Ovarian cancer patients' psychological distress: the role of physical impairment, perceived unsupportive family and friend behaviors, perceived control, and self-esteem.

Although research has indicated that illness-related and interpersonal stress are associated with greater psychological distress among cancer patients, little empirical attention has been given to mechanisms that account for these relationships. In the present study, 2 mechanisms for the association between illness-related stress (physical impairment) and interpersonal stress (family and friend unsupportive responses) and psychological distress of 143 ovarian cancer patients were examined cross-sectionally. Separate structural equation models tested whether physical impairment impacted patients' distress via decrements in perceived control over their illness and whether unsupportive behaviors impacted patients' distress via decrements in patients' self-esteem. Results supported the proposed models and suggest that perceived control and self-esteem are 2 mechanisms for explaining how illness-related and interpersonal stress may be associated with psychological distress among women with ovarian cancer.     

Teachers’ personal values,age, and educational setting shape their socialisation values

ABSTRACT

Teachers in kindergartens and schools also fill an important role of values educators. The study examined teachers’ socialisation values and their links with teachers’ personal values, age, education, and educational setting (kindergarten vs school). A total of 391 teachers in Estonia filled in the Schwartz’s Portrait Values Questionnaire that assessed their personal and socialisation values. Teachers considered self-transcendence values most important personally and in socialisation of children, followed by openness to change values. At the same time, teachers differentiated between their personal and socialisation values: openness to change was rated higher as a socialisation than as a personal value. The variation in teachers’ socialisation values stemmed from their personal values, teachers’ age, and educational setting.     

Problem Solving,Stress, and Coping in Adolescent Suicide Attempts

Twenty adolescents who had made suicide attempts were compared with 20 nonpsychiatric control subjects on measures of problem solving, stress, and coping. The suicidal group did not show evidence of “rigid” thinking or of deficits in the ability to generate solutions to standardized interpersonal problems. However, they did report recent histories of more severe life stress and had inaccurate appraisal of the extent to which stressful events could be controlled. Although suicidal patients were able to generate as many adaptive strategies as control subjects for coping with their own most severe recent real-life stressor, they actually used fewer. They were also more likely to identify maladaptive behaviors as ways of coping. These findings support a transactional model of adolescent suicidal behavior, whereby inaccuracies in the appraisal aspects of problem solving (but not in the solution-generation aspects) in the face of high life stress lead to a reduction in the use of adaptive efforts to cope.