The association between body image and smoking cessation among individuals living with HIV/AIDS

Lower smoking cessation rates are associated with body image concerns in the general population. This relationship is particularly important to study in individuals living with HIV/AIDS due to alarmingly high smoking rates and considerable bodily changes experienced with HIV disease progression and treatment. The association between body image and smoking cessation rates was examined among individuals living with HIV/AIDS participating in a smoking cessation intervention. Body image concerns were significantly associated with depression, anxiety, stress, and social support, all variables known to affect cessation rates. However, reduced quit rates were found among individuals reporting elevated and low levels of body image concerns at the end of treatment. These findings suggest a unique relationship between smoking and body image among individuals living with HIV/AIDS. Further research is needed to examine these effects and whether moderate levels of body image concerns in this population reflect realistic body perceptions associated with positive mental health.     

Development of category formation for faces differing by age in 9‐ to 12‐month‐olds: An effect of experience with infant faces

We examined category formation for faces differing in age in 9‐ and 12‐month‐olds, and the influence of exposure to infant faces on such ability. Infants were familiarized with adult or infant faces, and then tested with a novel exemplar from the familiarized category paired with a novel exemplar from a novel category (Experiment 1). Both age groups formed discrete categories of adult and infant faces, but exposure to infant faces in everyday life did not modulate performance. The same task was conducted with child versus infant faces (Experiment 2). Whereas 9‐month‐olds preferred infant faces after familiarization with child faces, but not child faces after familiarization with infant faces, 12‐month‐olds formed discrete categories of child and infant faces. Moreover, more exposure to infant faces correlated with higher novel category preference scores when infants were familiarized with infant faces in 12‐month‐olds, but not 9‐month‐olds. The 9‐month‐old asymmetry did not reflect spontaneous preference for infant over child faces (Experiment 3). These findings indicate that 9‐ and 12‐month‐olds can form age‐based categories of faces. The ability of 12‐month‐olds to form separate child and infant categories suggests that they have a more exclusive representation of face age, one that may be influenced by prior experience with infant faces.     

Emotion regulation choice: the role of environmental affordances

Which emotion regulation strategy one uses in a given context can have profound affective, cognitive, and social consequences. It is therefore important to understand the determinants of emotion regulation choice. Many prior studies have examined person-specific, internal determinants of emotion regulation choice. Recently, it has become clear that external variables that are properties of the stimulus can also influence emotion regulation choice. In the present research, we consider whether reappraisal affordances, defined as the opportunities for re-interpretation of a stimulus that are inherent in that stimulus, can shape individuals’ emotion regulation choices. We show that reappraisal affordances have stability across people and across time (Study 1), and are confounded with emotional intensity for a standardised set of picture stimuli (Study 2). Since emotional intensity has been shown to drive emotion regulation choice, we construct a context in which emotional intensity is separable from reappraisal affordances (Study 3) and use this context to show that reappraisal affordances powerfully influence emotion regulation choice even when emotional intensity and discrete emotions are taken into account (Study 4).     

Who Will Volunteer? Religiosity, Everyday Racism, and Social Participation Among African American Men

This study explores the relative importance of everyday racism, empathic concern, communalism, and religiosity as predictors of pro-social involvement (i.e., volunteerism and membership in political/social justice organizations) among a sample of African American men (N = 151). Church involvement emerged as a positive predictor of the likelihood that these men were involved in volunteer work as well as the number of hours that men dedicated to volunteer work. Communalism positively predicted the amount of time (in hours per year) that men were involved in volunteer work. Subjective religiosity and the stress of everyday racism were associated with a greater likelihood of being a member of a political–social justice organization. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

The Effectiveness of Couple and Individual Relationship Education: Distress as a Moderator

Current literature yields mixed results about the effectiveness of relationship education (RE) with low‐income participants and those who experience a high level of individual or relational distress. Scholars have called for research that examines whether initial levels of distress act as a moderator of RE outcomes. To test whether initial levels of relationship and/or individual distress moderate the effectiveness of RE, this study used two samples, one of couples who received couple‐oriented relationship education with their partner (n = 192 couples) and one of individuals in a relationship who received individual‐oriented RE by themselves (n = 60 individuals). We delivered RE in a community‐based setting serving primarily low‐income participants. For those attending with a partner, there was a significant interaction between gender, initial distress, and time. Findings indicate that women who were relationally distressed before RE reported the largest pre‐postgains. Those who attended an individual‐oriented RE program reported significant decreases in individual distress from pre to post, but no significant relationship gains. Findings also suggest that initial levels of distress did not moderate the effectiveness of individual‐oriented RE.     

Valuing Our Communities: Ethical Considerations for Economic Evaluation of Community‐Based Prevention

Restricted public budgets and increasing efforts to link the impact of community interventions to public savings have increased the use of economic evaluation. While this type of evaluation can be important for program planning, it also raises important ethical issues about how we value the time of local stakeholders who support community interventions. In particular, researchers navigate issues of scientific accuracy, institutional inequality, and research utility in their pursuit of even basic cost estimates. We provide an example of how we confronted these issues when estimating the costs of a large‐scale community‐based intervention. Principles for valuing community members’ time and conducting economic evaluations of community programs are discussed.     

Unconscious affective reactions to masked happy versus angry faces influence consumption behavior and judgments of value

The authors explored three properties of basic, unconsciously triggered affective reactions: They can influence consequential behavior, they work without eliciting conscious feelings, and they interact with motivation. The authors investigated these properties by testing the influence of subliminally presented happy versus angry faces on pouring and consumption of beverage (Study 1), perception of beverage value (Study 2), and reports of conscious feelings (both studies). Consistent with incentive motivation theory, the impact of affective primes on beverage value and consumption was strongest for thirsty participants. Subliminal smiles caused thirsty participants to pour and consume more beverage (Study 1) and increased their willingness to pay and their wanting more beverage (Study 2). Subliminal frowns had the opposite effect. No feeling changes were observed, even in thirsty participants. The results suggest that basic affective reactions can be unconscious and interact with incentive motivation to influence assessment of value and behavior toward valenced objects.     

The Therapist’s Needs: Beyond Mutual Recognition

Abstract

As early as 1965, Harold Searles argued that therapists’ needs for healing and growth are part and parcel of their work with patients. Since then, the relational movement has corroborated this idea by articulating the healing function of treatment for both patient and clinician. In this article, the authors examine therapists’ needs that have been overlooked or those that have not been considered fully in the literature. Using various ideas related to the concept of what the authors call therapeutic freedom, this article argues that clinicians must strive to adopt a therapeutic vision that aims to loosen their own ties to safe, familiar modes of engaging with patients, particularly in moments of enactment or impasse. The authors elucidate these ideas with case material from their clinical work and show how embracing various forms of therapeutic freedom results in a type of mutual surrender on the part of both patient and therapist, creating opportunistic conditions that generate therapeutic action and new possibilities for the dyad.     

Entrepreneurship in young adults: Initial findings from the young entrepreneurs study

The scientific study of youth entrepreneurship is truly in its infancy, with research on the development of entrepreneurship constrained by theoretical foundations that rely on static, trait-like approaches that equate entrepreneurship with stable personality characteristics. In this article, we define entrepreneurship as a fluid process that relies on the bidirectional interplay between a developing individual and his or her context. We report initial findings from the Young Entrepreneurs Study that clarify how entrepreneurial intentions and actions manifest in youth. We present quantitative analyses that examined the relations between entrepreneurial strengths and entrepreneurial activities in a sample of 3461 college students, and we describe the results of semi-structured interviews from a 48-person subset of our larger sample that explored how entrepreneurial intentions and actions manifested in our sample. We describe a mixed-method triangulation that integrates these two sets of findings, then discuss implications for future research.