Coercion in Intimate Partner Violence: Toward a New Conceptualization

For decades, battered women’s advocates have placed coercive control squarely at the center of their analysis of intimate partner violence. Yet, little work has been done to conceptualize and measure the key construct of coercive control. In this article, we apply French and Raven’s social power model to a conceptualization of coercive control in intimate partner violence relationships. Central elements of the model include: social ecology; setting the stage; coercion involving a demand and a credible threat for noncompliance; surveillance; delivery of threatened consequences; and the victim’s behavioral and emotional response to coercion. These elements occur in spiraling and overlapping sequences to establish an overall situation of coercive control. The implications of this model for theory and practice are discussed.     

The Effects of Values on Worries Associated With Acute Disaster: A Naturally Occurring Quasi‐Experiment1

On April 12, 1995, a bomb exploded in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, destroying a federal office building, killing 168 people, and upending American notions of safety and security in the heartland. Using data collected before, immediately after, and 1 year after the bombing from 3 samples living within 25 miles of the explosion in a naturally occurring quasi‐experiment, research examined effects of values on people's worries in the context of a macrolevel traumatic event. High self‐transcendence and conservation values correlated with higher macro‐worries immediately after vs. before the explosion, but these worries were lower 1 year later. Findings indicate that values emphasizing broader social perspectives were associated with higher macrolevel worries, while values emphasizing one's own life and welfare were not.     

Children and Psychotropic Medication: What Role Should Advocacy Counseling Play?

There are currently millions of children with mental and emotional symptoms who are being treated with psychotropic medication. The authors critique such treatment and suggest that advocacy counseling is a responsible approach to balance the power of both the pharmaceutical companies and the medical model in the mental health arena.     

Self‐esteem,perception of relationships,and emotional distress: A cross‐cultural study

This study examined the relative importance of self‐esteem, family cohesion, and support from friends in predicting depressed mood and anxiety in Japanese and American college students. Contrary to expectations, self‐esteem was the strongest predictor of emotional distress in both groups of students. Nevertheless, consistent with predictions derived from Markus and Kitayama's theory of self‐construals, family cohesion accounted for a significantly larger percentage of the variance in predicting emotional distress in Japan than in the United States. In both countries, the relations between support from friends and the measures of emotional distress were entirely mediated by self‐esteem. However, among Japanese students, family cohesion accounted for additional significant variance in predicting the measures of emotional distress, even after controlling for self‐esteem.     

Bogus concerns about the false prototype enhancement effect

Two experiments addressed the mechanism responsible for the false prototype effect, the phenomenon in which a prototype gradient can be obtained in the absence of learning. Previous demonstrations of this effect have occurred solely in a single-category paradigm in which transfer patterns are assigned or not to the learning category. We tested the hypothesis that any extraneous variable potentially responsible for this effect, such as compactness varying with pattern distortion (Zaki & Nosofsky, 2004), may be functional in the single-category paradigm but not when multiple categories are available at the time of transfer. In the present study, subjects received a bogus or a real category learning phase, followed by a transfer test that required assignment into 1 or 3 prototype categories. The results showed that a minimal prototype gradient was obtained in the bogus conditions, with performance approaching chance levels when classification into 3 categories was required. In contrast, a substantial prototype gradient effect was found following learning. We conclude that the prototype gradient typically obtained following multiple-category learning is primarily driven by real learning and that the false prototype effect is itself an artifact of the single-category paradigm.     

Sleep hygiene behaviours: an application of the theory of planned behaviour and the investigation of perceived autonomy support, past behaviour and response inhibition

This study investigated the sleep hygiene behaviour of university students within the framework of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB [Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50, 179-211.]), and examined the predictive validity of additional variables including perceived autonomy support, past behaviour and response inhibition. A total of 257 undergraduate students from an Australian university were administered two online questionnaires at two time points. At time 1, participants completed the TPB questionnaire and the Go/NoGo task as a measure of response inhibition. A week later at time 2, participants completed a questionnaire measuring the performance of sleep hygiene behaviours. Multiple and hierarchical regression analyses showed that the TPB model significantly predicted intention and behaviour. Although intention and perceived behavioural control were statistically significant in predicting behaviour, past behaviour and response inhibition accounted for more variance when added to the TPB model. Subjective norm was found to be the strongest predictor of intention implying the importance of normative influences in sleep hygiene behaviours. Response inhibition was the strongest predictor of behaviour, reinforcing the argument that the performance of health protective behaviours requires self-regulatory ability. Therefore, interventions should be targeted at enhancing self-regulatory capacity.     

The development of metasuggestibility in children

One component of metasuggestibility is the understanding that a person's statements can influence another person's reports. The purpose of the present study was to examine the development of this understanding in school‐aged children. We produced a short video in which a boy makes a false allegation about being hit following an adult's suggestive interview. Children aged 6–13 years (N = 196) watched the video and answered open‐ended and forced‐choice questions about why the boy made a false allegation. The 6‐ and 7‐year‐olds performed poorly on all question types, whereas the 12‐ and 13‐year‐olds were at ceiling. There were developmental increases in metasuggestibility between 8 and 11 years. Our findings indicate that metasuggestibility undergoes prolonged development well into the school years. Implications for child witness training programs are discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Unaltered ethical standards for individual physicians in the face of drastically reduced resources resulting from an improvised nuclear device event

When disaster disrupts healthcare and other systems, the ethical allocation of resources should follow principles of justice, defined as fairness, established for normal clinical practice. Standards of clinical practice may be altered during disaster, but ethical standards must remain centered on prioritizing the treatment of patients according to need and the effectiveness of treatment. Should resources become extremely limited, it is fair to restrict their use to patients who have the highest needs, provided that the intervention is effective. When resources become more available, patients with lower priority can be increasingly accommodated.