women's overall body image. A sample of 59 Asian American women from two large universities completed self-report surveys, which included questions regarding values acculturation, media internalization, and overall body satisfaction. Results showed that Asian American women who identified more strongly with traditional Asian values reported higher levels of body image dissatisfaction. Further, Asian American women who reported higher internalization of media portrayals of beauty ideals reported higher body image dissatisfaction. Research and clinical recommendations are made to enhance psychologists' understanding of Asian American women's body image and acculturation.     

The relationship between perceived length and egocentric location in Müller-Lyer figures with one versus two chevrons

We examined the apparent dissociation of perceived length and perceived position with respect to the Müller-Lyer (M-L) illusion. With the traditional (two-chevron) figure, participants made accurate open-loop pointing responses at the endpoints of the shaft, despite the presence of a strong length illusion. This apparently non-Euclidean outcome replicated that of Mack, Heuer, Villardi, and Chambers (1985) and Gillam and Chambers (1985) and contradicts any theory of the M-L illusion in which mislocalization of shaft endpoints plays a role. However, when one of the chevrons was removed, a constant pointing error occurred in the predicted direction, as well as a strong length illusion. Thus, with one-chevron stimuli, perceived length and location were no longer completely dissociated. We speculated that the presence of two opposing chevrons suppresses the mislocalizing effects of a single chevron, especially for figures with relatively short shafts.     

Priming vs. rhyming: orthographic and phonological representations in the left and right hemispheres

The right cerebral hemisphere has long been argued to lack phonological processing capacity. Recently, however, a sex difference in the cortical representation of phonology has been proposed, suggesting discrete left hemisphere lateralization in males and more distributed, bilateral representation of function in females. To evaluate this hypothesis and shed light on sex differences in the phonological processing capabilities of the left and right hemispheres, we conducted two experiments. Experiment 1 assessed phonological activation implicitly (masked homophone priming), testing 52 (M=25, F=27; mean age 19.23years, SD 1.64years) strongly right-handed participants. Experiment 2 subsequently assessed the explicit recruitment of phonology (rhyme judgement), testing 50 (M=25, F=25; mean age 19.67years, SD 2.05years) strongly right-handed participants. In both experiments the orthographic overlap between stimulus pairs was strictly controlled using DICE [Brew, C., & McKelvie, D. (1996). Word-pair extraction for lexicography. In K. Oflazer & H. Somers (Eds.), Proceedings of the second international conference on new methods in language processing (pp. 45-55). Ankara: VCH], such that pairs shared (a) high orthographic and phonological similarity (e.g., not-KNOT); (b) high orthographic and low phonological similarity (e.g., pint-HINT); (c) low orthographic and high phonological similarity (e.g., use-EWES); or (d) low orthographic and low phonological similarity (e.g., kind-DONE). As anticipated, high orthographic similarity facilitated both left and right hemisphere performance, whereas the left hemisphere showed greater facility when phonological similarity was high. This difference in hemispheric processing of phonological representations was especially pronounced in males, whereas female performance was far less sensitive to visual field of presentation across both implicit and explicit phonological tasks. As such, the findings offer behavioural evidence indicating that though both hemispheres are capable of orthographic analysis, phonological processing is discretely lateralised to the left hemisphere in males, but available in both the left and right hemisphere in females.