Is Veteran Status and Suicide Risk Assessed in Community Long‐Term Care? A Review of the States' Assessment Instruments

Given recent policy initiatives to address suicide risk among older persons and veterans, community‐based elder serving agencies may serve an important role in identifying and referring individuals at risk for suicide. A review of state‐level long‐term assessment instruments was conducted to determine whether veteran status and suicide are assessed. Data from forty‐three state's Units on Aging instruments were content analyzed. Results indicate that over two thirds of the states in this review included questions about suicide and veterans in their assessments, 69.8% and 67.4% respectively. Suicide risk among elders and veterans must be addressed at local, state, and federal levels so that concerted attention and oversight can be provided for matching elders to the services they need.     

Perceptual units in the acquisition of visual categories

A series of experiments provided evidence that the representational structure of categories comprising dot patterns is based on pattern parts and pattern configuration rather than on pattern elements. We found that similarity judgments and postacquisition classification data could not be explained in terms of element-level perceptual units, even for categories of dot patterns with seven of their eight dots in the exact same relative location. The importance of higher order perceptual units was indicated by evidence that the long-term retention of information specific to previously learned category exemplars, which is typical of natural objects, can also be obtained for artificial dot patterns, providing their structure reflects the perceptual characteristics identified in Tversky and Hemenway's (1984) study of natural objects: Members of the same category had to be perceptually distinctive at the level of pattern configuration and perceptually similar at the level of pattern parts. The level of within-category similarity for a set of categories (relative to between-categories similarity) did not predict whether item-specific information would be retained; long-term retention appears to require both within-category similarity and dissimilarity, but at different levels of perceptual structure.     

Contemporary transgender health experience and health situation in prisons: A scoping review of extant published literature (2000–2019)

Abstract

Background: Many jurisdictions globally have no specific prison policy to guide prison management and prison staff in relation to the special needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) prisoners despite the United Nations for the Treatment of Prisoners Standard Minimum Rules and the updated 2017 Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. Within LGBT prison groups, transgender people represent a key special population with distinct needs and rights, with incarceration rates greater than that of the general population, and who experience unique vulnerabilities in prisons.

Aims/Method: A scoping review was conducted of extant information on the transgender prison situation, their unique health needs and outcomes in contemporary prison settings. Fifty-nine publications were charted and thematically analyzed.

Results: Five key themes emerged: Transgender definition and terminology used in prison publications; Prison housing and classification systems; Conduct of correctional staff toward incarcerated transgender people; Gender affirmation, health experiences and situational health risks of incarcerated transgender people; and Transgender access to gender-related healthcare in prison.

Conclusions: The review highlights the need for practical prison based measures in the form of increased advocacy, awareness raising, desensitization of high level prison management, prison staff and prison healthcare providers, and clinical and cultural competence institutional training on transgender patient care. The review underscores the need to uphold the existing international mandates to take measures to protect incarcerated transgender people from violence and stigmatization without restricting rights, and provide adequate gender sensitive and gender affirming healthcare, including hormone therapy and gender reassignment.     

THE FEMALE ROLE AND MENSTRUAL DISTRESS

Numerous studies of either sex role behavior (masculinity/femininity) or women's role attitudes (contemporary/traditional) as related to menstrual distress have amassed inconsistent and contradictory results. It was proposed that these two role variables may hold an interactive relationship with menstrual distress, and their study in isolation may have provoked less reliable results. An interaction was found with masculine women preferring a contemporary role and feminine women committed to traditional role values reporting greater menstrual and premenstrual distress. Feminine Contemporary and masculine traditional women revealed less distress ássociated with the menstrual cycle.     

Being nice by choice: The effect of counterfactual reasoning on children's social evaluations

The ability to engage in counterfactual thinking (reason about what else could have happened) is critical to learning, agency, and social evaluation. However, not much is known about how individual differences in counterfactual reasoning may play a role in children's social evaluations. In the current study, we investigate how prompting children to engage in counterfactual thinking about positive moral actions impacts children's social evaluations. Eighty-seven 4-8-year-olds were introduced to a character who engaged in a positive moral action (shared a sticker with a friend) and asked about what else the character could have done with the sticker (counterfactual simulation). Children were asked to generate either a high number of counterfactuals (five alternative actions) or a low number of counterfactuals (one alternative action). Children were then asked a series of social evaluation questions contrasting that character with one who did not have a choice and had no alternatives (was told to give away the sticker to his friend). Results show that children who generated selfish counterfactuals were more likely to positively evaluate the character with choice than children who did not generate selfish counterfactuals, suggesting that generating counterfactuals most distant from the chosen action (prosociality) leads children to view prosocial actions more positively. We also found age-related changes: as children got older, regardless of the type of counterfactuals generated, they were more likely to evaluate the character with choice more positively. These results highlight the importance of counterfactual reasoning in the development of moral evaluations.

Research Highlights

• Older children were more likely to endorse agents who choose to share over those who do not have a choice.
• Children who were prompted to generate more counterfactuals were more likely to allocate resources to characters with choice.
• Children who generated selfish counterfactuals more positively evaluated agents with choice.
• Comparable to theories suggesting children punish willful transgressors more than accidental transgressors, we propose children also consider free will when making positive moral evaluations.