This study used an exploratory case study approach to explore the race-related experiences of a Black male specialist level school psychology graduate student. We used the CRT tenets of racism as ...normal and permanent and intersectionality and antiessentialism to help us make sense of the findings. Findings revealed that race and racism did not negatively impact the case study participant's experiences within his school psychology program at the university. However, racism was pervasive during his internship year, as it influenced interactions with white teachers and parents. Implications for school psychology graduate education are discussed, including the need for school psychologists to actively engage behaviors that disrupt systems of oppression like racism if the profession is to meet its antiracist aims.
Impact Statement
This case study uses Critical Race Theory to help us make sense of a Black male's experiences in a school psychology program. Findings showed the participant did not perceive his race or racism as a barrier to relationships with program peers or faculty, but racism negatively impacted his experience at his field-based internship sites. Implications suggest the need for school psychology graduate programs to enroll students who are inclusive and open to engaging racial issues, faculty who engage culturally-responsive mentoring practices, and the presence of school psychologists of color as university professors and supervisors in PK-12 schools.
In 1979, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, published a paper in Econometrica titled “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” The paper presented a new model of risk attitudes called ...“prospect theory,” which elegantly captured the experimental evidence on risk taking, including the documented violations of expected utility. More than 30 years later, prospect theory is still widely viewed as the best available description of how people evaluate risk in experimental settings. However, there are still relatively few well-known and broadly accepted applications of prospect theory in economics. One might be tempted to conclude that, even if prospect theory is an excellent description of behavior in experimental settings, it is less relevant outside the laboratory. In my view, this lesson would be incorrect. Over the past decade, researchers in the field of behavioral economics have put a lot of thought into how prospect theory should be applied in economic settings. This effort is bearing fruit. A significant body of theoretical work now incorporates the ideas in prospect theory into more traditional models of economic behavior, and a growing body of empirical work tests the predictions of these new theories. I am optimistic that some insights of prospect theory will eventually find a permanent and significant place in mainstream economic analysis.
More than 40 years ago, Paul Meehl (1978) published a seminal critique of the state of theorizing in psychological science. According to Meehl, the quality of theories had diminished in the preceding ...decades, resulting in statistical methods standing in for theoretical rigor. In this introduction to the special issue Theory in Psychological Science, we apply Meehl’s account to contemporary psychological science. We suggest that by the time of Meehl’s writing, psychology found itself in the midst of a crisis that is typical of maturing sciences, in which the theories that had been guiding research were gradually cast into doubt. Psychologists were faced with the same general choice when worldviews fail: Face reality and pursue knowledge in the absence of certainty, or shift emphasis toward sources of synthetic certainty. We suggest that psychologists have too often chosen the latter option, substituting synthetic certainties for theory-guided research, in much the same manner as Scholastic scholars did centuries ago. Drawing from our contributors, we go on to make recommendations for how psychological science may fully reengage with theory-based science.
Over 4 million children in the United States suffer from chronic health conditions, including cancer, sickle cell disease, and diabetes. Because of major advances in the early identification and ...treatment of these conditions, survival rates for these children continue to rise, and the majority now lives into adulthood. However, increases in survival have come with costs related to long-term effects of disease processes and treatments. Foremost among these consequences is impairment in brain development and neurocognitive function that may affect a substantial portion of children with chronic health conditions and follow many into adulthood. Impaired cognitive function may contribute to impairment in educational and occupational attainment, mental health, and quality of life for children with chronic conditions. Despite the significance and scope of this problem, advances in the identification and understanding of neurocognitive problems and the delivery of effective clinical care have been hindered in part because research has been "siloed"-conducted on each chronic condition in isolation. This review examines, for the first time, neurocognitive problems in a selected set of 6 chronic pediatric health conditions-leukemia, brain tumors, sickle cell disease, congenital heart disease, Type 1 diabetes, and traumatic brain injury-to define the magnitude of the problem and identify directions for future research and clinical care. Psychologists from many areas of specialization, including pediatric psychology, educational and school psychology, neuropsychology, behavioral medicine, and adult primary care, are uniquely positioned to contribute to every phase of this work, including research, identification, and intervention.
•Facial hair is used as a cue of masculinity, but has not been examined in sales.•Facial hair on male sales personnel drives increased perceptions of expertise.•Increased ratings of expertise drive ...perceptions of trust and purchase likelihood.•Five studies conducted using a variety of male ethnicities and sales contexts.•Sporting a beard in a sales/service role may be beneficial to sales outcomes.
Service and sales personnel researchers have long been interested in the effects of physical appearance on sales and service outcomes. In the current work, we examine a specific physical feature—facial hair. Interestingly, evolutionary psychologists have found that facial hair does not consistently increase perceived attractiveness (Dixson & Vasey, 2012; Dixson, Vasey, & Brooks, 2013), but it does serve as an indicator of masculine traits. The present research examines how males with beards are perceived in a sales/service specific context. We present five studies, in which the power of the beard (versus other facial hair styles or no hair) is evident. Sales personnel with a beard are perceived as having more expertise across various industries; furthermore, increased perceptions of expertise predict higher ratings of trustworthiness and, subsequently, increase consumers’ purchase likelihood.
The American Psychological Association (APA) advocates the use of person-first language (e.g., people with disabilities) to refer to individuals with disabilities in daily discourse and to reduce ...bias in psychological writing. Disability culture advocates and disability studies scholars have challenged the rationale for and implications of exclusive person-first language use, promoting use of identity-first language (e.g., disabled people). We argue that psychologists should adopt identity-first language alongside person-first constructions to address the concerns of disability groups while promoting human dignity and maintaining scientific and professional rigor. We review the evolution of disability language and then discuss the major models used to characterize disability and people with disabilities. The rationale for person-first language and the emergence of identity-first language, respectively, are linked to particular models. We then discuss some language challenges posed by identity-first language and the current intent of person-first language, suggesting that psychologists make judicious use of the former when it is possible to do so. We conclude by offering five observations of ways that use of both person-first and identity-first language could enhance psychologists' cultural competence regarding disability issues in personal and scientific communications.
The purpose of this article is to systematically examine the literature around Curriculum Based Measurement in Writing (CBM‐W) for English learners (ELs) in English. We reviewed the literature to ...identify published research studies examining CBM‐W that disaggregated data for ELs. We identified six published studies examining the technical adequacy of CBM‐W specifically for ELs. The studies examined a variety of types of CBM‐W across diverse populations of ELs but all were restricted to stage 1 of CBM research. Only one study included ELs participating in a bilingual model of instruction and their findings contrasted with other studies including ELs participating in English‐only models of instruction. While there is emerging evidence of the technical adequacy for ELs across a variety of CBM‐W types for screening purposes, there is little evidence to currently support their use for progress‐monitoring or for ELs participating in bilingual models of instruction. Suggestions for current practice and future research are described.
Practitioner Points
School psychologists should emphasize writing development and consider including Curriculum Based Measurement in Writing (CBM‐W).
School psychologists should use their school's CBM‐W assessment data to create local norms and rates of growth according to English Language Proficiency for their English learners (ELs) as well as reference published norms and rates of growth.
School psychologists should use more than just CBM‐W data to drive high‐stakes and instructional decisions for ELs.
Specific learning disability (SLD) identification procedures vary across states (Maki et al., 2015, School Psychol Quart,
30, 457–469); however, the extent to which SLD identification methods are ...implemented at the district level is not well understood. Moreover, the high‐stakes nature of SLD identification necessitates extensive training, but research regarding graduate and postgraduate training in SLD is limited. This study examined school psychologists’ SLD training and practices through survey methodology. Results showed that a growing number of school psychologists use, prefer, and receive training in response to intervention and pattern of strengths and weaknesses to identify students with SLD while the use of and preference for ability–achievement discrepancy may be decreasing. However, nearly one‐third of school psychologists still reported the use of ability–achievement discrepancy. In addition, over half of school psychologists reported using state department of education guidance documents to inform their SLD identification practices. Implications for training and practice are discussed.
The Dragons of Inaction Gifford, Robert
The American psychologist,
05/2011, Volume:
66, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Most people think climate change and sustainability are important problems, but too few global citizens engaged in high-greenhouse-gas-emitting behavior are engaged in enough mitigating behavior to ...stem the increasing flow of greenhouse gases and other environmental problems. Why is that? Structural barriers such as a climate-averse infrastructure are part of the answer, but psychological barriers also impede behavioral choices that would facilitate mitigation, adaptation, and environmental sustainability. Although many individuals are engaged in some ameliorative action, most could do more, but they are hindered by seven categories of psychological barriers, or "dragons of inaction": limited cognition about the problem, ideological worldviews that tend to preclude pro-environmental attitudes and behavior, comparisons with key other people, sunk costs and behavioral momentum, discredence toward experts and authorities, perceived risks of change, and positive but inadequate behavior change. Structural barriers must be removed wherever possible, but this is unlikely to be sufficient. Psychologists must work with other scientists, technical experts, and policymakers to help citizens overcome these psychological barriers.
The negative impacts of racism, including experiences of racial trauma, are well documented (e.g., Bryant-Davis & Ocampo, 2006; Carter, 2007). Because of the deleterious effects of racial trauma on ...Black people, interventions that facilitate the resistance and prevention of anti-Black racism are needed. Critical consciousness is one such intervention, as it is often seen as a prerequisite of resistance and liberation (Prilleltensky, 2003, 2008). To understand how individuals advance from being aware of anti-Black racism to engaging in actions to prevent and resist racial trauma, nonconfidential interviews with 12 Black Lives Matter activists were conducted. Using constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014) under critical-ideological and Black feminist-womanist lenses, a model of Critical Consciousness of Anti-Black Racism (CCABR) was co-constructed. The 3 processes involved in developing CCABR include: witnessing anti-Black racism, processing anti-Black racism, and acting critically against anti-Black racism. This model, including each of the categories and subcategories, are detailed herein and supported with quotations. The findings and discussion provide context-rich and practical approaches to help Black people, and counseling psychologists who serve them, prevent and resist racial trauma.
Public Significance Statement
This study presents a practical model of critical consciousness development that delineates the core processes Black people navigate to actively prevent and resist racial trauma in an intersectional and systematic manner. The findings suggest that when Black people are exposed to anti-Black racism, they can not only cope but also reduce racial trauma in their broader worlds by going through specific cognitive, intersectional, and behavioral growth processes.
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