Untitled

• Psychological interventions are actions aimed at an entire population, irrespective of individual risk factors.

Universal Interventions

• These interventions aim to reduce risks and promote protective factors.
• Examples include D.A.R.E., free school breakfasts, and universal pre-kindergarten.

Selective Interventions

• Selective interventions target specific individuals, families, or communities at risk for poor outcomes because of their characteristics or exposures.
• Head Start for low-income families and daily aspirin for individuals over 50 are examples.

Indicated Interventions

• Indicated interventions target individuals showing substantial initial difficulty.
• Typically, these interventions occur before a formal diagnosis or special classification.
• Cholesterol-lowering drugs and individualized education are examples.

Adolescence

• Adolescence is a time marked by growth, change, and risk.
• Risky decision-making and dangerous activities pose significant threats to the mental and physical well-being of youth.
• Interventions can become less effective as adolescents age.

Real-World Contexts

• Basic research deals with theoretical concepts and is typically conducted in highly controlled lab settings with limited clinical relevance.
• An example is a growth-mindset intervention given to college students in a lab setting.

Applied Research

• Applied research happens in real-world contexts, yielding more directly relevant and immediately useful results.
• An example is a growth-mindset intervention for high schoolers and its impact on their report card grades.

Universal Intervention Approaches

• Skills-based approaches aim to change the person.
• Social-Emotional Learning programs, D.A.R.E, and abstinence-only education are examples.
• Limitations: There is not solid evidence that targeted exercises to enhance skills actually improve life outcomes, interventions may not alter the "right" skills, and developing skills takes effort, practice and repetition.

Situation-Based Approaches

• These approaches change the situation using nudges.
• Examples include making organ donation opt-out and age restrictions on alcohol consumption.
• Limitations: change may not generalize for new situations, some changes may be embarrassing, and people may not want to take advantage of new opportunities or resources.

Meaning-Making Approaches

• Meaning-making approaches change the person-in-context.
• Its focus is on how individuals interpret themselves and their circumstances.
• It highlights the role of meaning-making in behavior.

Altering Meaning

• Altering meaning is a way to change behavior.
• Three core motivations underlie meaning-making: the need to understand, the need to belong, and the need for self-integrity.
• People want to develop understandings of themselves, others, and their world to predict behaviors.
• Interpretations are influenced through the lens of their own religious background.

Need for Self-Integrity

• People want their interpretations to be based on reality, but not in a disinterested observer.
• People want to think well of themselves, and believe they are adequate and coherent in their ideas.
• When self-integrity is threatened, individuals can become defensive and experience poor outcomes.

Stereotype Threat

• Stereotype threat involves worrying about confirming negative stereotypes of one's groups, which can threaten students' integrity and academic performance.

Need to Belong

• Humans are inherently social, and seek to connect with others, be included, feel accepted, and contribute positively.
• When the need to belong is threatened, people often experience distress and dysfunction.

Altering Meaning

• Psychologists alter negative meanings, so the individual still feels adequate, competent, and valued

Meanings Operate Within Complex Systems

• There are several influences on how people interpret themselves and their circumstances.
• Improve outcomes only when the necessary systems are already in place to lead them to a good path when people's interpretations change

Interventions

• Interventions may only work for certain people in certain circumstances (psychological precision), even through they might be delivered universally.
• Interventions may work when they are aligned with various other contextual affordances.

Witherspoon Article

• High-performing women in pre-med courses experience gendered attrition, particularly in chemistry and physics, despite their good grades
• Lower competency beliefs in chemistry is a critical factor influencing women's decisions to leave pre-med tracks.
• Motivational factors, such as science identity and interest, are important for keeping women in STEM careers.
• Targeted motivational interventions are needed to support high-performing women in pre-med courses to reduce attrition and promote gender equity in STEM education.

Walton-Wise Interventions

• Use social-psychological strategies to improve individual outcomes, particularly in education.
• Address challenges faced by students from minority or disadvantaged groups through targeted strategies like self-affirmation and social belonging.
• Aims to mitigate the stereotype threat and its impact on performance, enabling individuals to perform better in high-pressure situations.
• Even brief interventions can lead to lasting changes in attitudes and behaviors, contributing to improvements in academic and social outcomes.

Recursive Processes

• Changes in people's interpretations can be self-sustaining and become embedded in their lives.
• Recursive cycles can shift from self-defeating to self-enhancing, propelling future gains forward.
• Wise interventions use strategies honed through basic research to provide constructive meanings in compelling and simple ways.

Direct Labeling

• Provision of a positive label that defines an otherwise ambiguous situation
• Prompting new meanings gives people a basis for new interpretation and encourages reconsideration of their worldview.
• Increasing commitment through action leverages the desire for consistency between behaviors and attitudes.

Active Reflection exercises

• Exercises help people reframe their experiences through writing, by reflecting in a different way on a challenging or positive event in their lives.

Ecological Belonging Intervention in STEM Courses

• Aims to combat gendered attrition, which disproportionately affects women in STEM/pre-med fields.
• Gendered attrition restricts career opportunities, slows economic growth, reduces viewpoint diversity, and limits breakthroughs or optimal care.

Main Components

• Collective norms that frame adversity as a common and temporary experience.
• Social ecology creates a supportive environment fostering belonging through interactions among students, teachers, and relationships. -Long-term effects where interventions based on this model can improve students' trajectories.

Developmental Period of Adolescence

• Adolescence begins with puberty and leads to the transition to an adult role in society
• Middle adolescence happens after puberty and before the transition to an adult role, typically grades 7-11.
• This period consists of tremendous growth, exploration, logical and moral reasoning, and heightened risk of of mental and behavioral disorders.

Adolescent Interventions

• The first hypothesis is that people desire status and respect, affecting one's place in a social hierarchy as well as the desire to have high social rank
• There is sensitivity to status and respect, and there is a need to align attention, motivation, and behavior with feelings of status and and respect
• Traditional Interventions become less effective during adolescence because they do not honor desires for status and respect, in what they say and how they say it

Hypothesis 3

• Improved interventions could honor the adolescent sensitivity to status and respect to capture their attention and motivation to create behavior change.
• Aligning interventions with adolescent needs creates environments where adolescents feel valued and heard
• Successful interventions frame healthy behaviors as desireable and programs that allow adolescents to make decisions to increase respect over their own actions.

Impacts of Abstinence Education(Trenholm)

• Abstinence-only programs do not impact onset of sexual activity among teens
• These programs may enhance knowledge of STDs, but do not significantly influence teens' sexual behaviors or reduce the risks of pregnancy and STDs

Week 5: Measurement

• Construct: what are we trying to measure? -Operational definition: description of a construct in terms of procedures, actions, or processes which it could be observed and measure
• • Operational definitions measure in a way that it it measurable
• Types of Measures: questionnaires, performance measures, administrative records
• • Self Report questionnaire: most common approaches to assessing personal qualities amount both researchers and practitioners(cheap, quick,reliable, and predictive of outcomes)
• • Objective Instruments: designed to elicit meaningful differences in a behavior of a specific kind(no subjective interpretation)
• • Administrative Data: we can measure a construct by passive instrumentation

Reliability and Validity

• Reliability: does an assessment tool produces stable and consistent results?
• • Validity: How well a test measures the construct it is supposed to measure?

Factors that Affect Questionnaire and Performance Methods

• Intrinsic factors influence instrument
• Extrinsic factors remain outside instrument itself
• • Threats to reliability and validity across measurement type
• Misinterpretation influences participant , lack of insight or info, ,reference bias: (implicit standards used when making judgments may differ across individuals, faking and social desirability bias,

Causality Experiment Conditions

• The cause and effect must be correlated. Example: smoking and lung cancer
• The cause must come before the effect. Example: smoking before lung cancer
• Control for all 3rd variable confounds.
• Ex: relationship between smoking and lung cancer are NOT EXPLAINED by genetic risk, family, factors, and cultural factors

Causality

• Correlation might just be a coincidence -Reverse causality is a possibility→ when the effect of something actually causes the thing itself
• Other factors may explain relationships.

Study Designs

• Pre-post design: comparing people's behaviour before and after intervention to the same people -Quasi-Experimental: Study design in which we compare attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors among people who participate in an intervention to those who do not participate -Randomized controlled experiment: study where people are divided into group randomly in order to have an equal chance of being in a treatment or control group

Caveats

• Quality of control condition: Inferencing treatment effectiveness must be made with the the appropriate comparison group
• Quality of measures: can influence inferences can about treatment effectiveness

Statistics

• P values: measure of the probability that on observed difference would occur by chance

• Lower P value: statistically significant(unlikely due to chance)

• Higher value: not statistically significant(not unlikely results are due to chance)