Are outdated assessment forms cluttering your office? Many Customers are unsure what to do with unused or obsolete test protocols or materials from prior versions of an instrument. Rather than letting them collect dust in a bottom drawer, PAR recommends that you destroy and discard obsolete materials in a secure manner.

If you or your institution doesn’t have access to a secure recycling program, we are happy to help! Simply e-mail custsup@parinc.com or call our Customer Support line at 1.800.331.8378 and a specialist will help you obtain a prepaid return label so we may discard the materials through our corporate recycling program. This program is available only for PAR proprietary products and to our Customers in the United States.

 
Wrongful conviction stories abound in the news these days as DNA evidence is being used more frequently to reopen cases, some of them decades-old. Groups like The Innocence Project are drawing attention to those who have been wrongly convicted of crimes and helping to exonerate them. In many of these stories, those falsely accused of crimes maintained their innocence, filing appeals and talking to anyone who would listen in an effort to have their cases heard.

But what about convictions in which the accused has confessed to the crime and believes in his or her own guilt? How could an innocent person be persuaded to confess to a crime he or she didn’t commit?

Quite easily, according to a new study by Julia Shaw, a lecturer in forensic psychology from the University of Bedfordshire, and Stephen Porter, a forensic psychologist at the University of British Columbia. In an article in the January 2015 issue of the journal Psychological Science, Shaw and Porter describe the method by which they were able to implant false memories of committing a crime into the minds of college-age adults who volunteered for their study.

Participants were screened to exclude those who had any previous history of law-breaking. Shaw and Porter sent questionnaires to participants’ parents to gather background information (e.g., the names of friends, details about their hometowns) that the researchers could use in the stories they fabricated about the “crime.” During the course of the experiment, which included three 45-minute interviews several days apart, participants were not permitted to communicate with their parents.

In the interviews, Shaw asked each participant to talk about a true, emotional experience from his or her early teen years; then, she prompted participants to “remember” an invented crime such as assault that led to an encounter with the police. During the interviews, Shaw maintained a friendly, nonthreatening rapport, offering to help jog memories about the false crime with details from the true event and information gleaned from the parent questionnaire.

The results surprised even the researchers: of 30 participants in the study, 21 developed a false memory of the event, and 11 reported elaborate details of their interactions with the police following their imagined crimes. “We thought we’d have something like a thirty percent success rate, and we ended up having over seventy,” Shaw said in a March 5, 2015 interview with The New Yorker. “We only had a handful of people who didn’t believe us.” In one example, a participant developed a detailed story about a love triangle that turned into a rock-throwing incident. “It was very emotional,” Shaw said. “Each time she’d re-enact the event, the rock would fill her hand a little bit more.”

The study has serious implications for law enforcement. “No department wants the image of locking up innocent people,” said Albie Esparza, public information officer for the San Francisco Police Department, responding to questions about the study from NPR’s Nathan Siegel. Esparza asserts that the “good cop, bad cop” routine is mostly a figment of Hollywood’s imagination, and that police departments are highly motivated to find the real perpetrators of crime. Yet the methods used by Shaw—gathering background information about the accused, drawing connections between that information and a crime, and even lying about facts and witnesses—are all perfectly legal for use by law enforcement in the U.S.

It seems that even when the stakes are high, people are still very susceptible to the influence of an authority figure who is questioning them. In their study summary, Shaw and Porter conclude, “It appears that in the context of a highly suggestive interview, people can quite readily generate rich false memories of committing crime.”

What do you think? What are the implications of police officers using suggestive interview techniques, and when do those techniques cross the line into coercion? PAR wants to hear from you, so leave a comment and join the conversation!
What does the science of cognitive neuropsychology—brain research—have to say about why kids struggle to read? Plenty! But it can be very time-consuming for busy professionals to sift through the research, assess kids’ brain functioning, and choose interventions that target their specific needs. This is where the Feifer Assessment of Reading™ (FAR™), a new product from PAR, can help.

The FAR was developed using a brain-based educational model of reading. Research using neuroimaging techniques has clearly shown that specific neural networks in the brain are associated with different aspects of the reading process, such as phonemic awareness, fluency, decoding, and comprehension. This means that interventions for reading disorders vary depending on the specific dyslexic subtype of the individual reader.

Reading expert Dr. Steven Feifer developed the FAR to identify the four most common dyslexic subtypes: dysphonetic dyslexia, surface dyslexia, mixed dyslexia, and reading comprehension deficit. Comprising 15 subtests to measure highly differentiated aspects of reading, the FAR generates five index scores:

  • the Phonological Index, including phonemic awareness, decoding, and positioning sounds;

  • the Fluency Index, including orthographic processing plus both visual perception and verbal fluency;

  • the Comprehension Index, including semantic concepts, word recall, and morphological processing;

  • the Mixed Index (a composite of Phonological and Fluency Index scores); and

  • the FAR Total Index (a composite of all subtest scores).


Clearly, the science is there. But many districts use a Response to Intervention (RTI) approach, with teams of educators planning interventions for kids and monitoring progress to see what’s been most effective. Where does brain science come into play?

RTI is about looking at the evidence—the individual student’s reading behaviors—and designing interventions that address his or her specific needs. Evidence-based interventions require evidence-based assessments. The FAR allows practitioners to conduct an in-depth assessment that provides information about how a child learns and processes information—not a label.

The RTI approach has many strengths, but often it is not sufficient on its own to identify or diagnose a learning disability. Also, remediation strategies are too often “one size fits all” when they haven’t taken into account the reasons behind a student’s reading difficulties. The FAR can support RTI by identifying learning disabilities, thereby reducing the risk of delaying diagnosis or denying students’ eligibility for much-needed services. The included Screening Form is perfect for a quick assessment of student progress—it takes just 15 minutes to complete.

The FAR is designed to integrate cognitive neuropsychology research into the RTI approach, supporting RTI while filling some of the gaps—especially in terms of dyslexia identification and differentiation—that RTI can miss. The FAR offers solutions for school psychologists, reading specialists, and teachers—and most importantly, the potential for real improvements in student reading.

To learn more about the FAR, visit www.parinc.com.

  • Approximately 106,500 psychologists hold current licenses in the U.S.

  • 17,890 psychologists are located in California, the state with the most licensed psychologists.

  • 170 psychologists are located in Wyoming, the state with the fewest licensed psychologists.

  • The District of Columbia has the greatest representation of psychologists per 100,000 population—173.3!

  • There are approximately 33.9 psychologists per 100,000 individuals in the U.S. population. To see the distribution of psychologists in your state, visit APA.

  • More than 6,000 doctorates in psychology were awarded in the U.S. in 2012.

  • Approximately 74 percent of those doctorates were categorized as research/scholarship; 24 percent were awarded as professional practice. To view the breakdown of degrees by subfield, visit APA’s Center for Workforce Studies.


Source: APA’s Center for Workforce Studies
We are used to thinking of alcohol dependence as black or white: Either someone is or isn’t an alcoholic. Dr. John Mariani, who researches substance abuse at Columbia University, says that the field of psychiatry now recognizes shades of gray between someone who doesn’t drink at all and someone who suffers from an alcohol addiction.

At least 38 million adults drink too much. Binge drinking, high weekly use, and any alcohol use by pregnant women or people under the age of 21 are included in this category. In the United States each year, about 88,000 deaths are alcohol related, and alcohol abuse costs the U.S. economy about $224 billion each year.

A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that 90% of excessive drinkers were unlikely to need addiction treatment, and another revealed that only 1 in 6 adults talk with their doctor, nurse, or other health professional about their drinking. Among adults who binge drink 10 times or more a month, only 1 in 3 have discussed drinking. And only 17% of pregnant women have talked about drinking.

The CDC recommends that physicians and other health providers include basic alcohol screening and brief counseling as part of routine medical practice by:

  • talking directly with patients about how much and how often they drink;

  • providing information about the health dangers of drinking too much;

  • offering options for patients who may want to stop drinking, cut down, maintain their current level of drinking, or seek further help; and

  • referring patients who need specialized treatment for alcohol dependence.


Screening and brief counseling have been proven to work by reducing how much alcohol a person drinks on an occasion by 25% and by improving health and saving money in the same way that blood pressure screening, flu vaccines, and cholesterol or breast cancer screening do.

Drinker’s Checkup, an online confidential screening tool, is a good resource to share with clients; it provides detailed, objective feedback for people who aren’t sure whether their drinking is excessive and provides help with making a decision about whether to change drinking habits. An app called Moderate Drinking can be downloaded to help monitor drinking habits; its effectiveness has been demonstrated in a study published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.
In the context of mental illness, the word “asylum” conjures, for many of us, some very negative images. We picture a scene with characters like the abusive Nurse Ratched from the movie “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” or even worse, tragic true stories of the overcrowded, understaffed psychiatric hospitals of the last century where healthy, sick, disabled, and poor patients alike were locked away for years with no effective treatment or hope of release.

These images may be the reason that a JAMA viewpoint published last month has garnered so much attention: Bioethicists from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania are calling for a return to asylums for long-term psychiatric care.

At Penn, Dominic Sisti, PhD, Andrea Segal, MS, and Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD, have been studying the current system for treating the chronically mentally ill and the evolution over the past half-century away from inpatient psychiatric hospitals. They observe that although the United States population has doubled since 1955, the number of inpatient psychiatric beds has been cut by nearly 95 percent to just 45,000—a very small number when compared to the 10 million U.S. residents who are currently coping with serious mental illness.

According to Sisti and his colleagues, the result of this trend has not be “de-institutionalization” but rather “trans-institutionalization.” That is, people with chronic mental illness are being treated in hospital emergency rooms and nursing homes at best, and more often receiving no treatment and living on the street. “Most disturbingly, U.S. jails and prisons have become the nation’s largest mental health care facilities,” say the authors, in a January 20 Penn Medicine press release. “Half of all inmates have a mental illness or substance abuse disorder; 15 percent of state inmates are diagnosed with a psychotic disorder…. This results in a vicious cycle whereby mentally ill patients move between crisis hospitalization, homelessness, and incarceration.”

As a solution, the authors propose a modern and humane asylum—but they use the word in its original sense, that is, a place of safety, sanctuary, and healing. In addition, they advocate reforms in the psychiatric services offered in such institutions, including both inpatient services, for those who are a danger to themselves and others, as well as outpatient care for those with milder forms of mental illness.

The proposal has been controversial, to say the least.  Some in the mental health community find the idea of a return to asylums misguided and even frightening. In her article called “Asylum or Warehouse?” author Linda Rosenberg, President and CEO of the National Council for Behavioral Health, asserts that although Sisti and his colleagues accurately describe the problems of the current mental health system, their solution is to “just simply lock some people up” and that “the simple solution offered, recreating asylums, is not helpful—it’s dangerous.”

Others have viewed the proposal in a more positive light. Christine Montross, a staff psychiatrist at Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island and author of “Falling into the Fire: A Psychiatrist’s Encounters with the Mind in Crisis” wrote an op-ed piece in the February 18 New York Times in support of a move toward modern asylums.

“The goals of maximizing personal autonomy and civil liberties for the mentally ill are admirable,” says Montross. “But as a result, my patients with chronic psychotic illnesses cycle between emergency hospitalizations and inadequate outpatient care. They are treated by community mental health centers whose overburdened psychiatrists may see even the sickest patients for only 20 minutes every three months. Many patients struggle with homelessness. Many are incarcerated. A new model of long-term psychiatric institutionalization, as the Penn group suggests, would help them.”

What do you think? Are modern, reimagined asylums a potential solution for the chronically mentally ill, or has history proven that institutions cannot work? PAR wants to hear from you, so leave a comment and join the conversation!

 
This week’s blog was contributed by PAR Author Adele Eskeles Gottfried, PhD. Dr. Gottfried is the author of the Children’s Academic Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (CAIMI). The study she describes in this blog is part of a broader investigation in which she examines the importance of home environment and parental stimulation on the development of children’s academic intrinsic motivation.

In a longitudinal study spanning 28 years, new research just published in Parenting: Science and Practice examined the long-term effect of children’s home literacy environment during infancy and early childhood on their subsequent reading intrinsic motivation and reading achievement from childhood through adolescence and their educational attainment during adulthood. This type of motivation, which is the enjoyment or pleasure inherent in the activity of reading, is found to relate to various aspects of children’s literacy behaviors.

Literacy environment was assessed from infancy through preschool using the amount of time mothers read to their children and the number of books and reading materials in the home. Analyzing the data using a statistical model, the study examined literacy environment as it related to children’s reading intrinsic motivation (measured with the Reading scale of the CAIMI) and reading achievement across childhood through adolescence and their educational attainment during adulthood. Results demonstrated that it was the amount of time mothers spent reading to their children—not the number of books and reading materials in the home—that significantly related to reading intrinsic motivation, reading achievement, and educational attainment. Specifically, when mothers spent more time reading to their children across infancy through early childhood, their children’s reading intrinsic motivation and reading achievement were significantly higher across childhood through adolescence. In turn, higher reading intrinsic motivation and reading achievement were significantly related to educational attainment during adulthood. These findings were found regardless of mothers’ educational level.

The implications for practice are clear: Reading to children during infancy and early childhood has significant and positive long-term benefits, and this information must be disseminated. Mothers, fathers, and other caregivers need encouragement and support to read to infants and young children, and they need to know what a difference it will make to children’s intrinsic motivation to read and learn.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But an image is not always a true representation of reality. From Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr to fashion magazines and reality shows, we are bombarded with images that have been created, filtered, manipulated, and staged. And it’s often very difficult to sift through what’s real and what’s not.

This is precisely why Dove began its Campaign for Real Beauty—to start a global discussion surrounding the definition of real beauty. It first conducted a study titled “The Real Truth About Beauty: A Global Report,” which revealed that less than 2% of women worldwide considered themselves beautiful. In a Dove Real Sketches video, participants were asked to describe themselves to an artist, who drew them behind a curtain, using only their descriptions of themselves as a guide. Then the same women returned to describe fellow participants. The difference between the two drawings was astonishing, and it revealed how hard we are on ourselves versus how others see us.

According to the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA), 30 million people will be affected by an eating disorder during their lifetime. A full 69% of American school-age girls who read magazines say that the pictures they see influence how their concept of an ideal body shape. Boys are also affected, and largely because of cultural bias and stereotypes, they are much less likely to seek treatment. In addition, teen athletes are more at risk of developing an eating disorder or having a negative body image.

It is daunting to compete with society and media, so the NEDA has developed an Educator’s Toolkit to help those in schools reach out to students suffering from an eating disorder. It covers everything from myths surrounding these disorders (e.g., that eating disorders are a choice; p. 6) to school strategies for assisting these students (p. 11). NEDA also has a Feeding Hope Fund, which grants funding to researchers who are seeking out new ways to combat this illness.

Some of the most groundbreaking work has been done related to connecting genetics to eating disorders, according to Amy Novotny in an article published in the American Psychological Association publication the Monitor. One study by Kelly Klump in Psychological Medicine demonstrates that heritability influences disordered eating most when estrogen levels are highest, and another suggests that in some females, bulimia may be hard-wired.

Organizations like Project Heal are contributing to the healing process in a different way: the organization, started by two women who suffered from eating disorders, provides scholarship funding for those who can’t afford treatment. And still others are trying innovative interventions, including art therapy and yoga, which could encourage participants to view their bodies in a more compassionate way.

The NEDA Web site offers a plethora of resources, including a resource page with contact information and a helpline (1-800-931-2237) for those who may know someone who suffers from an eating disorder. Visit NEDA’s Get Involved page to learn more about how to raise awareness.
http://youtu.be/8Kn2LXJDxik

Make 2015 the year you try PARiConnect.

PARiConnect is an online tool that allows you to easily administer, score, and obtain interpretations for more than 50 of your favorite PAR instruments.

PARiConnect broadens your administration and reporting options by allowing you to choose when, where, and how to get the results you need—with no new hardware or additional equipment required. Easy to use, flexible, and secure, PARiConnect will change the way you practice.

Plus, PARiConnect has new features to make online assessment even easier. Manage large numbers of accounts, clinicians, and clients; import and export data in large batches; and capture the current status of inventory and reallocate uses.

We will even teach you how to use it!

Register now for a free, live Webinar that will help you become better acquainted with this dynamic assessment platform.

Join our Webinar on Thursday, January 29 from 12:00-1:00 p.m. ET or 3:00-4:00 p.m. ET. Space is limited. Register today!
For many of us, the holidays are a joyful time to celebrate together with family and friends. Yet for those who have recently suffered the loss of a loved one, the holidays can be an especially difficult time. What are the best ways to support someone who is grieving during the holidays?

The National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO), a nonprofit organization that advocates for improved end-of-life care, offers some guidance to help those who don’t know what to say or do for a grieving friend or family member. The NHPCO’s hospice professionals offer these suggestions:

  1. Be supportive of the way the person chooses to handle the holidays. Some may wish to follow traditions; others may choose to avoid customs of the past and do something new. It’s okay to do things differently.

  2. Offer to help the person with decorating or holiday baking. Both tasks can be overwhelming for someone who is grieving.

  3. Offer to help with holiday shopping. Share catalogs or online shopping sites that may be helpful.

  4. Invite the person to join you or your family during the holidays. You might invite them to join you for a religious service or at a holiday meal where they are a guest.

  5. Ask the person if he or she is interested in volunteering with you during the holidays. Doing something for someone else, such as helping at a soup kitchen or working with children, may help your loved one feel better about the holidays.

  6. Never tell someone that he or she should be “over it.” Instead, give the person hope that, eventually, he or she will enjoy the holidays again.

  7. Be willing to listen. Active listening from friends and family is an important step to helping some cope with grief and heal.

  8. Remind the person you are thinking of him or her and the loved one who died. Cards, phone calls, and visits are great ways to stay in touch.


For more information about NHPCO and their resources on grief, loss, and hospice care, visit www.nhpco.org.

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