Non-Violent Survival Strategies in the Face of Intimate Partner Violence and Economic Discrimination

Intimate partner violence (IPV) theory often locates violence equitably between women and men. Women, however, sustain greater degrees of injury than men and often use violence as a measure of protection rather than as an act of aggression. Yet measures of protection must be viewed in multiple contexts. In this case, the context is poverty, which reveals that violence by women in response to IPV is not the only way that women deal with the violence in their lives. This article explicates four strategies that battered women in poverty deploy in their protective trajectory and highlight alternative resistance strategies women use to overcome multiple structural barriers.     

A Review of: “Hollander,M. (2008). Helping Teens Who Cut: Understanding and Ending Self Injury.”

Based upon informal observation of adverse effects arising during behaviorally oriented parent-training programs, 119 parents attending such programs answered a structured questionnaire regarding six specific adverse effects. Each of the “side effects” were reported by a substantial portion of the participants. In most cases, the severity of effects was not extreme. The mean number of side effects reported by each parent was 1.70. Based upon these findings, clinicians conducting such parent-training programs are encouraged to provide content material to prevent or ameliorate these adverse effects.     

Suicide and the Rorschach: A Rueful Postscript

A review of the Rorschach suicide literature written 10 years ago called for cross validation studies and the use of refined methodology in order to enhance the usefulness of the test as a device for the identification, prediction, and understanding of suicidal ideation and behavior. The present followup review was undertaken and it was concluded that careful and refined research methodology can somewhat enhance sensitivity of the Rorschach to suicidal activity. It was also concluded the replicative research has not supported previously promising Rorschach suicide indicators, suggesting that the Rorschach may be an inappropriate technique for assessing suicidal activity.     

ListChecker Pro 1.2: A program designed to facilitate creating word lists using the University of South Florida word association norms

Various areas of research (e.g., memory, metamemory, visual word recognition, associative priming) rely on the careful construction of reliable word lists. ListChecker Pro 1.2 is a computer program that accesses the University of South Florida word association norms (Nelson, McEvoy, & Schreiber, 1998, 2004) to report characteristics of words (e.g., frequency, concreteness), as well as direct and indirect associative relationships (e.g., shared associates, mediators). The present article presents the input requirements, menu options, and output obtained by ListChecker Pro 1.2. In addition, a randomly selected list of words from the associative versus semantic priming literature was submitted to ListChecker Pro 1.2 to demonstrate how seemingly unrelated words can be associated. The zipped file containing the program and database can be downloaded from www .eakinmemorylab.psychology.msstate.edu.     

Risk and Protective Factors that Distinguish Adolescents Who Attempt Suicide from Those Who Only Consider Suicide in the Past Year

Data from the 2010 Minnesota Student Survey was analyzed to identify risk and protective factors that distinguished adolescents across three groups: no suicidality, suicidal ideation only, and suicide attempt. The population‐based sample included 70,022 students in grades 9 and 12. Hopelessness and depressive symptoms emerged as important risk factors to distinguish youth who reported suicidal ideation or behavior from those without a history of suicidality. However, these factors were not as important in differentiating adolescents who attempted suicidal from those who considered suicide but did not act on their thoughts. Instead, for both genders, self‐injury represented the most important factor to distinguish these youth. Other risk factors that differentiated the latter groups, but not the former groups, for males were dating violence victimization and cigarette smoking, and for females was a same‐sex sexual experience. Running away from home also seemed to increase the risk of a suicide attempt among youth in this study. Parent connectedness and academic achievement emerged as important protective factors to differentiate all the groups, yet neighborhood safety appeared to protect against the transition from suicidal thoughts to behavior. Findings from this study suggest risk and protective factors practitioners should target in clinical assessments and intervention programs to help prevent suicidal behavior among youth at greatest risk.     

Brain rCBF and performance in visual imagery tasks: Common and distinct processes

The present study was designed to discover whether variations in normalised regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in different brain areas predict variations in performance of different imagery tasks. Positron emission tomography (PET) was used to assess brain activity as 16 participants performed four imagery tasks. These tasks were designed so that performance was particularly sensitive to the participant's ability to form images with high resolution, to generate images from distinct segments, to parse imaged forms into parts while inspecting them, or to transform (rotate) images. Response times and error rates were recorded. Multiple regression analyses revealed that variations in most brain areas predicted variations in performance of only one task, thus demonstrating that the four tasks tap largely independent imagery processes. However, we also found that some underlying processes were recruited by more than one task, particularly those implemented in the occipito‐parietal sulcus, the medial frontal cortex, and Area 18.     

Drive for muscularity, body comparison, and social physique anxiety in men and women

The presented study tested a model of the relationship between the drive for muscularity (DM), three aspects of body comparison (general, weight-, and muscle-related), and social physique anxiety in college men and women. The findings demonstrated that those with higher levels of DM engaged in more frequent body-related comparisons in all three areas. Greater frequency of both Weight- and Muscle-Related Body Comparison was then predictive of higher levels of social physique anxiety. Constraints placed on the path coefficients showed that the association between DM and Muscle-Related Comparisons was significantly stronger than the association between DM and Weight-Related Comparisons. The model was similar for both genders. The results from the structural models were discussed in terms of Cash's (2002) cognitive-behavioral model of body image and the dual pathway model of boys' and men's body image (Jones & Crawford, 2005).     

Mitigating disruptive effects of interruptions through training: what needs to be practiced?

It is generally accepted that, with practice, people improve on most tasks. However, when tasks have multiple parts, it is not always clear what aspects of the tasks practice or training should focus on. This research explores the features that allow training to improve the ability to resume a task after an interruption, specifically focusing on task-specific versus general interruption/resumption-process mechanisms that could account for improved performance. Three experiments using multiple combinations of primary tasks and interruptions were conducted with undergraduate psychology students. The first experiment showed that for one primary and interruption task-pair, people were able to resume the primary task faster when they had previous practice with the interruption. The second experiment replicated this finding for two other sets of primary and interruption task-pairs. Finally, the third experiment showed that people were able to resume a primary task faster only when they had previous practice with that specific primary and interruption task-pair. Experience with other primary and interruption task-pairs, or practice on the primary task alone, did not facilitate resumption. This suggests that a critical component in resuming after an interruption is the relationship between two tasks. These findings are in line with a task-specific mechanism of resumption and incompatible with a general-process mechanism. These findings have practical implications for developing training programs and mitigation strategies to lessen the disruptive effects of interruptions which plague both our personal and professional environments.     

Aging increases inattentional blindness to the gorilla in our midst

When engaged in an attention-demanding task, people are surprisingly vulnerable to inattentional blindness--the failure to notice an unexpected event. Two theories of cognitive aging, attentional capacity models and inhibitory deficit models, make opposite predictions about age differences in susceptibility to inattentional blindness. We tested these predictions using an inattentional blindness paradigm developed by Simons and Chabris (1999) and found that older adults were more likely to experience inattentional blindness than young adults. These results are compatible with attentional capacity models of cognitive aging but not with current inhibitory deficit models.