Creating a public psychology through a scientist-practitioner-advocate training model.

Persistent racist violence, health and economic disparities, and a divisive sociopolitical climate in the United States obviate the urgent need to address pressing social issues. Psychologists are well-positioned to provide scientific and clinical expertise toward viable solutions, and can best do so through a public, outward-facing psychology that is socially engaged and advocacy-driven. We assert that discipline-wide adoption of a Scientist-Practitioner-Advocate (SPA) training model can help bridge divides between scientific or basic psychology and practice-oriented or applied psychology by demonstrating how all psychologists can and do bring their work to bear to benefit society.

Introduction to the Special Section on Group Psychotherapy and Gender Identity.

This introduction to the special section of this issue of the provides context for the articles that follow. I discuss how recent events (both within and outside of the American Group Psychotherapy Association) highlight the need for an ongoing discussion about how group psychotherapists have a duty to provide ethical and affirming care of transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) individuals. I then provide a brief overview of some foundational terms and constructs related to gender identity and briefly review the existing literature before previewing the two articles in the special section that focus on ethical issues in group psychotherapy with TGNC individuals (Darby, this issue, 2020) and in providing affirming group psychotherapy (Chen et al.

Is Essentialism Essential? Reducing Homonegative Prejudice by Targeting Diverse Sexual Orientation Beliefs.

We conducted an experiment to assess whether targeting multiple beliefs about sexual orientation (SO) may be more effective in reducing homonegativity than focusing only on beliefs about its biogenetic origins. Participants (116 women, 85 men) were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions or a control condition. Those in the treatment conditions read essays summarizing: (1) research suggesting SO has biogenetic origins, (2) research suggesting SO is socially constructed and refuting beliefs about the discreteness, homogeneity, and informativeness of SO categories; or (3) research suggesting SO is biogenetic and research suggesting SO categories are socially constructed and not necessarily discrete, homogenous, or informative.

Conscience clauses and sexual and gender minority mental health care: A case study.

Tennessee is one of the first states in the United States to have a law that enables counselors and therapists in independent practice to deny services to any client based on the practitioner's "sincerely held principles." This so-called "conscience clause" represents a critical moment in professional psychology, in which mental health care providers are on the frontlines of cultural and legal debates about religious freedom. Though the law's language is ambiguous, it was widely perceived to target sexual and gender minority (SGM) individuals.

Establishing a Secure Base to Increase Exploration of Diversity in Groups.

All groups can be considered multicultural, and group members often present with issues that stem from contextual factors related to cultural identities, including experiences with oppression. Therefore, group leaders must be able to effectively facilitate deep intercultural dialogues in psychotherapy groups, and we suggest that an understanding of attachment theory can help leaders engage group members in these dialogues. In order to demonstrate how attachment theory can be applied to the exploration of diversity in groups, we provide a case example from an intergroup dialogue group bringing together religious minorities, secular individuals, and Christians over the course of eight weeks.

Beyond "born this way?" reconsidering sexual orientation beliefs and attitudes.

Previous research on heterosexuals' beliefs about sexual orientation (SO) has been limited in that it has generally examined heterosexuals' beliefs from an essentialist perspective. The recently developed Sexual Orientation Beliefs Scale (SOBS; Arseneau, Grzanka, Miles, & Fassinger, 2013) assesses multifarious "lay beliefs" about SO from essentialist, social constructionist, and constructivist perspectives. This study used the SOBS to explore latent group-based patterns in endorsement of these beliefs in 2 samples of undergraduate students: a mixed-gender sample (n = 379) and an all-women sample (n = 266).

Developing a comprehensive scale to assess college multicultural programming.

A barrier to assessing effectiveness of multicultural programming is lack of a relatively brief instrument to measure the wide range of intended outcomes. A frequent goal of programming is to increase cultural empathy, but this is rarely the only intended outcome. We conducted focus groups of campus administrators, student affairs staff, and undergraduate instructors who identified a full range of racial/ethnic multicultural competencies that undergraduates should possess.

To be or not to be immediate with clients: the use and perceived effects of immediacy in psychodynamic/interpersonal psychotherapy.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the use and perceived effects of immediacy in 16 cases of open-ended psychodynamic psychotherapy. Of 234 immediacy events, most were initiated by therapists and involved exploration of unexpressed or covert feelings. Immediacy occurred during approximately 5% of time in therapy.

Development and initial validation of The Sexual Orientation Beliefs Scale (SOBS).

The purpose of these studies was to develop and validate a measure of beliefs about sexual orientation (SO) that incorporates essentialist, social constructionist, and constructivist themes. The Sexual Orientation Beliefs Scale (SOBS) is offered as a multidimensional instrument with which to assess a broad range of beliefs about SO, which evidence suggests are highly correlated with positive and negative attitudes about sexual minorities. An initial exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted in the general population with a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender-identified (LGBT) sample (n = 323) and suggested a 4-factor structure of naturalness (α = .

Pay now or pay later: aging and the role of boundary salience in self-regulation of conceptual integration in sentence processing.

Previous research has suggested that older readers may self-regulate input during reading differently from the way younger readers do, so as to accommodate age-graded change in processing capacity. For example, older adults may pause more frequently for conceptual integration. Presumably, such an allocation policy would enable older readers to manage the cognitive demands of constructing a semantic representation of the text by off-loading the products of intermediate computations to long-term memory, thus decreasing memory demands as conceptual load increases.

Adult age differences in the effects of goals on self-regulated sentence processing.

The authors examined age differences in adults' allocation of effort when reading text for either high levels of recall accuracy or high levels of efficiency. Participants read a series of sentences, making judgments of learning before recall. Older adults showed less sensitivity than the young to the accuracy goal in both reading time allocation and memory performance.

Adult age differences in self-regulated learning from reading sentences.

We examined age differences in the heuristic used to allocate effort in learning information from sentences. Younger and older adults read and reread sentences varying in propositional density for recall, making judgments of learning before producing recall. The allocation of effort in rereading items that were less well learned on the first reading was optimized for sentences of intermediate complexity, especially for older adults.