Syntactic Data Augmentation Increases Robustness to Inference Heuristics

Pretrained neural models such as BERT, when fine-tuned to perform natural language inference (NLI), often show high accuracy on standard datasets, but display a surprising lack of sensitivity to word order on controlled challenge sets. We hypothesize that this issue is not primarily caused by the pretrained model's limitations, but rather by the paucity of crowdsourced NLI examples that might convey the importance of syntactic structure at the fine-tuning stage. We explore several methods to augment standard training sets with syntactically informative examples, generated by applying syntactic transformations to sentences from the MNLI corpus. The best-performing augmentation method, subject/object inversion, improved BERT's accuracy on controlled examples that diagnose sensitivity to word order from 0.28 to 0.73, without affecting performance on the MNLI test set. This improvement generalized beyond the particular construction used for data augmentation, suggesting that augmentation causes BERT to recruit abstract syntactic representations.Comment: ACL 202

Identifying and addressing barriers to treatment for child sexual abuse survivors and their non-offending caregivers

Mental health treatment is a critical part of an effective and compassionate response to the disclosure of child sexual abuse (CSA). Given the vast negative consequences for children and families following CSA, engagement in treatment can benefit youth and their non-offending caregivers. Yet, these families face unique barriers to treatment initiation, adherence, and effectiveness. The identification of these barriers allows clinicians, researchers, and policy makers to increase treatment utilization, engagement, and value. The current review and its recommendations derive from the existing literature combined with knowledge gained from a clinical research team with more than 20 years of experience offering a treatment program for CSA survivors and their non-offending family members. The review organizes barriers around factors related to individual characteristics of children and caregivers, perceptions and beliefs commonly held following CSA, and challenging family interactions in the context of individual and group treatment for CSA. Finally, barriers related to systemic and societal factors are examined given the importance of understanding the legal and cultural context in which families seek and engage in treatment. Recommendations for further research, suggestions for clinicians, and considerations for policy change to decrease the identified treatment barriers for families impacted by CSA are provided

Poverty-Related Adversity and Emotion Regulation Predict Internalizing Behavior Problems among Low-Income Children Ages 8–11

The current study examines the additive and joint roles of chronic poverty-related adversity and three candidate neurocognitive processes of emotion regulation (ER)—including: (i) attention bias to threat (ABT); (ii) accuracy of facial emotion appraisal (FEA); and (iii) negative affect (NA)—for low-income, ethnic minority children’s internalizing problems (N = 338). Children were enrolled in the current study from publicly funded preschools, with poverty-related adversity assessed at multiple time points from early to middle childhood. Field-based administration of neurocognitively-informed assessments of ABT, FEA and NA as well as parental report of internalizing symptoms were collected when children were ages 8–11, 6 years after baseline. Results suggest that chronic exposure to poverty-related adversity from early to middle childhood predicted higher levels of internalizing symptomatology when children are ages 8–11, even after controlling for initial poverty status and early internalizing symptoms in preschool. Moreover, each of the 3 hypothesized components of ER played an independent and statistically significant role in predicting children’s parent-reported internalizing symptoms at the 6-year follow-up, even after controlling for early and chronic poverty-related adversit

Virtual Community Health Workers: Outreach Calls During COVID-19

The “Clinical Experience” program at the Sidney Kimmel Medical College, established in 2017, provides pre-clerkship students with an opportunity to identify and address patients’ needs for social determinants of health (SDoH). The COVID-19 pandemic led to a suspension of the student program in the clinical environment, but the CHWs continued to address patients’ social needs from a remote setting. In the absence of established best practices regarding patient outreach calls from a remote setting, we sought to develop an effective workflow that would mask the CHWs’ personal cell phones while leading to fewer “unable to reach” scenarios and improved case resolution rates

Object Permanence and the Relationship to Sitting Development in Infants With Motor Delays

Purpose: This study examines object permanence development in infants with motor delays (MD) compared with infants with typical development (TD) and in relation to sitting skill. Methods: Fifty-six infants with MD (mean age = 10 months) and 36 with TD (mean age = 5.7 months) were assessed at baseline and then at 1.5, 3, and 6 months postbaseline. A scale was developed to measure object permanence (Object Permanence Scale [OPS]), and the Gross Motor Function Measure sitting subsection (GMFM-SS), and the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development, 3rd Edition (Bayley-III) were administered. Results: Interrater reliability of the OPS was excellent and correlation between the OPS and Bayley-III cognitive scores was moderately positive. Compared with TD, infants with MD were delayed in development of object permanence but demonstrated increased understanding over time and as sitting skills improved. Conclusion: In children with MD, object permanence, as quantified by the OPS, emerges in conjunction with sitting skill

HealthMpowerment.org: Development Of A Theory-Based HIV/STI Website for Young Black MSM

Black men who have sex with men (BMSM) are disproportionately affected by the HIV epidemic, yet few prevention interventions have been developed specifically for them. Recent studies suggest that the Internet is a promising intervention delivery avenue. We describe results from our formative work in developing a theory-based online HIV/STI prevention intervention for young BMSM including focus groups, semistructured interviews, and usability testing. The Intervention, HealthMpowerment.org, was created based on the Institute of Medicine’s integrated model of behavior change with extensive input from young BMSM. Key interactive Web site features include live chats, quizzes, personalized health and “hook-up/sex” journals, and decision support tools for assessing risk behaviors. Creating an interactive HIV/sexually transmitted infection web site for BMSM was a complex process requiring many adjustments based on iterative feedback throughout all development stages. Preliminary satisfaction, content acceptability, and usability findings support the use of the Internet to deliver risk reduction messages to young BMSM

HealthMpowerment.org: Feasibility and acceptability of delivering an Internet intervention to young Black men who have sex with men

Young Black men who have sex with men (BMSM) are disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS in the United States and continue to experience rapidly increasing HIV incidence. We designed a tailored, theory-based interactive HIV/STI prevention website for young BMSM, called HealthMpowerment.org (HMP) and conducted a small pilot trial comparing HMP to currently available HIV/STI websites. We present findings demonstrating feasibility and acceptability of delivering the intervention to the target population of young BMSM. Retention rates were 90% and 78% at one and three month follow-ups, respectively. Evaluation immediately after the intervention’s completion revealed that participants who used the HMP website reported high levels of user satisfaction and interest and low levels of website difficulty and frustration. At the end of the intervention, there was a trend in increased behavioral intentions to use condoms and engage in preparatory condom use behaviors in the intervention group compared to the control group (p=.10). We observed a reduction in mean scores on the CES-D scale among those in the intervention group that was not seen in the control group at the one-month follow-up, though this was not statistically significant. Feedback from exit interviews with study participants suggested that HMP is relevant to the prevention needs of young BMSM. Overall, the findings support the acceptability and feasibility of delivering this prevention program to a group that has few interventions despite bearing a significant burden of the epidemic. Future trials, combining internet and mobile phone technologies, are planned to test HMP among larger and more diverse populations of young BMSM