Kevin's Thoughts On Behaviors Interventions For Aggressive Children

Children suffering from severe mental and behavior disorders, including oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and conduct disorder (CD), who often depict aggressive and antisocial behaviors, can benefit from the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), an external behavior intervention from psychological approach. Behavior psychology, a sub-topic of psychology, bases on the theory that “all behaviors are acquired through conditioning”. Therefore, it becomes possible to “reshape” people’s behaviors through conditioned stimulus. This process is called behavior intervention or behavior modification. It anticipates to reinforce the desired behavior of a person through rewards and punishments. Studies have shown that this type of treatment has clinical significance as well and can be used for therapeutic purposes. The CBT has become the most widely accepted treatment that can help solve problems concerning depression, anxiety, personality, substance abuse, etc. The use of CBT extends to children and adolescents as well. Concerning complex childhood aggressiveness and its diverse causes, an article titled “Behavior Modification of Aggressive Children in Child Welfare” examines the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral intervention in dealing with children with aggressive behaviors.

The article reveals that children with social problems and aggressive and delinquent behaviors are prevalent in child welfare settings. ODD and CD exist widely within young children 5 to 15 of age (2.31% for ODD and 1.47% for CD). Typical behavioral patterns of ODD are “characterized by intense defiance, anger, irritability, and vindictiveness”; while, CD includes “a variety of behaviors directed against people, animals, norms, and property” which has the danger of developing into “weapon using, bullying, torturing animals, deliberately destroying others’ property, theft, [etc]”. Because of the prevalence and negative potentials of these behaviors, a more psychotherapeutic orientation of child welfare needs to be introduced. Previously, some empirical evidence supports the use of cognitive-behavioral approaches for children aggressiveness, conveying that the implementation of CBT in children welfare program will effectively reduce the aggressive behaviors and could achieve better results than child welfare does alone. The author develops an experimental design that tests this assumption.

The design is performed very much in the same way as the experiments we conduct to test the statistical significance in Stat class. 24 young children from a children welfare institution, including ones diagnosed with either ODD or CD are divided into 2 groups - the intervention group and the control group - with 6 children in each group who have aggressive behaviors. In order to minimize bias and reduce the impact of confounding variables, sex distribution, youth welfare subprograms, school types, age average and grades of the children are all kept within certain range for both groups. That means that the differences in those categories will not result in statistically significant variation in the outcomes. Before the treatment, parents and teachers evaluate each child by examining the social problems, attention problems and delinquent behaviors that are associated with him or her. The results are collected. At the mean time, each child takes a survey and obtains an overall score of aggression based the results. CBT includes exposing people to stimuli, in this case, children are exposed to correct actions and performance in each given conflict situation. The theory is human will behave based on what environment they are exposed to and what the consequences are for each reaction. During the therapies, each child in the intervention group participates in various consulting and modification sessions where they are asked to perform specified behavior tasks. The trainers help them individually to analyze each performance in detail and and direct them into “prosocial perceptions” through role-playing and practicing the socially desirable behaviors. Tokens will be given for each right behavior and avoidance of aggressive behavior. At the end of a session, children can exchange their tokens for play time. This is an example of positive reinforcement that encourages children to continuously avoid aggressive behaviors as “playing-time” is something that young children really enjoy and care about. Moreover, children will then practice the right behaviors in a social environment as they perform in contact with other children. This creates an environmental interventions as Children will tend to behave favorably if they see everyone else in the group behaves in prosocial ways. The process of self-reflecting and reflection of others will help stabilize the positive behaviors. Furthermore, parents receive consoling where they learn to provide with a harmonious family environment by changing unfavorable interactions.

Immediately after completion of the combined treatment, evaluations from parents and teachers are collected again and each child will take another survey and obtain a new score on their aggression level. The children in both groups show dramatic changes in their behaviors. For both groups, the ratings in externalizing symptoms, social problems, attention problems, aggressive behaviors and peer relation problems present significant decrease. However, datas show that children treated with CBT intervention show a larger decrease ratings regarding their problematic behaviors; meanwhile, they demonstrate a stronger increase in prosocial behaviors than those treated without CBT.

To maintain subjective and professional, the author acknowledges the limitation of this experiment. As much as they try to avoid possible bias and reduce the variance between the two groups, the difference and the uniqueness of each individual will be doomed to influence the outcomes to some extent. Therefore, the effectiveness of the CBT might be overstated or understated. Furthermore, the sample size of each group is too small, leaving the rooms for “coincidence”. Think it in this way: if you toss a fair coin for only 5 times, there is a chance that you end up with 5 heads (even if the possibility of head should be 0.5). Despite these limitation, given the implicit theory behind the study and the “predictable” outcomes it shows, there is still a good reason to believe that cognitive intervention can assist child welfare programs and lead to a more effective treatment for reducing undesirable behaviors and “promoting deficient social skills” for children with aggressive behaviors.

Autumn's Thoughts on Alcohol Consumption Patterns Among College Students

It is well-known that personality traits predict drinking motives, and drinking motives predict drinking patterns. However, the connection between personality traits and drinking patterns for students who drink both for coping and enhancement reasons remains unknown. Abby L. Goldstein and Gordon L. Flett of York University in Toronto, Canada attempted to discover this unknown. They conducted a study relating drinking motives with personality traits and drinking patterns of college students over a year time span, a smaller project of a study examining the relationship between childhood variables, personality, alcohol use, and adjustment to university. According to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, “College students represent a population at risk for binge drinking and alcohol-related consequences, including academic and legal difficulties, physical and psychological concerns, increased injury risk, and involvement in unsafe sexual practices.”

Goldstein and Flett separated 138 first year college students who reported drinking alcohol within the past year into four categories: coping, enhancement, enhancement + coping, and non-internally motivated drinkers. They hypothesized that coping motivated drinkers will have more alcohol related problems, enhancement and non-internally motivated drinkers will drink larger quantities of alcohol, and enhancement plus coping motivated drinkers will have the most extreme binge drinking problems. The study was conducted using data such as neuroticism, drinking quantity, and sensation seeking values. Each participant completed two questionnaires; one given during the first six weeks of the fall semester and the other given three months later. These questionnaires tested neuroticism, drinking quantity, sensation seeking values, and other drinking related measures.

The first questionnaire measured neuroticism and sensation seeking. Neuroticism was tested with the Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI), consisting of five 2-item scales analyzing the “Big Five” personality factors: extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. Sensation seeking was measured by the 4-item Brief Sensation Seeking Scale (BSSS-4). This is a condensed version of the Form V of the Sensation Seeking Scale. Response choices ranged from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5).

The second questionnaire measured drinking motives, anxiety sensitivity, positive and negative affect, alcohol problems, and alcohol use. Drinking motives were assessed by the DMQ-R made of four subscales: enhancement, coping, social, and conformity. Participants shared the frequency in which they consume alcohol for these reasons. The scale ranged from 1 to 5, 1 being almost never/never and 5 being almost always/always. Anxiety sensitivity was measured with the Anxiety Sensitivity Index-Revised in 1998. The ASI-R analyzes six domains of anxiety sensitivity that form a single higher-order factor. The Positive Affect Negative Affect Scale (PANAS) measured the positive and negative affect. Respondents rated their emotions according to 20 adjective descriptors, half positive and the other negative. They also indicated the extent to which they feel these emotions using a 5-point scale, 1 being very slightly or not at all and 5 being extremely. Alcohol problems were assessed by the Rutgers Alcohol Problem Index. RAPI is a 23-item questionnaire that analyzes the frequency that students experienced alcohol problems within the past year. For this study, participants were given 0 points if they did not experience the item in the past year, and 1 point if they had. Their total score was calculated to represent the frequency of their alcohol problems in the past year. Lastly, alcohol use was assessed with two parts of the Canadian Campus Survey: the amount of alcohol consumed per drinking session and episodic binge drinking. Binge drinking was determined by asking the students how many times in the past two weeks they had consumed five or more drinks.

The means and standard deviations, separate for men and women, were calculated from the data results of the questionnaire. Analysis concluded three observations: (1)Coping and enhancement motives were positively correlated with each other and alcohol use, (2)Coping motives were negatively correlated with positive affect and positively correlated with negative affect, neuroticism, and anxiety sensitivity, and (3)Enhancement motive were significantly and positively correlated with anxiety sensitivity. Based on these observations and the means and standard deviations, the students were placed into four groups. 19 participants were coping motivated, 23 were enhancement motivated, 11 were coping and enhancement motivated, and 85 were non-internally (neither coping of enhancement) motivated. In conclusion, roughly 38% of college students were internally motivated drinkers and 62% were non-internally motivated drinkers.

With these figures, Goldstein and Flett’s hypothesis disproven. They hypothesized that coping motivated drinkers will have more alcohol related problems, enhancement and non-internally motivated drinkers will drink larger quantities of alcohol, and enhancement plus coping motivated drinkers will have the most extreme binge drinking problems. Their research shows that coping motivated drinkers do have more alcohol related problems, so that portion of their hypothesis is correct. However, the research also showed that enhancement and non-internally motivated drinkers consume the least amount of alcohol of the four groups. Also according to the research, coping motivated drinkers have the most extreme binge drinking problems. From Goldstein and Flett’s research, one can see that coping motivated drinkers have the most alcohol related consequences.

Tyler's Thought on Public Speaking Phobias

453 phobias exist in the world today. You fear darkness, sitting, ugliness, nudity (looks like they’re not getting any), everything, colors, bathing, sitting in a car and 445 other things. 13% of the population suffers from a social phobia, some more common than others. Public speaking phobia affects the largest number of individuals with social phobias, 40% to be exact. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) treats public speaking phobia when in session with a therapist. While CBT is preferred, problems can arise in the treatments. Such problems include lack of therapist control, patient’s inability to imagine and audience, self flooding of emotions and loss of confidentiality when put in front of a real audience. A new method of CBT has been invented called virtual CBT (VRCBT), where a fake audience is used to simulate the real situation. A study has been done and is explained in Behavioral Modification Journal. that tests whether VRCBT is a better alternative to conventional CBT.

People with public speaking phobia perceive communication in front of others as dangerous and feared, sort of like talking to the hottest girl in school. Anxiety builds up and manifests as physical symptoms such as sweating, loss of words, redness and shortness of break. Avoidance of such situations then becomes the next step. Patients do not confront their fears thus they build up and manifest in their brain. Many times they overestimate the threat of public ridicule and disapproval and tend to catastrophize negative consequences and personal events that have no relation to them.

Cognitive behavioral therapy treats the most symptoms in patients. The most common component to CBT includes exposing patients to stimuli, in this case people listening. The client experiences two things while in therapy, they have a lessened sense of anxiety during exposure and they learn no catastrophic even is coming as they anticipated. Exposure to their fear may be done in two ways, by natural setting or by imagination. In natural exposure the patient actually speaks in front of live people; however this becomes very time consuming and expensive. The therapist also loses some of their control over the situation, for they cannot make the people suddenly disappear if something goes wrong. Running into someone the client knows at these public events also becomes a problem because everyone will now know he or she is in therapy. In imaginative exposure the patients visualizes and audience in their heads. This manner is less effective because therapists cannot tell if the patient is truly following directions or is thinking about other things. Other problems include an overflow of thought and dramatizing the situation.

Virtual CBT introduces a new way to perform therapy for people with public speaking phobias. It is already currently being used to treat other phobias such as fight phobia, fear of driving, claustrophobia and agoraphobia. New advances in technology allow for these virtual simulations to seem very life like. Exposure to the stimuli occurs in the same way expect the client but on a helmet connected to a computer to visualize his or her audience. The helmet system provides both visual and audio input. A special program allows the therapist to manipulate different elements of the scenery, allowing for gradual exposure. For example the operator can make the audience clap their hands, seem uninterested or get up and leave. (The exact view the patient has, the therapist has so their progress can be monitored).

VRCBT proved very effective in a recent study done on public speaking patients. 88 persons were tested with different methods of clinical help. The results were measured on how well the patients preformed behavioral tasks. The data showed men and women who were treated with VRCBT did better than those treated by other types of medicine. Overall the virtual therapy shows more improvement over conventional methods in quelling anxiety of patients as well as allowing therapist to control the environment more effectively. People with public speaking phobia perceive communication in front of others as dangerous and feared, sort of like talking to the hottest girl in school. Anxiety builds up and manifests as physical symptoms such as sweating, loss of words, redness and shortness of break. Avoidance of such situations then becomes the next step. Patients do not confront their fears thus they build up and manifest in their brain. Many times they overestimate the threat of public ridicule and disapproval and tend to catastrophize negative consequences and personal events that have no relation to them. Cognitive behavioral therapy treats the most symptoms in patients. The most common component to CBT includes exposing patients to stimuli, in this case people listening. The client experiences two things while in therapy, they have a lessened sense of anxiety during exposure and they learn no catastrophic even is coming as they anticipated. Exposure to their fear may be done in two ways, by natural setting or by imagination. In natural exposure the patient actually speaks in front of live people; however this becomes very time consuming and expensive. The therapist also loses some of their control over the situation, for they cannot make the people suddenly disappear if something goes wrong. Running into someone the client knows at these public events also becomes a problem because everyone will now know he or she is in therapy. In imaginative exposure the patients visualizes and audience in their heads. This manner is less effective because therapists cannot tell if the patient is truly following directions or is thinking about other things. Other problems include an overflow of thought and dramatizing the situation. Virtual CBT introduces a new way to perform therapy for people with public speaking phobias. It is already currently being used to treat other phobias such as fight phobia, fear of driving, claustrophobia and agoraphobia. New advances in technology allow for these virtual simulations to seem very life like. Exposure to the stimuli occurs in the same way expect the client but on a helmet connected to a computer to visualize his or her audience. The helmet system provides both visual and audio input. A special program allows the therapist to manipulate different elements of the scenery, allowing for gradual exposure. For example the operator can make the audience clap their hands, seem uninterested or get up and leave. (The exact view the patient has, the therapist has so their progress can be monitored). VRCBT proved very effective in a recent study done on public speaking patients. 88 persons were tested with different methods of clinical help. The results were measured on how well the patients preformed behavioral tasks. The data showed men and women who were treated with VRCBT did better than those treated by other types of medicine. Overall the virtual therapy shows more improvement over conventional methods in quelling anxiety of patients as well as allowing therapist to control the environment more effectively.

Suzie's Thoughts on Psychological Flexibility

Eating disorders correlate with a person's mental ability to positively handle even miniscule unpleasant situations. This ability is known as psychological flexibility: the admittance of undesirable feelings is recognized while a person simultaneously follows their personal values and beliefs. Psychological flexibility is studied to compare thoughts of eating-disorders/body image, to overall psychological health. College students, in particular, encounter stressful situations and social pressure, and often become the focus of these studies. The article, “Disordered Eating-Related Cognition and Psychological Flexibility” (by Masuda, Price, Anderson, and Wendell), shows the relationship between negative body image thoughts, psychological flexibility and psychological ill-health among college students.

This article stems from the online Behavior Modification site regarding psychology topics. Behavioral psychology suggests that all behaviors are learned. One of the most well-known and influential scientists that studied this kind of psychology was B.F. Skinner (1904-1990). His research focused on operant conditioning, the idea that organisms (college students in this case) perform actions based on the environment around them. This article suggests that the drive to be thin emerges from today’s society. The magazines with big, bright titles such as, “Get you best beach bod” and “How to lose 10 pounds fast” consume newsstands everywhere. It’s no wonder that young adults long to look like their favorite celebrities that are famous because of their ‘good’ bodies. Skinner would say the act of not eating (or eating in an unhealthy way) in order to lose weight to ‘fit in’ is an effect of operant conditioning. Girls want to be skinny because they see how thin women are accepted and flaunted in current Western society. This trend is harmful to today’s youth and the study by Masuda, Price, Anderson, and Wendell focus on other factors (psychological flexibility and mental health) along with disordered eating cognition, that are affecting college students today.

Many studies show that disordered eating-related cognition is positively associated with negative psychological outcomes. So when a person has increased thoughts and puts pressure on himself or herself to lose weight in order to fit into society, they are more likely to experience depression and anxiety. However, although disordered eating-related thoughts are a decent predictor to a person’s psychological distress, it does not always yield negative psychological health. This study by Masuda and others takes into account how a person responds to negative events (flexibility) and observes its effects. Again, psychological flexibility, as summarized in the article, is “an overall behavior pattern of experiencing private events without trying to judge, evaluate, avoid, fix, down-regulate, or change them, while spontaneously engaging in value-directed activities at the same time”. Hence, a person who is psychologically flexible can be exposed to negative thoughts/feelings (like wanting to be thin) without being completely enthralled with the negativity. Being in college, we all know the pressures that students encounter. Being in a sorority, especially, I see girls that are constantly struggling with their body image. It is so important to reassure these girls that they are beautiful and help them not let society’s standards negatively affect them. But if you know someone who obviously needs more relief than you can give them, the best thing you can do is get them professional help (but I’m sure you all already knew that).

New evidence suggests that psychological flexibility is inversely associated with detrimental psychological problems. So if someone is very psychologically flexible, he/she usually has minimal negative psychological effects/problems. The authors’ main goal when administering this study was to determine if/how a “psychologically flexible response style contributes to the link between disordered eating-related cognitions and poor psychological outcomes”. 375 participants from a large public university in Georgia were asked a variety of questions and answered anonymously. The question’s topics included: eating disorders/self-esteem, willingness to accept unpleasant thoughts, overall psychological health (including common behavior stressors), and personal anxiety.

Previous studies that were similar to the current one, suggested that gender is a significant predictor when dealing with disordered variables. However, gender was excluded in the results of this study because it did not appear to be a compelling factor of the participants’ psychological outcomes. I originally expected eating-disordered cognitions to be significantly more prevalent in college females, but to my surprise, the difference in gender and outcomes did not show any variance. The study insinuates that in order to understand how negative psychological events are maintained, it would be beneficial to not only assess disordered eating-related cognitions, but also understand how a person reacts to difficult or undesirable situations. I found this study interesting because self-image and body issues are obviously ongoing in society today, especially among young adults. Disordered eating-related cognitions and poor psychological outcomes are positively related to each other, while psychological flexibility is inversely related to the two and should be taken into account when studying people’s psychological ill-health.