Commentary: Moral growth in medical students

Knight has shown how the moral growth of medical students involves a spiritual journey. He may, however, present too sanguine a portrayal of the extent to which the medical education environment promotes this moral and spiritual growth. Medical school may indeed be more abusive than supportive. Admitting more women to medical school and teaching more humanities courses, while worthwhile, will not necessarily promote the goals that Knight appropriately advocates.     

Antihypertensive treatment,compliance, and quality of life: Review of a little-understood relation

If patients notoriously violate treatment regimens known to effectively control hypertension, then there must be some subjective costs associated with adherence to these regimens. Generally speaking, there must be some reduction in quality of life associated with antihypertensive medication. Unfortunately the concept of quality of life, due to its lack of specificity, is of little help in further investigating the nature of these subjective costs. We developed a simple neuropsychophysiological model based on fundamental psychological and physiological processes: corticoinhibitory effects of phasic blood pressure elevation reduce the aversive or painful qualities of many stressors. This negative reinforcement increases the rate of the reinforced physiological behavior, i.e., phasic analgesic blood pressure increases. Such negatively reinforced operant behavior is known to be extremely resistant to extinction. Counter actions such as taking antihypertensive medication not only lead to reduced quality of life due to their cancellation of the analgesic effect of conditioned blood pressure increase, but also lead to some form of reluctance to comply with treatment. The model not only provides an innovative etiological path to the emergence of neurogenic essential hypertension, but also yields a highly specific and lean concept of quality of life. Furthermore, it supplies the health care community with a concise explanation for the well-known low compliance of patients with their antihypertensive regimens. In addition to its parsimony, the model fits well with various experimental findings and has been operationalized and tested empirically. Specific therapeutic implications can be derived.     

Predicting interpersonal competence in young adulthood: The roles of family,self, and peer systems during adolescence

The present investigation examines the impact of family, self, and peer systems, evaluated during early adolescence, on the development of interpersonal competence in young adulthood. The participants were 110 Caucasian individuals, their mothers, and one of their teachers. At the first assessment, the participants ranged in age from 11.5 to 15.1 years old. Approximately six years later, the participants completed a second evaluation involving assessment of interpersonal competence. Increased interparental conflict and parental divorce predicted decreased self-esteem. Decreased self-esteem predicted poorer peer-adolescent relationships, which, in turn, forecasted poorer adult interpersonal competence. The results suggest that living in a distressed family leads to diminished self-esteem which can influence the quality of peer relationships and place an adolescent on a trejectory toward difficulties in interpersonal competence during adulthood.     

Role of maternal functioning and parenting skills in adolescent functioning following parental divorce

While divorce has been associated with impaired child functioning, the mechanisms within the divorce process leading to such an outcome have rarely been examined. The following hypothesis was examined: Divorce is associated with poor parental adjustment or disrupts parenting behavior, or both, which leads to poor adolescent functioning. Subjects were 121 and 93 young adolescents from intact and recently divorced families, respectively, and their mothers and teachers. Mothers completed measures assessing parental conflict and depression, observers coded parenting skills during a mother-adolescent interaction, and teachers completed measures assessing adolescent functioning. Although the magnitude of differences was not large, analyses of variance indicated that the divorced sample was functioning poorer than the married sample on all measures except interparental conflict. Path analysis suggested that parental functioning and parenting skills play a role in adolescent functioning following divorce.     

To catch a thief with a recognition test: The model and some empirical results

The purpose of the present paper is to describe a new technique and a mathematical model--called the "Catch model"--for identifying a face previously seen (i.e., the target face). Both the technique and the model were developed on the basis of the general approach of information processing used with respect to human memory. Subjects were presented with a pair of test faces on each trial. Neither of the test faces was the target face. Their task was to choose from the two test faces the one most similar to the target face. The data furnished by the subjects were used to reconstruct the target face in the following way: At each trial the differentiating values, such as a long nose and blue eyes, of the test face chosen by the subject were recorded. These values were the ones that accounted for the difference between the two test faces. Over the whole run of the test trials, the differentiating values were associated with various frequencies of occurrence. The target face was reconstructed by selecting the differentiating values having the highest frequency of occurrence. Only one differentiating value per facial dimension such as a nose and eyes could be selected. Thus, given that the facial dimension of the nose has three different values consisting of the long, short, and wide varieties of nose, the value chosen would be the one associated with the highest frequency of occurrence. Mathematical derivations show that, given different variations of the proposed technique, the target face will be detected. These derivations were supported by the results of three experiments.     

Neighborhood Disorder and Children’s Antisocial Behavior: The Protective Effect of Family Support Among Mexican American and African American Families

Using data from a sample of 673 Mexican Origin families, the current investigation examined the degree to which family supportiveness acted as a protective buffer between neighborhood disorder and antisocial behavior during late childhood (i.e. intent to use controlled substances, externalizing, and association with deviant peers). Children's perceptions of neighborhood disorder fully mediated associations between census and observer measures of neighborhood disorder and their antisocial behavior. Family support buffered children from the higher rates of antisocial behavior generally associated with living in disorderly neighborhoods. An additional goal of the current study was to replicate these findings in a second sample of 897 African American families, and that replication was successful. These findings suggest that family support may play a protective role for children living in dangerous or disadvantaged neighborhoods. They also suggest that neighborhood interventions should consider several points of entry including structural changes, resident perceptions of their neighborhood and family support.     

Toward a taxonomy of career studies through bibliometric visualization

One of the greatest strengths and liabilities of the career field is its diversity. This diversity allows for wide coverage of relevant career dynamics across the lifespan and across levels of analysis. However, this diversity also reflects fragmentation, with career scholars failing to appreciate how the insights from other thought worlds can advance their own work. Using advanced bibliometric mapping techniques, we provide a systematic review of the 3141 articles on careers published in the management literature between 1990 and 2012. In doing so, we (1) map key terms to create a systematic taxonomy of career studies within the field of management studies, (2) provide a synthetic overview of each topic cluster which extends prior reviews of more limited scope, and (3) identify the most highly influential studies on careers within each cluster. Specifically, six local clusters emerged — i.e., international careers, career management, career choice, career adaptation, individual and relational career success, and life opportunities. To classify a broad range of research opportunities for career scholars, we also create a “global” map of 16,146 career articles from across the social sciences. Specifically, six global clusters emerged — i.e., organizational, individual, education, doctorate careers, high-profile careers, and social policy. We describe and compare the clusters in the map with an emphasis on those avenues career scholars in management have yet to explore.