Smoking as subculture? Influence on Hispanic and non-Hispanic White women's attitudes toward smoking and obesity.

Cultural stereotypes might help explain why smoking is less prevalent among Hispanic than non-Hispanic White women, whereas obesity is more prevalent. Hispanic (n = 130) and non-Hispanic White (n = 114) women rated their thoughts and feelings regarding a female smoker and an overweight woman. Ethnicity did not influence evaluations, but attitudes toward smokers were more positive among more acculturated Hispanic women, F(1, 66) = 9.9, p < .01. Less acculturated women evaluated an overweight woman more positively than a smoker, F(1, 28) = 5.65, p < .05; more acculturated women did the opposite, F( 1, 36) = 5.92, p < .05. Smokers evaluated smokers more positively than overweight women, F(1, 86) = 40.8, p < .01; nonsmokers did the opposite, F(l, 138) = 7.7, p < .01. Personal body weight did not influence evaluations. Acculturation and smoking status appear to have a greater influence than ethnicity or weight status on women's attitudes toward smoking and weight.     

Beyond invulnerability: the importance of benefits in adolescents' decision to drink alcohol.

Some investigators propose that adolescents engage in risky behaviors mainly because they perceive themselves to be invulnerable to risk. However, studies have typically not included perceived benefits. In the current study, 5th, 7th, and 9th graders were surveyed about their perceptions of and experience with alcohol and tobacco. Results indicated that perceptions of the benefits were significantly related to drinking and smoking 6 months later, over and above perceptions of the risks, age of the respondent, and experience level. Further, the importance of benefits was replicated across 3 separate analyses. Experience with alcohol alone, especially positive experience, was also related to perception and behavior. These findings are discussed in terms of how to improve messages and influence adolescents' decisions regarding risk-taking behaviors.     

Verification of Statements about Story Worlds That Deviate from Normal Conceptions of Time: What Is True aboutEinstein''s Dreams?

College students read chapters from a novel written by Alan Lightman (Einstein's Dreams) and later provided verification judgments on the truth/falsity of test statements. Each chapter described a different fictional village that incorporated assumptions about time that deviate from our normal TIME schema, e.g., citizens knowing exactly when the world will end, time flowing backward instead of forward. These novel assumptions about time provided interesting insights about life and reality. In two experiments, we examined whether readers could accurately incorporate these novel assumptions about time in the fictional story worlds, as manifested in the verification judgments for statements after story comprehension. The test statements included verbatim typical, verbatim atypical, inference typical, and inference atypical information from the perspective of mundane reality that meshes with a normal TIME schema. Verification ratings were collected on a 6-point scale in Experiment 1, whereas Experiment 2 used a signal–response technique in which binary true/false decisions were extracted at −.5, 1.5, 3.5, 5.5, and 10.0 s. The college students were measured on literary expertise, reading skill, working memory span, and reading time. Readers with comparatively high literary expertise showed truth discrimination scores that were compatible with aschema copy plus tagmodel, which assumes that readers are good at detecting and remembering atypical verbatim information; this model predicts better (and faster) truth discrimination for verbatim atypical statements than for verbatim typical statements. In contrast, fast readers with comparatively low literary expertise were compatible with afilteringmodel; this model predicts that readers gloss over (or suppress) atypical verbatim information and show advantages for verbatim typical information. All groups of readers had trouble inferentially propagating the novel assumptions about time in a fictional story world, but the slower readers were more accurate in their verification of the atypical inferences. Aconstruction–integrationmodel could explain the interactions among literary expertise, reading time, and the typicality of test statements.     

The Development of an Analytic Perspective in the Group Leader: Some Basic Thoughts

Previous experience working with individuals on a one-to-one basis along with previous analytic therapy are important prerequisites for analytic group training. Training must emphasize understanding of group-as-a-whole processes, such as basic assumption life, complex transference manifestations, as well as awareness of one's countertransference toward individuals, subgroups and the group-as-a-whole. Specific concepts derived from object-relations theory such as projective identification are crucial to master. Personal analytic group therapy is recommended.     

Parent and Child Factors Associated with Household versus Community Adversity among Black and Hispanic Children

Journal of Child and Family Studies - The purpose of this study was to describe exposure to within-household and community adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and to identify child- and...     

Effects of Anxiety on Novice Genetic Counseling Students’ Experience of Supervised Clinical Rotations

Supervised clinical experiences with patients comprise a critical component of genetic counseling student education. Previous research has found genetic counseling students tend to be more anxiety prone than the general population, and anxiety related to supervision has been found in genetic counseling and related fields. The present study investigated how anxiety affects the experience of supervision for genetic counseling students. Second year genetic counseling students were invited to participate through email invitations distributed via training directors of the 33 programs accredited at the time of the study by the American Board of Genetic Counseling. An initial online survey contained the trait scale of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory to estimate anxiety proneness in this population and an invitation to participate in a 45-minute semi-structured phone interview focusing on students’ experiences of supervision during their clinical rotations. High and low trait anxiety groups were created using STAI scores, and the groups’ interview responses were compared using consensual qualitative research methodology (CQR; Hill 2012). The high anxiety group was more likely to describe problematic supervisory relationships, appreciate the supervisor’s ability to help them when they get stuck in sessions, and feel their anxiety had a negative effect on their performance in general and in supervision. Common themes included supervisors’ balancing support and guidance, the importance of feedback, ego-centric responses, and supervisors as focal points. The results of the present study are largely consistent with current literature. Further research findings and research, practice, and training recommendations are provided.     

Does segmental overlap help or hurt? Evidence from blocked cyclic naming in spoken and written production

Past research has demonstrated interference effects when words are named in the context of multiple items that share a meaning. This interference has been explained within various incremental learning accounts of word production, which propose that each attempt at mapping semantic features to lexical items induces slight but persistent changes that result in cumulative interference. We examined whether similar interference-generating mechanisms operate during the mapping of lexical items to segments by examining the production of words in the context of others that share segments. Previous research has shown that initial-segment overlap amongst a set of target words produces facilitation, not interference. However, this initial-segment facilitation is likely due to strategic preparation, an external factor that may mask underlying interference. In the present study, we applied a novel manipulation in which the segmental overlap across target items was distributed unpredictably across word positions, in order to reduce strategic response preparation. This manipulation led to interference in both spoken (Exp. 1) and written (Exp. 2) production. We suggest that these findings are consistent with a competitive learning mechanism that applies across stages and modalities of word production.