Merging community and faith-based organizations to empower African American males

The Holistic Needs of African American Men (HAAM) Program provides information and resources that allow African American men to take full control of their lives and tell "their" story. The majority of the participants indicated they did not trust the current service or health care systems in the United States because they felt these systems robbed them of their "voice." HAAM provided the African American men with needed support and assisted them in repositioning their lives for success.     

A note on ethical egoism

Philosophical Studies -     

Justice, health, and healthcare

Healthcare (including public health) is special because it protects normal functioning, which in turn protects the range of opportunities open to individuals. I extend this account in two ways. First, since the distribution of goods other than healthcare affect population health and its distribution, I claim that Rawls's principles of justice describe a fair distribution of the social determinants of health, giving a partial account of when health inequalities are unjust. Second, I supplement a principled account of justice for health and healthcare with an account of fair process for setting limits of rationing care. This account is provided by three conditions that comprise "accountability for reasonableness."     

Sexualized and Athletic: Viewers’ Attitudes toward Sexualized Performance Images of Female Athletes

Using an experimental methodology, the present study investigated college students’ attitudes toward media images of female athletes. We are particularly focused on how viewers perceive media images of female athletes that have both an appearance and athleticism focus, such as those found in ESPN’s The Body Issue. An aim of our study was to assess viewers’ attitudes toward these images that are not purely objectified, thereby contributing to the objectification literature and providing empirical data relevant to theorizing on the social impact of these images. U.S. college students (n?=?563) viewed one of four types of images of the same athletes including: (a) sexualized athletes, (b) sexualized performance athletes (in which both athleticism and sexualization are present), (c) sport performance athletes (in which athletes are depicted playing their sport), or (d) non-sexualized athletes. They then rated the athletes’ competence, esteem, and sexual appeal. Overall, sexualized performance athletes were rated more positively than sexualized athletes, but less positively than sport performance athletes. These results have implications for advocacy efforts calling for more media coverage in which women are depicted as athletes rather than as sexual objects.

     

I can time with a little help from my friends: effect of social enrichment on timing processes in Pigeons (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Columba livia</Emphasis>)

There is evidence that impulsive decision-making is associated with errors in timing. However, there has been little attempt to identify the putative mechanism responsible for impulsive animals’ timing errors. One means of manipulating impulsivity in non-human animals is providing different levels of access to conspecifics. These preclinical models have revealed that social isolation increases impulsive responding across a wide range of tasks. The goal of the present study was to determine whether social isolation modulates time perception in pigeons by inducing more variability or a bias to underestimate the passage of time in temporal judgments. A temporal bisection task was used to characterize time perception. One group of pigeons performed the bisection following social enrichment, and the remaining half of the pigeons were tested following social isolation. Results revealed pigeons in the social isolation condition categorized a temporal stimulus sample as “long” at shorter durations than pigeons in the social enrichment condition. These data highlight the mechanism(s) thought to underlie timing-based interventions aimed at reducing impulsivity in humans. Future work should consider whether impulsivity is produced by misperceptions of time or a reduced threshold for a response.     

Getting the Job: Attributional Retraining and the Employment Interview1

This study examined the effectiveness of attributional retraining (AR) in an employment interview setting. Our sample consisted of 50 co‐operative education students completing job interviews who were randomly assigned to a control or writing‐based AR condition. Dependent measures included attributions, expectations, and affect, as well as behavior with respect to an interview skills workshop, and actual employment outcomes. Results showed AR to promote controllable failure attributions, expectations, motivated behavior, and interview success, particularly among participants with maladaptive baseline attributions. Findings further revealed AR effects on emotions mediated by post‐treatment attributions. Implications for attribution theory and research on AR in employment settings are discussed.     

Wanting Nothing: imitation and production inthe economy of desire

Desire is examined here with a view to informing a theological response to capitalism. The notion of mimetic desire offered by René Girard is used as a starting point, Girard's ideas being brought into critical engagement with, first, other intersubjective accounts, namely those offered by Alexandre Kojève and by psychoanalysis in its Freudian and Lacanian variants; and then the account of desire as productive becoming offered by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in which the link to capitalism is explicit. It is suggested that both mimetic desire and its productive counterpart can be understood as asserting the priority of desire itself over both subject and object. The possibilities for framing a coherent theological account of desire which is both mimetic and productive are then assessed with reference to Bernard of Clairvaux, Aquinas and Augustine, noting that accepting a metaphysics of participation makes plausible a productive desire which is nonetheless coded as a mimesis of the divine precedent. Such a conclusion brings into relief the inevitable difficulty of reconciling Christian and capitalist economies of desire.     

Childhood Emotional Abuse and Maladaptive Coping in Adults Seeking Treatment for Substance Use Disorder

Little is understood about distinct traumatic exposures and their relationship to later coping strategies. Adults receiving treatment for substance use were assessed for experiential avoidance and a range of traumatic exposures. Only childhood emotional abuse significantly predicted experiential avoidance.