Life Events may Contribute to Family Communication About Cancer Risk Following BRCA1/2 Testing

We assessed whether certain life events contributed to the communication about cancer risk within families who have undergone BRCA1/2 testing. We also explored what type of resources participants would have valued to help in supporting family communication about genetic information. Two hundred and forty-six individuals (218 women, 28 men) who received a BRCA1/2 genetic test result 3 to 10 years earlier (mean of 6.4 years) participated in a telephone interview. Participants were asked about the occurrence of a number of life events (cancer diagnosis, death, uptake of prophylactic surgery, and providing care to a family member with cancer) in their family since their BRCA1/2 test result disclosure and, for each occurrence, whether it fostered family communication about cancer risk. A total of 182 participants (74 %) reported that they or one of their relatives received a cancer diagnosis, 176 (72 %) reported that someone died in their family, and 73 (30 %) stated that they or one of their relatives undertook a prophylactic surgery. During this period, 109 participants (44 %) also provided care for a family member who had cancer. Among participants who reported these life events, family communication was fostered by these events in proportions varying from 50 % (death) to 69 % (cancer diagnosis). Our results indicate that life events may contribute to family communication about cancer risk. Further research is needed to determine whether these events provide a “window of opportunity” to reach family members, address their needs and concerns about cancer, update family cancer history, and introduce genetic counseling and risk assessment.     

Letter transpositions within and across morphemic boundaries: Is there a cross-language difference?

Research on the impact of letter transpositions that arise across morpheme boundaries has yielded conflicting results. These results have led to the suggestion that a cross-linguistic difference may exist in the recognition of Spanish and English words. In two masked-priming experiments run on separate groups of Spanish and English speakers, we tested this hypothesis by comparing the impacts of primes with letter transpositions that arose within morphemes or across morpheme boundaries on the recognition of identical or near-identical Spanish–English cognate targets. The results showed transposed-letter benefits in both Spanish and English that were not modulated by the position of the transposed letter in the prime stimulus. Our findings therefore add to the growing body of literature suggesting that the transposed-letter benefit is not affected by the position of the transposed letters relative to the morpheme boundary, and they dispel previous suggestions that there might be a genuine difference in orthographic coding across the Spanish and English writing systems.     

Willingness to accept occupational change when offered incentives: Comparing full-time and part-time employees

The ability to deal with occupational change is becoming increasingly important. We hypothesized that individual differences determining preferences for specific types of mobility (i.e., global personality traits and uncertainty tolerance) and decisional factors theoretically derived from the theory of planned behaviour (e.g., desirability of change; subjective norms) would be associated with higher willingness to accept occupational change when incentives such as greater autonomy were offered. These hypotheses were tested in a questionnaire study with samples of full-time and part-time employees. We further expected employment situation to function as a moderator in this process. Overall, results of regression analyses confirmed the relevance of the core components of the theory of planned behaviour. In addition, we found decisional factors to be more closely linked to the outcomes of full-time employees than to those of part-time employees. We discuss the practical implications of our results in terms of how best to support employees in adapting to the increasing demands for occupational change.     

Teaching Oppressive Texts

Scholars have identified the many stories in the Bible that are oppressive to women or other minoritized groups. It is remarkable how common it is that North American undergraduate students remain blind to the oppression that is depicted and that is too often the result of commonly accepted interpretations of these texts. Three brief essays collected here, originally presented as part of a panel at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting (Atlanta, 2010), present various teaching strategies for exposing the oppressive elements in the biblical text and showing how the oppression operates (an aspect of ideological criticism). What are good strategies for communicating these hard points to students in a way they can hear them and work with them? Why is this important to do?     

A comparison of visual and auditory representational momentum in spatial tasks

Similarities have been observed in the localization of the final position of moving visual and moving auditory stimuli: Perceived endpoints that are judged to be farther in the direction of motion in both modalities likely reflect extrapolation of the trajectory, mediated by predictive mechanisms at higher cognitive levels. However, actual comparisons of the magnitudes of displacement between visual tasks and auditory tasks using the same experimental setup are rare. As such, the purpose of the present free-field study was to investigate the influences of the spatial location of motion offset, stimulus velocity, and motion direction on the localization of the final positions of moving auditory stimuli (Experiment 1 and 2) and moving visual stimuli (Experiment 3). To assess whether auditory performance is affected by dynamically changing binaural cues that are used for the localization of moving auditory stimuli (interaural time differences for low-frequency sounds and interaural intensity differences for high-frequency sounds), two distinct noise bands were employed in Experiments 1 and 2. In all three experiments, less precise encoding of spatial coordinates in paralateral space resulted in larger forward displacements, but this effect was drowned out by the underestimation of target eccentricity in the extreme periphery. Furthermore, our results revealed clear differences between visual and auditory tasks. Displacements in the visual task were dependent on velocity and the spatial location of the final position, but an additional influence of motion direction was observed in the auditory tasks. Together, these findings indicate that the modality-specific processing of motion parameters affects the extrapolation of the trajectory.     

Phonemic priming with words and pseudowords

Abstract

The bi-alphabetic nature of the Serbo-Croatian writing system allows unequivocal examination of phonemic similarity unconfounded with graphemic similarity. The Roman and Cyrillic alphabets are largely independent but map onto the same sounds. A lower-case context written in one alphabet bears no visual similarity to an uppercase target written in the other alphabet. One naming experiment and one lexical decision experiment investigated phonemic priming of high-frequency words and pseudowords with word and pseudoword contexts. For naming, targets that were phone-mically similar to the preceding context were named significantly faster than were phonemically dissimilar targets. This result was indifferent to the lexicality of the contexts and targets. For lexical decision, in contrast, phonemically similar word-word pairs showed inhibition, whereas phonemically similar pseudoword-word pairs showed facilitation relative to their phonemically dissimilar counterparts. These results were discussed in terms of (1) a model of visual word processing that posits a layer of phoneme units between letter units and word units, and (2) the idea that active word units inhibit one another in proportion to each one's frequency. In this account, phonemic similarity effects in naming are based on the states of the phoneme units, while phonemic similarity effects in lexical decision are based on the states of the word units. These results lend further support to the claim that, for readers of Serbo-Croatian, the visual computation of phonology is automatic and prelexical.     

Messages about sex in the workplace: A content analysis of primetime television

Because television has the potential to shape cultural beliefs about both sexual norms and appropriate workplace behavior, it seems important to examine TV’s portrayal of “sexual etiquette” in the workplace. In a content analysis of two episodes of every primetime comedy aired on all broadcast and cable networks during fall 2000, we coded every sexual remark and behavior made in a workplace scene. Across all networks, 85 percent of programs and one in four workplace interactions contained some type of sexual content. Overall, a viewer is likely to hear eleven sexual remarks and see two to three sexual behaviors in a workplace setting per hour; this jumps to twenty-three remarks and nine behaviors on cable networks. Sexual remarks were mostly explicit, made in an office setting, by White men, and were rarely (1.4%) about sexual harassment or discrimination. Although sexual content in the workplace was generally less common on broadcast than cable networks, a broadcast network (Fox) actually had the highest overall rate, with sexual content in 38 percent of workplace scenes. Given that research suggests that TV teaches youth about sexuality and cultivates sexual attitudes and beliefs consistent with televised portrayals, it is alarming that youth may learn from television that sex in the workplace is not only commonplace, but also to be tolerated and enjoyed.     

Personality Disorders and Spinal Cord Injury: A Pilot Study

A substantial body of research has found that spinal cord injury (SCI) patients have relatively high degrees of energy, impulsivity, and risk-taking (W. Fordyce, 1964; G. P. Taylor, 1970; B. Woodbury, 1978). The present study endeavors to extend our knowledge to the personality disorder (PD) domain. Forty SCI participants and 40 matched controls were given a semistructured diagnostic interview and a self-report personality disorder instrument. Findings indicated that 27.5% of SCI patients, and a similar number of controls, have PDs. Unexpectedly, impulsive/externalizing disorders (histrionic, narcissistic, antisocial, and borderline) were not unusually high in SCI patients, and were not higher than controls. Avoidant and depressive disorders were unexpectedly high.     

The Role of School-based Group Mentoring in Promoting Resilience among Vulnerable High School Students

This study examined the role of participation in a year-long school-based group mentoring program, Project Arrive (PA), on increasing resilience during the first year of high school among students identified as being at high risk for school dropout. Participants were 114, ninth grade students taking part in one of 32 PA mentoring groups, and 71 statistically matched comparison students (53% male, 75% eligible for free/reduced-price lunch, 62% Latinx). Using a propensity score with inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) to reduce selection bias, and a multi-level model to account for non-independence of data within mentoring groups, we examined changes from pre-test to program exit on seven external resilience resources (developmental supports and opportunities) and four internal resilience assets (personal strengths). At program exit, PA participants had higher adjusted means than comparisons on six external resources, including school support, school belonging, school meaningful participation, peer caring relationships, prosocial peers, and home meaningful participation. PA participants also had higher adjusted means on one internal asset, problem solving. Results point to the promise of group mentoring as an approach for increasing resilience among academically vulnerable adolescents.