According to Stamm (2010), variables in counselors’ work environment, personal environment, and client environment precipitate the development of compassion fatigue. Compassion fatigue, which comprises secondary traumatic stress and burnout, is an occupational hazard for counselors, and new counselors are especially vulnerable. A supervisory style that exhibits servant leadership traits may provide necessary support and counteract compassion fatigue symptoms for counseling residents. Servant leadership shares many philosophical assumptions of the counseling profession and addresses the administrative challenges many clinical supervisors face today (Evans, Wright, Murphy, & Maki, 2016). A sample of 241 counseling residents participated in the study and completed several instruments. Data were analyzed with two structural equation models to identify the impact of the perceived servant leadership traits of supervisors on counseling residents’ compassion fatigue, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress with other relevant predictors. Limitations, avenues for future research, and implications for counselor education and supervision are discussed.

The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study was to explore the experiences of Imams in their mosques during their personalized interactions with the congregants they serve. A review of the literature was conducted, and the theoretical framework of the study was social constructivism. Eight Imams were identified as meeting the criteria for the study. Data collection consisted of a demographic questionnaire, a semi-structured interview, and artifact collection. A hermeneutic phenomenological method was used to analyze the data which resulted in five themes around Imam’s experience with their congregants. Additional findings are also discussed, along with implications, limitations, and future research.

In use for centuries across nations, meditation is still one of the widely used interventions to promote holistic health. Despite its large research base, many forms of meditation in use still have yet to be subject to empirical research. Centering prayer has been an established contemplative practice since the third century and has recently gained popularity at the turn of the last century. Individuals practiced centering to find stillness and, through the stillness, their inner strength. Due to its lack of empirical evidence, centering practice has primarily remained in religious or contemplative circles outside instead of counseling treatment. Furthermore, it is almost entirely out of the young adult population's knowledge, a generation that has increasingly identified with spirituality over the years. Due to this potential match with the population and other stated needs of the college counseling field for complementary and alternative forms of treatment, the present study aims to test the effectiveness of a centering prayer meditation on resilience in the college population. Further, it seeks to examine the temporal dynamics of resilience during this intervention over four weeks. To address this goal, I conducted a longitudinal randomized controlled trial where university students (n = 150) joined at random a treatment group or a control group. Each group took assessments measuring their resilience, hope, mindfulness, spiritual transcendence, and stress at three points in time with equal intervals of two weeks (T1, T2, and T3). Also, they took a brief assessment of hope every morning and every evening for the duration of the study. At the onset of the study, participants in the treatment group received a brief online introductory training to centering meditation. Afterward, the study procedure requested them to practice centering for 10 minutes every morning and every evening for the study duration. After meditation, they completed their brief assessments of hope, while the control group completed them at the same time without the meditation. This study used two research methods from temporal dynamics, including growth curve modeling and time series analysis. The growth curve model indicated a statistically significant difference in resilience over four weeks between the treatment and control group (p < .05). The 4-week treatment had approximately a moderate within-group effect on the treatment group (d = .48). A subsequent growth curve model indicated that hope was a significant explanatory variable (p < .05) and within-subject mediator (p < .01) of resilience over time. Based on the hypothesis of this effect of hope on resilience, the study included a time series analysis analyzing the bi-daily levels of hope between the treatment group and control group. Using an ARIMA modeling procedure, the analysis detected that the treatment group had an ARIMA (1, 1, 0) model, indicating a statistically significant increasing trend in hope and autocorrelation to aid in forecasting, p < .000. The model accounted for 56% of the variance in hope while controlling for the trend in the data (stationary R2 = .56). As expected, the control group did not have an increasing trend in hope, but it showed a forecastable model through its AR(1) and MA (1), p <.000. Lastly, the study explored how other psychosocial properties of resilience such as mindfulness, stress, and spiritual transcendence could affect the trajectory of resilience over time. A growth curve model indicated that each variable had a statistically significant fixed effect on resilience over time, p < .05. Time served as a statistically significant random effect in the models of stress and spiritual transcendence, p < .000. Discussion of limitations and implications for counseling practice and research will follow.

Implicit biases are known to have potentially damaging effects in counselors’ professional work. Although it is widely accepted that all people have these personal and unconscious biases, it has been difficult for researchers to identify strategies for consistently eradicating them on an individual level. To engage in multiculturally competent practice, counselors are directed to make every effort to eliminate latent biases. In order to understand how clinicians go about doing this, Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis was employed to explore the nature of counselors’ experiences navigating and addressing their implicit biases. The findings of this study revealed a need for more training in counselor education programs targeted at equipping students to work through the complex psychological challenges that come with addressing personal biases. Unfortunately, participants of this study indicated that they often feel unprepared to manage their implicit biases as they entered the workforce. Racial identity, empathy, obstacles, and a personal orientation towards addressing biases were discussed in relation to individual experiences navigating implicit bias. The findings of this study imply that practitioners’ retention of implicit biases impose added risk for already marginalized groups and that cognitive and racial identity developmental frameworks might offer some insight in identifying effective practices for reducing implicit biases. Implications for counselors, supervisors, and counselor educators are provided along with limitations of the study and directions for future research.

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Virtual humans serve as role-players in social skills training environments simulating situational face-to-face conversations. Previous research indicates that virtual humans in instructional roles can increase a learner's engagement and motivation towards the training. Left unaddressed is if the learner is looking at the virtual human as one would in a human-to-human, face-to-face interaction. Using a modified version of the Emergent Leader Immersive Training Environment (ELITE-Lite), this study tracks visual attention and other behavior of 120 counselor trainees counseling a virtual human role-playing counselee. Specific study elements include: (1) the counselor's level of visual attention toward the virtual counselee; (2) how changes to the counselor's viewpoint may influence the counselor's visual focus; and (3) how levels of the virtual human's behavior may influence the counselor's visual focus. Secondary considerations include aspects of learner performance, acceptance of the virtual human, and impacts of age and rank. Result highlights indicate that counselor visual attentional behavior could be separated into two phases: when the virtual human was speaking and when not speaking. When the virtual human is speaking, the counselor's primary visual attention is on the counselee, but is also split toward pre-scripted responses required for the training session. During the non-speaking phase, the counselor's visual focus was on pre-scripted responses required for training. Some of the other findings included that participants did not consider this to be like a conversation with a human, but they indicated acceptance of the virtual human as a partner with the training environment and they considered the simulation to be a useful experience. Additionally, the research indicates behavior may differ due to age or rank. Future study and design considerations for enhancements to social skills training environments are provided.

Although developing a personal identity is a lifelong process, it has long been considered the critical developmental task faced by adolescents transitioning to adulthood. Previous studies have researched the factors contributing to identity formation and the correlates of identity; researchers have found that individuals whose identities are based in intensive exploration of values, beliefs and goals, followed by a strong commitment to said values, beliefs and goals, are more likely to have positive mental health and psychological well-being. The environment in which emerging adults face the developmental task of identity is often college or university. College students are generally separating from their families for the first time, and are faced with many decisions that will influence the development identity. Although college offers an opportunity for exploration, there are students that may not actively engage in the exploration process, potentially due to a lack of interest or ability. College student-athletes are a subset of college students that may be at a disadvantage when it comes to the exploration process. Due to their stringent schedules and focused commitment to one specific activity, college student-athletes may be developing identities that are limited in their scope while their non-athlete peers have the opportunity to explore their environments in greater depth and breadth. If this is the case, student-athletes may be at higher risk of poor mental health or psychological well-being. A factor that has not been considered in the literature is the impact that fitness behaviors have on the relationship between identity and mental health. The relationship between exercise and positive mental health has been widely researched and supported, and student-athletes regularly exercise as a part of their training. As such, the research would indicate that student-athletes are at risk of negative mental health correlates as a result of identities based on premature commitments or a lack of exploration, but would also likely benefit from the positive mental health correlates that exercising regularly would indicate. This exploratory study aimed to provide clarity to these conflicting correlates of identity and mental health, and answer three research questions about the relationship between college student identity, mental health and fitness behaviors. Data was collected from a sample of 347 college students who completed a web-based survey during the spring semester of 2016. The research questions for this study focused on the relationship between identity and mental health, and whether or not fitness behaviors moderate that relationship. Additionally, this study sought to identify any differences between student-athletes and non-student-athletes in terms of their patterns of identity and mental health. Finally, the study explored how identification with the athletic role among student-athletes impacts identity and mental health. There was no evidence found to support fitness as a moderator of identity and mental health. There were, however, trends in the results indicating that anxiety and depression do decrease for certain identity groups (i.e. Achievement, Carefree Diffusion, Undifferentiated) when individuals in that group engage in regular exercise. These findings support the need for future research on college student identity, as well as college student-athletes as a unique subset of the larger population of college students. The current research on college student identity and on student-athletes is limited in its scope, both in terms of how identity influences mental health and other factors that might contribute. This study contributes to the current literature by suggesting that fitness behaviors may moderate the relationship between identity and mental health. This would have implications for how the correlates of identity are understood and also imply that college student-athletes may be at higher risk for negative mental health consequences following their retirement from sport. For college students and college student-athletes that may be less susceptible to interventions targeting their exploration of, and commitment to, identity, interventions focusing on exercise may decrease the negative mental health correlates that have been shown to relate to identity statuses low in exploration and commitment. In summary, although there was no statistically significant evidence found to support the research questions examining identity, mental health and fitness behaviors, there were visible trends in the data. This may indicate that with a larger sample statistically significant results might be achieved. Future research that includes larger samples of college students from public and private universities and evaluates students from various areas of the United States may provide greater insight into how these variables are related. Additionally, future research that expands on the variables mental health and fitness behaviors may lead to greater understanding of how fitness may moderate the relationship between identity and mental health.

This study examined the Mindfulness Meditation for Sport 2.0 protocol (MMTS 2.0) (Baltzell & Summers, 2018), a six-week integrated mindfulness and self-compassion training, with a Division III women’s basketball team and coaching staff. The study design replicated a mixed method approach used in previous MMTS 2.0 studies, using an identical battery of eight validated quantitative instruments (with the student athletes only), as well as a qualitative interview guide (slightly modified for this study for sport-specificity). Both student athletes and coaches were interviewed post-training in order to explore their self-reported perceptions of the impact and the benefits and challenges of the MMTS 2.0 training. The MMTS 2.0 protocol was delivered by the researcher to fifteen total participants (n=15), ten student athletes and five coaches, over six weekly one-hour sessions. In addition to the weekly group sessions, as part of the MMTS 2.0 training, home practice was encouraged using audio-recorded meditations. The primary objective of the MMTS 2.0 training was to increase the student athletes’ and coaches’ poise as defined by ability to cope with the experience of negative thoughts and emotions that may be present due to the pressures of competition and training. In addition, the objectives of increased focus and psychological flexibility were investigated. The researcher hypothesized that the MMTS 2.0 intervention would show increases in measures of mindfulness and self-compassion, and other indices of sport-related performance variables (e.g., flow, grit, psychological inflexibility, etc.), as well as participant well-being. Reductions in sport-related anxiety and psychological inflexibility were hypothesized. The quantitative findings revealed no statistically significant results regarding the eight quantitative measures as well as no demonstrated moderate effect sizes. The qualitative results indicated strong support for the training. Both groups, student athletes and coaches, described a range of perceived impacts, aligning with the training’s core objectives of increased poise, focus and psychological flexibility. The emerging themes in the interview data revealed evidence for overall enhancements in awareness, focus, stress management, and strong support for enhanced team climate. The discussion synthesizes the findings and offers suggestions for future implementation and coach involvement.

The purpose of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of how community-based organizations are supporting the positive development of court-involved youth. More specifically, this study examined how organizations support youth’s access to work-based learning opportunities. This study also investigated how organizations determine the kinds of activities to implement in their comprehensive transition programs. Additionally, this study sought to understand whether and in what ways these programs are incorporating positive youth development (PYD) principles. Purposive sampling identified five organizations that are implementing work-based learning programs for court-involved youth. These organizations were located in the Midwest, South, East and Western regions of the United States. The research considered multiple sources of data, including documentation review, semi-structured interviews, field notes and survey interviews. Documents collected included administrative reports, brochures, evaluation reports, annual reports, samples of recruitment materials, youth needs assessment, and partnership agreements with businesses. The semi-structured, open-ended interview was conducted with an executive director of each organization using an interview protocol that was guided by positive youth development and well-being frameworks. Survey interviews were conducted with other stakeholders of the organizations using a structured qualitative questionnaire. The data were analyzed using cross-case analysis. Each organization’s documentation, survey data and interviews were studied as a separate case to identify similarities, differences and unique patterns within the data. Then, a logic model was generated for each organization. Next, the separate logic models were compared using cross-case analysis. Lastly, based on the knowledge that emerged from the analyses, a proposed theory of change was created illustrating potential ways to incorporate positive youth development to guide future program design efforts. The major findings of the study were: (1) partnerships with various organizations explain the extent to which court-involved youth gain access to WBL activities; (2) the development of a theory of change, framework or assumptions based in evidenced based research impacts the integration of PYD principles in program activities; and (3) implementation of PYD principles varies across organizations.