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Background: Incorporating professional development into undergraduate psychology coursework is an ongoing area of improvement for educators. Objective: We present a novel activity encouraging students to explore various professional skills and roles for which their psychology major prepares them through application to real-world issues. Method: Students participated in one of two virtual mental health summits and formed working groups to present from different perspectives (e.g., public health, epidemiology, etc.). Students collectively voted on resolutions at the end of each summit (e.g., budgetary recommendations for a county health department). Results: We examined student perceptions of confidence in their professional skills and content knowledge before and after summits. Students indicated that they wanted more applied assignments like the mental health summit in other psychology classes and preferred the activity to exams or papers in a virtual course. Teaching Implications: The mental health summit represented a real-world application activity that students indicated wanting in their courses. Recommendations for how to adapt the presented activity for non-clinical psychology courses are discussed. Conclusion: The mental health summit activity supported the real-world application that students desire. Future iterations of the activity can build on the model we describe to support greater skill improvement.

Background: Incorporating professional development into undergraduate psychology coursework is an ongoing area of improvement for educators. Objective: We present a novel activity encouraging students to explore various professional skills and roles for which their psychology major prepares them through application to real-world issues. Method: Students participated in one of two virtual mental health summits and formed working groups to present from different perspectives (e.g., public health, epidemiology, etc.). Students collectively voted on resolutions at the end of each summit (e.g., budgetary recommendations for a county health department). Results: We examined student perceptions of confidence in their professional skills and content knowledge before and after summits. Students indicated that they wanted more applied assignments like the mental health summit in other psychology classes and preferred the activity to exams or papers in a virtual course. Teaching Implications: The mental health summit represented a real-world application activity that students indicated wanting in their courses. Recommendations for how to adapt the presented activity for non-clinical psychology courses are discussed. Conclusion: The mental health summit activity supported the real-world application that students desire. Future iterations of the activity can build on the model we describe to support greater skill improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early pubertal maturation is associated with earlier contact with the juvenile justice system. In two studies (Total N = 782), we examined whether youth presumed to have committed a crime and who appear physically older than their chronological age were held to different standards of legal responsibility while accounting for race and sex. Participants read a vignette detailing situations in which a crime was committed and decided whether to call the police (Study 1) or make sentencing recommendations (Study 2). Participants were more likely to call the police on youth who appeared more physically developed and on boys. Less visibly mature youth and girls were assigned behavioral explanations that deemphasized agency. White youth were sentenced to more hours of community service than Black youth. We discuss potential implications of these findings in real‐world contexts such as police decision‐making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering one's legacy is usual in later life but may be accentuated after receiving a serious and terminal cancer diagnosis. This may be particularly true when timing of the diagnosis is nonnormatively early, evoking the sense of losing future years of life. Acknowledging the severity of one's illness may also promote focus on legacy. We investigated the extent to which older individuals diagnosed with cancer narrated communion (i.e., loving, caring themes) when telling their legacy, including narration of aftermath concerns (i.e., concern for how others will fare after one's death). Communion was assessed in relation to individuals' potential years of life to lose and illness acknowledgment. Participants were a national sample of adults ( N = 203; M = 65.80 years; 66% women; 77.94% White; 48.53% college-educated) with serious and terminal cancer receiving outpatient palliative care. They narrated legacies in semistructured interviews and completed measures of illness acknowledgment. We developed a novel construct, potential years of life to lose, calculated as the difference between chronological age and national life expectancy at birth. Coders, trained to high reliability, content-analyzed legacy narratives for communion with follow-up coding for aftermath concerns. Hierarchical regression indicated that for those with more potential years of life to lose, acknowledging the severity of their illness was critical to narrating communion-rich legacies. Similarly, aftermath concerns were common in those with the most years of life to lose who were able to acknowledge the severity of their illness. Findings affirm the psychological richness of individuals' legacies in the second half of life and highlight one way they adaptively respond to the nonnormative timing of serious and terminal cancer. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: During Dignity Therapy a trained provider guides a patient to share their life story and legacy. Providers can demonstrate empathy through empathic self-disclosure (ESD), sharing something substantial and personal about themselves in response to the patient. The current study aims to identify the topics of ESDs and determine whether ESD frequency varied by patient and/or provider characteristics., Methods: Two coders analyzed 203 audio-recorded, transcribed Dignity Therapy sessions of palliative care patients ( M  = 65.78 years; SD  = 7.43 years, 65.69% women) for ESD. Topic modeling characterized themes of ESD and multilevel modeling examined ESD frequency based on several patient and provider characteristics., Results: ESD occurred in 37% of interviews ( M  = 0.59, SD  = 1.21). Topic modeling revealed five main themes: family, memory, school, geographical experiences, and values/beliefs. Multilevel modeling indicated patient-level differences, including greater rates of ESD when patients were men and older., Conclusion: ESD seems to be dependent on the context of the patient rather than individual communication style differences. Providers may use ESD in multiple instances, including when similar and different from patients., Innovation: This study introduces and defines the novel concept of ESD. It is among the first to examine patient-provider communication during Dignity Therapy, and the first to specifically examine self-disclosure., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.)