Perceptions of peer pressure, peer conformity dispositions, and self-reported behavior among adolescents.

Two samples, consisting of a total of 1,027 6th–12th graders from separate communities, were given measures of peer conformity dispositions (willingness to accede to peer pressure), perceptions of peer pressure, and self-reported frequency of behavior concerning 2 major aspects of teenage life: peer involvement (degree of socializing with friends) and misconduct (drug/alcohol use, sexual intercourse, and minor delinquent behavior). Results indicate that Ss perceived less peer pressure toward misconduct than peer involvement and also were comparatively less willing to follow peers in misconduct. Nevertheless, perceived peer pressure and conformity disposition accounted for more of the variance in self-reported misconduct than in self-reported peer involvement. Age differences were modest and varied among measures and samples. The samples also differed in the magnitude of perceived pressures and conformity dispositions as well as in the degree to which these variables were associated with self-reported behavior. It is concluded that the findings reveal a complexity in adolescent conformity that bears elaboration in future research. (31 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of peer support and therapist contact on long-term weight loss.

This study evaluated the effectiveness of two posttreatment programs designed to enhance the maintenance of weight loss. Eighty-five obese clients were randomly assigned to either (a) behavior therapy plus a peer-support maintenance program, (b) behavior therapy plus a therapist-contact maintenance program, or (c) behavior therapy only. At a 7-month follow-up session, the therapist-contact program resulted in significantly greater maintenance of weight loss compared with the peer support and behavior therapy only conditions. However, by the time of an 18-month follow-up assessment, overall relapse rates were equivalent across conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Generation

The structure and function of the target-language generation module for KBMT-89 is described. The lexical selection module (which includes thematic-role subcategorization, a meaning distance metric, and syntactic subcategorization) is presented. We also describe the generation mapping rules, and rule interpretation in the generation of f-structures for target language utterances.     

Brief therapy prevalence and training: A national survey of psychologists.

Psychologists find themselves ill-prepared to meet the increasing demand for briefer and briefer therapies. Members of APA Divisions 12 (Clinical Psychology) and 29 (Psychotherapy) were surveyed (N?=?1,250; return rate?=?57%) regarding their practice of and training in brief therapy. Results indicate that almost all (89%) of the respondents perform some brief therapy and, on average, spend half their time doing it. With regard to training, however, half of those conducting brief therapy have never taken any brief therapy courses. Additional findings indicate theoretical orientation, gender, region, practice site, and setting are significantly related to the amount of brief therapy delivered. Overall, the amount and helpfulness of brief therapy training are significantly related to one's skill, satisfaction, and positive attitude toward brief therapy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Housing for Health: The Role of Owner Occupation

Housing is widely regarded as playing an important role in the mediation and management of health inequalities. British policy-makers are increasingly looking to the research community to specify what it is about housing environments that impact on health, and to identify what housing interventions constitute healthy public policies. To feed into this debate, this paper begins by reviewing the state of the art of research on housing and health. It shows that the majority of work continues to focus on how housing affects health, while the limited attention to how health status affects housing outcomes has concentrated on medical priority for rehousing in the public sector. It is argued, however, that the market sector now merits closer scrutiny among those concerned with the health selectivity of the housing system. Drawing on a series of qualitative interviews, questions are raised about: how readily people with health problems and mobility difficulties gain access to owner occupation; how easily they sustain a position in that tenure sector; and how effective they are in maintaining their homes as healthy enabling living environments.     

Gaining and sustaining organizational support through a sociotechnical intervention.

Sociotechnical interventions in large organizations pose multiple challenges for consulting psychologists. The nature of this intervention was technical (a reengineered human resources information system) but had social, workplace impact in both its execution and its outcomes. The key issue of organizational support for an intervention of this magnitude is discussed. This case study describes the theoretical framework for the intervention, the implementation model, and the unforeseen critical junctures in the project, plus it addresses the lessons learned by a consulting group of industrial/organizational psychologists in implementing this long-term, large-scale project. A discussion of implications for both theory and practice concludes the article. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intact implicit habit learning in Alzheimer's disease.

Habit learning refers to the incremental implicit learning of associations. Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) exhibit deficits in explicit memory and in conceptual implicit memory tasks that rely on the cortical areas damaged in AD. The authors tested patients with AD and controls on a probabilistic classification task in which participants implicitly acquire cue-outcome associations. Both groups showed evidence of learning across 50 trials, and performance did not differ significantly between the groups. In contrast, patients with AD exhibited a profound impairment in explicit memory for the testing episode. These results are consistent with the idea that habit learning relies on subcortical structures, including the basal ganglia, and is independent of the medial temporal and cortical areas damaged in AD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Integrating language and gesture in infancy.

Whether language/gesture correlations in early language development can be explained by parallelism or comprehension mediation was examined. Study 1, parental report data for 95 1-year olds, suggested that word comprehension and production are dissociated in this age range and that the comprehension and production factors map onto distinct aspects of gesture. Study 2 tested 41 13–15-month-olds in a task in which the modeled gesture was accompanied by supportive, contradictory, or neutral narratives. Results showed that infants can use adult speech as an aid in reproduction of modeled gestures (comprehension mediation). However, there is still additional variance in gestural production that correlates with expressive vocabulary when comprehension-related variance is moved. Thus, comprehension mediation and parallelism both appear to be operating. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)