The promise of science-based training and application in psychological clinical science.

Baker, McFall, and Shoham (2008) analyzed and critiqued the state of training in clinical psychology, asserting that much of this training is not sufficiently influenced by science. They asserted that the emergent demands of health care, with its attendant costs and resource constraints, require that mental and behavioral health care become increasingly efficient, effective, and cost-effective. Baker et al.

Cognitive processes underlying women's risk judgments: associations with sexual victimization history and rape myth acceptance.

Objective: This study evaluated the effects of sexual victimization history, rape myth acceptance, implicit attention, and recent learning on the cognitive processes underlying undergraduate women's explicit risk judgments.

Method: Participants were 194 undergraduate women between 18 and 24 years of age. The sample was ethnically diverse and composed primarily of freshman, heterosexual, and single women.

The relationship between women's response effectiveness and a history of sexual victimization.

This study evaluated the effects of a sexual victimization history and the contextual features of sexual activity and alcohol use on the effectiveness of women's responses to 44 written vignettes describing diverse dating and social situations. One hundred and one undergraduate women reported their history of sexual victimization and provided written descriptions of how they would respond to each vignette. Experts in the sexual violence research area then evaluated the effectiveness of these responses in decreasing risk of having an unwanted sexual experience, meaning one in which the woman is verbally or physically coerced into having sexual contact of any kind with a man.

Current Status and Future Prospects of Clinical Psychology: Toward a Scientifically Principled Approach to Mental and Behavioral Health Care.

The escalating costs of health care and other recent trends have made health care decisions of great societal import, with decision-making responsibility often being transferred from practitioners to health economists, health plans, and insurers. Health care decision making increasingly is guided by evidence that a treatment is efficacious, effective-disseminable, cost-effective, and scientifically plausible. Under these conditions of heightened cost concerns and institutional-economic decision making, psychologists are losing the opportunity to play a leadership role in mental and behavioral health care: Other types of practitioners are providing an increasing proportion of delivered treatment, and the use of psychiatric medication has increased dramatically relative to the provision of psychological interventions.

Perceptual mechanisms that characterize gender differences in decoding women's sexual intent.

Men and women often disagree about the meaning of women's nonverbal cues, particularly those conveying dating-relevant information. Men perceive more sexual intent in women's behavior than women perceive or report intending to convey. Although this finding has been attributed to gender differences in the threshold for labeling ambiguous cues as sexual in nature, little research has been conducted to determine etiology.

Doctoral training in clinical psychology.

Competing models of doctoral training in clinical psychology are described and compared within their historical contexts. Trends in the field are examined critically with a focus on the impact of managed care on doctoral training and clinical practice. Implications for the future of doctoral training are considered, and a blueprint for the future of doctoral training in clinical psychology is presented.

Sexual coercion and the misperception of sexual intent.

Misperceiving a woman's platonic interest as sexual interest has been implicated in a sexual bargaining process that leads to sexual coercion. This paper provides a comprehensive review of sexual misperception, including gender differences in perception of women's sexual intent, the relationship between sexual coercion and misperception, and situational factors that increase the risk that sexual misperception will occur. Compared to women, men consistently perceive a greater degree of sexual intent in women's behavior.

Heterosocial perceptual organization: application of the choice model to sexual coercion.

Luce's (1959, 1963) choice model was used to characterize individual differences in men's perception of women's affect as friendly, sexually interested, sad, or rejecting. Women's clothing styles were associated with differences in the model's parameters. Sensitivity to sadness, rejection, and friendliness declined when women were dressed provocatively, whereas sensitivity to sexual interest increased.

Effects of emotional valence and arousal manipulation on eyeblink classical conditioning and autonomic measures.

Using a classical eyeblink conditioning paradigm, we have previously shown that the rate of acquisition of a conditioned response may be manipulated by engaging subjects in background tasks of varying complexity concurrent to conditioning. To further examine the influence of the background environment on conditioning, a picture set designed to elicit emotional responses, the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), was presented to subjects during classical eyeblink conditioning. The results suggest that eyeblink conditioning does appear to be sensitive to contextual manipulations of arousal.

Theory and utility--key themes in evidence-based assessment: comment on the special section.

This article focuses on two key themes in the four featured reviews on evidence-based assessment. The first theme is the essential role of theory in psychological assessment. An overview of this complex, multilayered role is presented.

Illusory correlation for body type and happiness: covariation bias and its relationship to eating disorder symptoms.

Objective: The current study investigates covariation bias (illusory correlation) in the perceived association between happiness and body type, as well as the association between covariation bias and eating disorder symptoms.

Method: Undergraduate women (n = 186) rated pictures of women on a variety of attributes, including happiness, degree of overweight, and attractiveness. Later, they were asked to judge the level of covariation between these attributes that was present in the stimuli that they had rated.

Modeling individual differences in perceptual and attentional processes related to bulimic symptoms.

Attentional and perceptual differences between women with high and low levels of bulimic symptoms were studied with techniques adapted from cognitive science. Stimuli were pictures of young women varying in body size and facial affect. A multidimensional scaling analysis showed that the high-symptom women were significantly more attentive to information about body size and significantly less attentive to information about affect.

Assessing clinically relevant perceptual organization with multidimensional scaling techniques.

Multidimensional scaling (MDS) techniques provide a promising measurement strategy for characterizing individual differences in cognitive processing, which many clinical theories associate with the development, maintenance, and treatment of psychopathology. The authors describe the use of deterministic and probabilistic MDS techniques for investigating numerous aspects of perceptual organization, such as dimensional attention, perceptual correlation, within-attribute organization, and perceptual variability. Additionally, they discuss how formal quantitative models can be used, in conjunction with MDS-derived representations of individual differences in perceptual organization, to test theories about the role of cognitive processing in clinically relevant phenomena.

Training for prescriptions vs. prescriptions for training: where are we now? Where should we be? How do we get there?

The proposal that state legislatures should grant prescription privileges to psychologists is examined critically, with particular attention to the proposal's implications for the future education and training of clinical psychologists. First, the current status of clinical psychology is described. Then, an alternative to the prescription privilege proposal is presented; this alternative prescribes a scientific approach to clinical psychology.