The Relation of Exposure to Traumatic Events and Longitudinal Mental Health Outcomes for Children Enrolled in Systems of Care: Results from a National System of Care Evaluation

This study examined the relation between children's history of exposure to potentially traumatic events (PTEs) and clinical and functional mental health trajectories over a 18‐month period among a national sample of youth referred for services in children's behavioral health systems of care (SOCs). Using data from the national evaluation of the Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services program for communities funded from 1997 to 2000, the study sample included 9556 children and their families. Latent growth modeling was used to assess the effect of history of exposure to PTEs on trajectories in a number of behavioral health outcomes during the 3‐year period following referral to services, controlling for child demographic characteristics (gender, race, and age). Results revealed that, on average, children in SOCs exhibited significant improvements over time on all four outcome measures. Children with a history of exposure to PTEs had higher rates of internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors and functional impairments and fewer behavioral and emotional strengths at baseline, but experienced improvements in these outcomes at the same rates as children without exposure to a traumatic event. Finally, child race, gender, and age also were associated with differences in behavioral health trajectories among service recipients. Implications for SOCs, including approaches to make them more trauma‐informed, are discussed.     

Assessing two competing approaches to the psychology of moral judgments

This paper brings together the social intuitionist view of the psychology of moral judgments developed by Jonathan Haidt, and the recent morphological rationalist position of Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons. I will end up suggesting that Horgan and Timmons have offered us a more plausible account of the psychology of moral judgment formation. But the view is not without its own difficulties. Indeed, one of them might prove to be quite serious, as it could support a form of skepticism about understanding our own motivating reasons.     

Sex differences of salivary cortisol secretion in patients with major depression

Depression is associated with increased cortisol secretion and occurs more often in women than in men. Thus, it has been hypothesized that differences in cortisol secretion might, in part, be responsible for the greater risk of developing depression in women. However, only few studies have examined sex differences in baseline cortisol secretion in depressed patients and healthy controls. We examined sex effects on cortisol secretion in 52 medication-free patients with major depression (37 women, 15 men, mean ± SD age 35 ± 11 years, Hamilton Depression Scale mean score 27 ± 5) and 50 healthy age- and sex-matched control subjects. Salivary cortisol concentrations were measured at 8:00, 12:00, 16:00, and 22:00 h. Repeated measures analysis of covariance revealed a group × sex interaction (p = 0.05). Post hoc tests revealed higher cortisol concentrations in depressed compared to healthy men [F(1;29) = 7.5, p = 0.01]. No differences were found between depressed and non-depressed women. Our results do not support the hypothesis that differences in cortisol secretion between depressed and non-depressed subjects are more pronounced in women than in men. Study characteristics and methods as well as sex-specific confounding variables such as menstrual cycle, menopause and the use of oral contraceptives may account for inconclusive results across studies.     

How Religious Coping is Used Relative to Other Coping Strategies Depends on the Individual’s Level of Religiosity and Spirituality

Results from empirical studies on the role of religiosity and spirituality in dealing with stress are frequently at odds, and the present study investigated whether level of religiosity and spirituality is related to the way in which religious coping is used relative to other coping strategies. A sample of 616 university undergraduate students completed the Brief COPE (Carver in Int J Behav Med 4:92?C100, 1997) questionnaire and was classified into groups of participants with lower and higher levels of religiosity and spirituality, as measured by the WHOQOL-SRPB (WHOQOL-SRPB Group in Soc Sci Med 62:1486?C1497, 2006) instrument. For participants with lower levels, religious coping tended to be associated with maladaptive or avoidant coping strategies, compared to participants with higher levels, where religious coping was more closely related to problem-focused coping, which was also supported by multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. The results of the present study thus illustrate that investigating the role of religious coping requires more complex approaches than attempting to assign it to one higher order factor, such as problem- or emotion-focused coping, and that the variability of findings reported by previous studies on the function of religious coping may partly be due to variability in religiosity and spirituality across samples.     

Protecting Against Low‐Probability Disasters: The Role of Worry

We carry out a large monetary stakes insurance experiment with very small probabilities of losses and ambiguous as well as exact probabilities. Many individuals do not want to pay anything for insurance whether the probabilities are given exactly or are ambiguous. Many others, however, are willing to pay surprisingly large amounts. With ambiguity, the percentage of those paying nothing is smaller and the willingness to pay (WTP) of the other individuals larger than with exact probabilities. Comparing elasticities with ambiguity, we find that worry is much more important than subjective probability in determining WTP for insurance. Furthermore, when the ambiguous loss probability is increased by a factor of 1000, it has almost no effect on WTP. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Family relations, mental health and adherence to nutritional guidelines in patients facing dialysis initiation

This study investigated the effect of family relations on patients' adjustment to dialysis. The two main aims were to develop a family typology, and to explore the influence of family profile on the patient's anxiety, depression and adherence to nutritional guidelines. The sample consisted of 120 patients (mean age 63 years; 67.5% of men). They completed several measures 1, 6 and 12 months after dialysis initiation. The scales used were the Family Relationship Index and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. Perceived adherence to nutritional guidelines was assessed using two visual analogical scales. Results showed that family relations remained stable over time. Cluster analysis yielded three family profiles, which were named conflict, communicative and supportive families. Patients belonging to conflict families perceived themselves as less adhering to nutritional guidelines. For these patients, anxiety and depressive moods increased significantly over time, whereas mental health remained stable over time for communicative and supportive families. This research underlines that family relations are essential in global consideration of the care of patients treated by dialysis. Conflict families seem especially at risk. They should be identified early to help them adapt to this stressful treatment.     

Strategy variability: How too much of a good thing can hurt performance

Recent research (e.g., Siegler, 1996) has discovered the important and vital role that variability plays among strategy use and development over time. However, as many researchers have pointed out (e.g., Miller, 1993), the majority of the research addressing this issue has focused on the outcomes, rather than on the potentially more informative aspects of variability, strategy development, and the process of adaptation. In this study, we examined the role of variability during strategy development, utilizing a longitudinal method. Thirteen participants were studied over 3 months as they coached a simulated football team. The results suggest that variability plays a major role in adaptive skill acquisition in a dynamic environment--in the direction, however, opposite to that predicted by previous research done with simple static tasks.     

Die Vielfalt der Persönlichkeit—Gefährdung der Einheit der Person?

Uniformity against manifold faces of a personality are manifest presentations of a supposed underlying person (subjectum) as its synthetic-cohesive potential. The association-psychology of the 19th century brought forward the concept of dissociation, which allows to interpret a broad spectrum of phenomena between adaptive functioning (salutary) and maladaptive, dysfunctional phenomena of psychopathology: it opens a dimensional perspective which includes dissociative identity disorder, dissociative trance disorder, borderline-pathologies and the most severe forms of ego/self-dissociation, -fragmentation in schizophrenic disorders.     

Do Economic Reforms Alleviate Subjective Well-Being Losses of Economic Crises?

Major economic crises tend to be followed by crises in subjective well-being. Following the financial and debt crises, politicians and social scientists have engaged in heated discussions of ways to alleviate such losses. In particular, should governments intervene more or less? This paper explores whether liberalizing economic institutions, a type of reform favoured by some economists, is likely to alleviate such loses. Estimating the effects of crises across European states 1975–2011 suggest that countries with relatively easy market regulations suffered smaller well-being losses.     

Religiousness and Religious Coping in a Secular Society: The Gender Perspective

Women are found to be more religious than men and more likely to use religious coping. Only few studies have explored religious gender differences in more secular societies. This population-based study comprised 3,000 Danish men and women (response rate 45 %) between 20 and 40 years of age. Information about demographics, religiousness and religious coping was obtained through a web-based questionnaire. We organized religiousness in the three dimensions: Cognition, Practice and Importance, and we assessed religious coping using the brief RCOPE questionnaire. We found substantial gender differences in both religiousness and religious coping. Nearly, 60 % of the women believed in some sort of spirit or in God compared to 40 % of the men. Generally, both men and women scored low on the RCOPE scale. However, for respondents reporting high levels of religiousness, the proportion of men who scored high in the RCOPE exceeded the proportion of women in using positive and especially negative coping strategies. Also, in a secular society, women are found to be more religious than men, but in a subset of the most religious respondents, men were more inclined to use religious coping. Further studies on religious coping in secular societies are required.