Solution Focused Financial Therapy: A Brief Report of a Pilot Study

The financial counseling, financial planning, and financial therapy fields are hampered by a conceptual and empirical paucity of clinical and experimental evidence-based research. In an attempt to decrease this gap in the literature, a pilot study was developed to test the implementation of a solution-focused financial therapy client intervention approach, in which solution-focused therapy techniques were applied in a financial counseling setting. This paper reports findings from a clinical intervention study of college students (N = 8) who presented a variety of financial issues related to budgeting, investing, and debt repayment problems. Data were gathered prior to the start of treatment, after treatment ended, and three months later. Participants’ psychological well-being and financial behaviors improved, while financial distress decreased. The solution-focused financial therapy approach used is discussed

ROCs in Eyewitness Identification:Instructions versus Confidence Ratings

From the perspective of signal-detection theory, different lineup instructions may induce different levels of response bias (Clark, 2005). If so, then collecting correct and false identification rates across different instructional conditions will trace out the ROC – the same ROC that, theoretically, could also be traced out from a single instruction condition in which each eyewitness decision is accompanied by a confidence rating. We tested whether the two approaches do in fact yield the same ROC. Participants were assigned to a confidence rating condition or to an instructional biasing condition (liberal, neutral, unbiased, or conservative). After watching a video of a mock crime, participants were presented with instructions followed by a 6-person simultaneous photo lineup. The ROCs from both methods were similar, but they were not exactly the same. These findings have potentially important policy implications for how the legal system should go about controlling eyewitness response bias

Strengths, Challenges, and Opportunities for Physical Activity Promotion in the Century-old National Cooperative Extension System

The need for physical activity promotion is ubiquitous, and offering physical activity interventions in community settings may reach people where they live, work, and play. Reaching people and providing evidence-based programming is exactly what the Cooperative Extension System has accomplished over the last century. In 2014, federal policy brought physical activity promotion into the mission of Extension. Although this policy marks the beginning of concerted efforts for physical activity promotion, several states have had strong success in this area. Borrowing from these efforts, this paper reports strengths, challenges, and opportunities for physical activity promotion in Extension

ROCs in Eyewitness Identification: Instructions vs. Confidence Ratings

From the perspective of signal-detection theory, different lineup instructions may induce different levels of response bias (Clark, 2005). If so, then collecting correct and false identification rates across different instructional conditions will trace out the ROC – the same ROC that, theoretically, could also be traced out from a single instruction condition in which each eyewitness decision is accompanied by a confidence rating. We tested whether the two approaches do in fact yield the same ROC. Participants were assigned to a confidence rating condition or to an instructional biasing condition (liberal, neutral, unbiased, or conservative). After watching a video of a mock crime, participants were presented with instructions followed by a 6-person simultaneous photo lineup. The ROCs from both methods were similar, but they were not exactly the same. These findings have potentially important policy implications for how the legal system should go about controlling eyewitness response bias

Biomass and Productivity of Thalassia testudinum in Estuaries of the Florida Panhandle

Thalassia testudinum often dominates seagrass meadows of the Florida panhandle but few measurements of productivity, biomass, density, turnover or leaf area index in this region have been made. We targeted 5 estuaries located at similar latitudes, 30⁰ ± 0.3⁰N: Big Lagoon, Santa Rosa Sound, St. Andrew Bay, St. Joseph Bay, and St. George Sound. This study was one component of a collaborative partnership of state and local researchers examining factors preventing recovery in panhandle estuarine areas that had historically contained seagrass in the 1940s and 1950s. Measurements were made twice in 2016, once in June and then again in summer or fall, except in Santa Rosa Sound where measurements were made 3 times. In the estuaries sampled for the second time in July or August, aboveground productivity was greater than in June. St. Joseph Bay had the highest aboveground productivity (4.3 g/m2/d) and 1—sided leaf area index (4.2) while St. George Sound had the lowest values (0.41 g/m2/d and 1.0). Principal component analysis suggested that St. Andrew Bay, Big Lagoon and Santa Rosa Sound were the most similar, with higher values for shoot densities and leaf turnover and lower salinities and watershed:water ratios. St. Joseph Bay had high aboveground productivity and salinity, and low turbidity. St. George Sound had low aboveground productivity, high total suspended solids and the highest watershed:water ratio. These baseline productivity estimates will be useful to assess the success of restoration efforts targeting seagrasses in the Florida panhandle and evaluate impacts of climate change on seagrasses

Solution Focused Financial Therapy: A Brief Report of a Pilot Study

The financial counseling, financial planning, and financial therapy fields are hampered by a conceptual and empirical paucity of clinical and experimental evidence-based research. In an attempt to decrease this gap in the literature, a pilot study was developed to test the implementation of a solution-focused financial therapy client intervention approach, in which solution-focused therapy techniques were applied in a financial counseling setting. This paper reports findings from a clinical intervention study of college students (N = 8) who presented a variety of financial issues related to budgeting, investing, and debt repayment problems. Data were gathered prior to the start of treatment, after treatment ended, and three months later. Participants’ psychological well-being and financial behaviors improved, while financial distress decreased. The solution-focused financial therapy approach used is discussed

Factors driving the seasonal and hourly variability of sea-spray aerosol number in the North Atlantic

Four North Atlantic Aerosol and Marine Ecosystems Study (NAAMES) field campaigns from winter 2015 through spring 2018 sampled an extensive set of oceanographic and atmospheric parameters during the annual phytoplankton bloom cycle. This unique dataset provides four seasons of open-ocean observations of wind speed, sea surface temperature (SST), seawater particle attenuation at 660 nm (cp,660, a measure of ocean particulate organic carbon), bacterial production rates, and sea-spray aerosol size distributions and number concentrations (NSSA). The NAAMES measurements show moderate to strong correlations (0.56 \u3c R \u3c 0.70) between NSSA and local wind speeds in the marine boundary layer on hourly timescales, but this relationship weakens in the campaign averages that represent each season, in part because of the reduction in range of wind speed by multiday averaging. NSSA correlates weakly with seawater cp,660 (R = 0.36, P \u3c\u3c 0.01), but the correlation with cp,660, is improved (R = 0.51, P \u3c 0.05) for periods of low wind speeds. In addition, NAAMES measurements provide observational dependence of SSA mode diameter (dm) on SST, with dm increasing to larger sizes at higher SST (R = 0.60, P \u3c\u3c 0.01) on hourly timescales. These results imply that climate models using bimodal SSA parameterizations to wind speed rather than a single SSA mode that varies with SST may overestimate SSA number concentrations (hence cloud condensation nuclei) by a factor of 4 to 7 and may underestimate SSA scattering (hence direct radiative effects) by a factor of 2 to 5, in addition to overpredicting variability in SSA scattering from wind speed by a factor of 5