Narrative and interactional process for preventing harmful struggle in therapy: an integrative empirical model

Resistance or struggle in therapy looms large as a predictor of treatment outcomes. This study organizes the significant empirical data on struggle into a coherent, operational framework for use by therapists in preventing and/or ameliorating harmful struggle in therapy. First, we review the prevalence and significance of struggle. Second, we offer a historical and conceptual overview, with emphasis on a contemporary interactional/systemic perspective on struggle. Third, we provide a synthesis of peer-reviewed research, profiling struggle at speech-act and episode levels of interaction process and across assessment/joining, intervention, and integration-consolidation phases of therapy. Fourth, based upon this review, we propose a three-factor model--consisting of eliciting dialogue, enactments, and accommodation--for successful therapy process relative to the occurrence of struggle.     

A Cognitive Neuroscience Approach to Studying the Role of Overconfidence in Problem Gambling

Research on the neural correlates of decision making in gambling tasks may be informative for understanding problem gambling. The present study explored confidence and overconfidence using magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure brain activity during a judgment task. Nineteen undergraduates who self-identified as frequent gamblers (average age 19.7 years; 5 females, 14 males) participated in this study. Participants first completed the DIGS (Winters, Specker & Stinchfield, 2002), a measure of gambling pathology. They then engaged in a behavioral task of confidence assessment, wherein they answered two-alternative trivia questions and estimated the probability that each answer was correct. In a subsequent MEG task, they viewed the questions and a target answer, and indicated with a button press whether the target matched the correct answer. Confidence was directly related to activity in the right prefrontal cortex. Matching and mismatching targets were associated with activity in the medial occipital cortex and left supramarginal gyrus, respectively. An interaction of pathology and match/mismatch was observed in the right inferior occipital-temporal junction region, showing more activity following a mismatch in non-problem gamblers, but not in problem gamblers. Implications of the results for understanding of top–down modulation and attentional systems are discussed in relation to gambling behavior.     

Reassessing the Testing of Generic Utility Models for Mixed Gambles

Miyamoto's generic utility theory (GUT) is a bilinear form that captures a diverse set of utility formulations. The present study, using mixed gambles, experimentally evaluates GUT in a fashion similar to the Chechile and Cooke and the Chechile and Butler studies, but employs a novel method of analysis. The reasons for the new method is to solve a fundamental flaw with the regression approacch used in the earlier experiments and to solve a problem of model overfit. Several participants from the earlier Chechile and Butler experiment are now recognized as being consistent with the GUT representation, but many are not. A new experiment, with actual economic consequences for the participants, does not support GUT. Suggestions are provided for subsequent research studies assessing the GUT class of models.     

THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF TRUST

We investigate the relationship between individual trust and individual economic performance. We find that individual income is hump‐shaped in a measure of intensity of trust beliefs. Our interpretation is that highly trusting individuals tend to assume too much social risk and to be cheated more often, ultimately performing less well than those with a belief close to the mean trustworthiness of the population. However, individuals with overly pessimistic beliefs avoid being cheated, but give up profitable opportunities, therefore underperforming. The cost of either too much or too little trust is comparable to the income lost by forgoing college. Our findings hold in large‐scale international survey data, as well as inside a country with high‐quality institutions, and are also supported by experimental findings. (JEL: A1, A12, D1, O15, Z1)     

Coal demand,market forces,and U.S. coal mine closures

Economic transitions have the potential to displace workers and cause social unrest. Coal mine closures and the resulting employment losses in rural areas have become salient issues. Using data on coal mine and power plant operation, we model closure as a function of expected profits, which allows us to compare the effects on mine closure of specific demand and supply shocks to expected mine profits. Increasing costs of production have had a large impact on closures, but lower natural gas prices and lower electricity demand have played more recently important roles.     

An Interactive Framework for Multi-Person,Multiobjective Decisions

Group decision making in the presence of multiple conflicting objectives is complex and difficult. This paper describes and evaluates an iterative technique to facilitate multiple objective decision making by multiple decision makers. The proposed method augments an interactive multiobjective optimization procedure with a preference ranking tool and a consensus ranking heuristic. Two multiple objective linear programming (MOLP) solution approaches, the SIMOLP method of Reeves and Franz [39] and the interactive weighted Tchebycheff procedure of Steuer and Choo [49], are recommended optimization strategies to be used independently or in concert. Computational experience suggests that the proposed framework is an effective decision-making tool. The procedure quickly located excellent compromise solutions in a series of test problems with hypothetical decision makers. In addition, human decision makers gave positive evaluations of the procedure and the production plans the procedure provided for a resource allocation case problem.     

Emergency risk communication and sensemaking during smoke events: A survey of practitioners

Emergency risk communication (ERC) for smoke emitted from major fires continues to challenge governments. During these events, practitioners (including scientific, communication, and emergency response government staff) are tasked with quickly making sense of the public health risks and the communication options available. Practitioners’ sensemaking—the process of creating meaning from information about an unfolding emergency—is key to effective ERC. This article identifies the factors that ERC practitioners consider the most important to their sensemaking for smoke events. A survey of practitioners (n = 86) was conducted to elicit their views on the level of importance of 22 different factors (individual, organizational, and contextual) on their sensemaking. The results indicate that the majority of the factors tested are very important to practitioners. This finding likely reflects the multidimensional nature of emergency smoke events and provides evidence as to why practitioners are challenged when trying to make sense of emergency situations. Despite multiple factors being considered very important to practitioners, the time-limited nature of emergencies means that practitioners will inevitability be forced to prioritize in their sensemaking efforts. Our results also provide insight into practitioners’ prioritization of different information sources. Specifically, practitioners prioritize their own knowledge and the knowledge of other practitioners. The two most important factors were information from other incident management stakeholders and the practitioners’ past experience. Other information, including community-based and academic knowledge, appear to be of lower priority for practitioners. Based on the study results, recommendations for practice and future research are discussed.