Jeff Orrico Named University Librarian

Email from Sacred Heart University Provost Robin L. Cautin, Ph.D. announcing that Jeff Orrico has been amed University Librarian

Fifty Psychological and Psychiatric Terms to Avoid: a List of Inaccurate, Misleading, Misused, Ambiguous, and Logically Confused Words and Phrases

The goal of this article is to promote clear thinking and clear writing among students and teachers of psychological science by curbing terminological misinformation and confusion. To this end, we present a provisional list of 50 commonly used terms in psychology, psychiatry, and allied fields that should be avoided, or at most used sparingly and with explicit caveats. We provide corrective information for students, instructors, and researchers regarding these terms, which we organize for expository purposes into five categories: inaccurate or misleading terms, frequently misused terms, ambiguous terms, oxymorons, and pleonasms. For each term, we (a) explain why it is problematic, (b) delineate one or more examples of its misuse, and (c) when pertinent, offer recommendations for preferable terms. By being more judicious in their use of terminology, psychologists and psychiatrists can foster clearer thinking in their students and the field at large regarding mental phenomena

125 Years of the American Psychological Association

The American Psychological Association (APA) began 125 years ago as a small club of a few dozen members in the parlor of its founder, G. Stanley Hall. In the decades since, it has faced many difficulties and even a few existential crises. Originally a scientific society, it spent the decades between the world wars figuring out how to accommodate the growing community of applied psychologists while still retaining and enhancing its scientific reputation. After World War II, with an expanded mandate, it developed formal training models for clinical psychologists and became an important player in legal cases pertaining to civil rights and other social justice issues. With practitioners taking an ever-greater role in the governance of the organization in the late 1970s, and the financial viability of the association in doubt in the 1980s, many psychological scientists felt the need to create a separate organization for themselves. The 1990s and early 2000s brought more challenges: declining divisional memberships; a legal dispute over fees with practitioners; and a serious upheaval over the APA Board of Directors’ cooperation with governmental defense and intelligence agencies during the “war on terror.” These clashes appear to have precipitated a decline in the association’s membership for the first time in its history. The APA has faced many storms over its century-and-a-quarter, but has, thus far, always ultimately found a way forward for itself, for its members, and for the wider discipline of psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved

Encyclopedia of Clinical Psychology

Available online, or as a 5-volume print set, The Encyclopedia of Clinical Psychology includes well over 500 A-Z entries covering the main topics, key concepts, and influential figures in this field

Mental Illness Misconceptions Among Undergraduates: Prevalence, Correlates, and Instructional Implications

Although several published studies have examined students’ misconceptions about psychology in general, only 1 study has focused exclusively on misconceptions about mental illness, and that study examined only 5 such misconceptions. To overcome this gap in our knowledge and to devise effective teaching strategies to disabuse college students of false information, an up-to-date survey of current misconceptions and their correlates among students is necessary. In this study, 375 undergraduates enrolled in introductory psychology courses completed an abnormal psychology misconceptions questionnaire, as well as measures assessing critical thinking, attitudes toward science, beliefs in paranormal phenomena, and vocational interests. Results revealed that certain misconceptions about mental illness and its treatment are widely held, and that compared with other students, students who endorse mental illness misconceptions tend to possess weaker critical thinking skills, are more inclined to accept paranormal claims, and are less likely to endorse scientific and behavioral views of psychology. Given the prevalence of abnormal psychology misconceptions among introductory students, we provisionally recommend assessing mental illness misconceptions early in an introductory course and utilizing empirically supported refutational methods to reduce student levels of mental illness misconceptions

Mental illness misconceptions among undergraduates: Prevalence, correlates, and instructional implications.

Although several published studies have examined students’ misconceptions about psychology in general, only 1 study has focused exclusively on misconceptions about mental illness, and that study examined only 5 such misconceptions. To overcome this gap in our knowledge and to devise effective teaching strategies to disabuse college students of false information, an up-to-date survey of current misconceptions and their correlates among students is necessary. In this study, 375 undergraduates enrolled in introductory psychology courses completed an abnormal psychology misconceptions questionnaire, as well as measures assessing critical thinking, attitudes toward science, beliefs in paranormal phenomena, and vocational interests. Results revealed that certain misconceptions about mental illness and its treatment are widely held, and that compared with other students, students who endorse mental illness misconceptions tend to possess weaker critical thinking skills, are more inclined to accept paranormal claims, and are less likely to endorse scientific and behavioral views of psychology. Given the prevalence of abnormal psychology misconceptions among introductory students, we provisionally recommend assessing mental illness misconceptions early in an introductory course and utilizing empirically supported refutational methods to reduce student levels of mental illness misconceptions

Personality Factors in Human Deception Detection: Comparing Human to Machine Performance

Previous studies of human performance in deception detection have found that humans generally are quite poor at this task, comparing unfavorably even to the performance of automated procedures. However, different scenarios and speakers may be harder or easier to judge. In this paper we compare human to machine performance detecting deception on a single corpus, the Columbia-SRI-Colorado Corpus of deceptive speech. On average, our human judges scored worse than chance — and worse than current best machine learning performance on this corpus. However, not all judges scored poorly. Based on personality tests given before the task, we find that several personality factors appear to correlate with the ability of a judge to detect deception in speech. Index Terms: deception, deceptive, perception, personality

Why Ineffective Psychotherapies Appear to Work: A Taxonomy of Causes of Spurious Therapeutic Effectiveness

The past 40 years have generated numerous insights regarding errors in human reasoning. Arguably, clinical practice is the domain of applied psychology in which acknowledging and mitigating these errors is most crucial. We address one such set of errors here, namely, the tendency of some psychologists and other mental health professionals to assume that they can rely on informal clinical observations to infer whether treatments are effective. We delineate four broad, underlying cognitive impediments to accurately evaluating improvement in psychotherapy—naive realism, confirmation bias, illusory causation, and the illusion of control. We then describe 26 causes of spurious therapeutic effectiveness (CSTEs), organized into a taxonomy of three overarching categories: (a) the perception of client change in its actual absence, (b) misinterpretations of actual client change stemming from extratherapeutic factors, and (c) misinterpretations of actual client change stemming from nonspecific treatment factors. These inferential errors can lead clinicians, clients, and researchers to misperceive useless or even harmful psychotherapies as effective. We (a) examine how methodological safeguards help to control for different CSTEs, (b) delineate fruitful directions for research on CSTEs, and (c) consider the implications of CSTEs for everyday clinical practice. An enhanced appreciation of the inferential problems posed by CSTEs may narrow the science–practice gap and foster a heightened appreciation of the need for the methodological safeguards afforded by evidence-based practice