Family processes in the midst of urban poverty: What does the trauma literature tell us?

Consistent with a family systems framework, this paper examines the clinical and research literatures to clarify the connection between chronic trauma exposure and family processes with a focus on the social ecology of low-income, urban neighborhoods. Strong empirical evidence demonstrates the impact of chronic trauma on individual family members and, in turn, on multiple family subsystems. Additionally, there is evidence that living under chronically harsh, traumatic circumstances slowly erodes family processes, specifically structure, relations, and coping. However, existing research reflects the problems inherent in sorting out relationships among multiple, often interrelated factors. Future research requires comprehensive theoretical models, such as systemic, transactional, or ecodevelopmental, along with sophisticated research designs, prospective, longitudinal or intervention, and multilevel analytic methods.     

Emotion Specificity and Consumer Behavior: Anger, Sadness, and Preference for Activity

We examine the influence of two specific negative emotions (i.e., sadness and anger) on consumers' preference for an advertised product promoting either activity (e.g., exercise) or passivity (e.g., relaxation). On the basis of empirical distinctions between the level of activation accompanying sadness and anger, and drawing upon a mood-as-information perspective, we hypothesized that individuals will have a preference for activity to passivity when in an angry compared to a sad emotional state. Thus, when angry, they preferred a product advertised as active, whereas when sad they preferred a product described in more passive terms.     

Environmental Refugees: What Rights? Which Duties?

It is estimated that there could be 200 million‘environmental refugees’ by the middle of this century. One major environmental cause of population displacement is likely to be global climate change. As the situation is likely to become more pressing, it is vital to consider now the rights of environmental refugees and the duties of the rest of the world. However, this is not an issue that has been addressed in mainstream theories of global justice. This paper considers the potential of two leading liberal theories of international justice to address the particular issues raised by the plight of potential and actual environmental refugees. I argue that neither John Rawls’s ‘Law of Peoples’ approach nor Charles Beitz’s `cosmopolitanism' is capable of providing an adequate account of justice in this context. Beitz’s theory does have some advantages over Rawls’s approach but it fails to take proper account of the attachment that some people have to their own ‘home’. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Basic processes in reading: the effect of interletter spacing

Reading is acutely sensitive to the amount of space between letters within a string. In the present investigation, we explore the impairment caused by increasing interletter spacing when reading single words and nonwords aloud. Specifically, 2 hypotheses are tested: (a) whether increasing interletter spacing induces serial processing while reading aloud and (b) whether this serial processing results from an increased reliance on a serial sublexical mechanism similar to that implemented in dual route models of reading. Implications of the present results for understanding basic processes in reading are discussed with particular reference to different types of serial processing in reading aloud and the role of attention in reading.     

Twice upon a time: multiple concurrent temporal recalibrations of audiovisual speech

Audiovisual timing perception can recalibrate following prolonged exposure to asynchronous auditory and visual inputs. It has been suggested that this might contribute to achieving perceptual synchrony for auditory and visual signals despite differences in physical and neural signal times for sight and sound. However, given that people can be concurrently exposed to multiple audiovisual stimuli with variable neural signal times, a mechanism that recalibrates all audiovisual timing percepts to a single timing relationship could be dysfunctional. In the experiments reported here, we showed that audiovisual temporal recalibration can be specific for particular audiovisual pairings. Participants were shown alternating movies of male and female actors containing positive and negative temporal asynchronies between the auditory and visual streams. We found that audiovisual synchrony estimates for each actor were shifted toward the preceding audiovisual timing relationship for that actor and that such temporal recalibrations occurred in positive and negative directions concurrently. Our results show that humans can form multiple concurrent estimates of appropriate timing for audiovisual synchrony.     

Nonclinical use of online social networking sites: new and old challenges to medical professionalism

The AMA Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs (CEJA) has written a position paper on how social medical use challenges medical professionalism. The report offers persuasive ethical and practical guidelines for nonclinical internet use, specifically for social networking. This commentary provides a framework from which to apply these guidelines, but adds that there may be important situations in which physicians are not able to act in accordance. The guidelines call for professional reporting of questionable online portrayals or behaviors, but this commentary argues that this may be not only cumbersome to implement, but may violate aspects of constitutional rights. While online social networking may in many ways be a new application of old challenges, there may be other aspects that require novel approaches to medical professionalism.     

Lexical processing while deciding what task to perform: reading aloud in the context of the task set paradigm

The results of two experiments provide the first direct demonstration that subjects can process a word lexically despite concurrently being engaged in decoding a task cue telling them which of two tasks to perform. These results, taken together with others, point to qualitative differences between the mind‘s ability to engage in lexical versus sublexical processing during the time they are engaged with other tasks. The emerging picture is one in which some form of resource(s) plays little role during lexical processing whereas the need for some form of resource(s) during sublexical processing serves to bottleneck performance.     

Sorry not today: Self and temporary consumption denial

This research investigates the temporary involuntary loss of symbolically important, meaningful possessions and how consumers manage self identity in this situation. The losses explored occurred within the context of air travel and included where people accustomed to flying in business class had to travel in economy and where high status in a frequent flyer program was lost. Three stages of fieldwork were conducted; participant observation involving 50 international and domestic flights covering 110,000 miles, depth interviews and engagement online with a range of frequent flyer discussion communities. The short‐term, concealable nature of the losses allowed consumers to manipulate private and public meaning to avoid, where possible, the consequences of the loss on self identity. This study contributes by showing that both private and public meanings of lost possessions can be used in identity construction and how identity negotiation can be avoided. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The malleability of age-related positive gaze preferences: training to change gaze and mood

Older adults show positive gaze preferences, but to what extent are these preferences malleable? Examining the plasticity of age-related gaze preferences may provide a window into their origins. We therefore designed an attentional training procedure to assess the degree to which we could shift gaze and gaze-related mood in both younger and older adults. Participants completed either a positive or negative dot-probe training. Before and after the attentional training, we obtained measures of fixations to negatively valenced images along with concurrent mood ratings. We found differential malleability of gaze and mood by age: for young adults, negative training resulted in fewer posttraining fixations to the most negative areas of the images, whereas positive training appeared more successful in changing older adults' fixation patterns. Young adults did not differ in their moods as a function of training, whereas older adults in the train negative group had the worst moods after training. Implications for the etiology of age-related positive gaze preferences are considered.