Identifying Substance Abuse Issues in High Schools: A National Survey of High School Counselors

High school students consistently report the use of substances such as alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana. One of the people they would talk to about a substance use problem is their school counselor. A survey study was conducted with a national sample of 289 high school counselors. Results indicated that participants were clearly able to identify their practice limitations and future training needs in this area. Implications for training and recommendations for future research are discussed.     

Implicit Hopelessness and Condom Use Frequency: Exploring Nonconscious Predictors of Sexual Risk Behavior1

Current models of affect and health posit that affective disturbance influences health through behavioral pathways. The current research explores this hypothesis in the domain of sexual risk behavior by testing explicit and implicit hopelessness as predictors of condom use. Male and female undergraduates (n = 60) completed implicit and explicit measures of depression, hopelessness, and self‐reported condom use frequency. Findings revealed that implicit hopelessness predicted less condom use. However, this relationship was moderated by gender such that implicit hopelessness predicted less condom use for men, but not for women. The applicability of the findings to broader health theories is discussed.     

Gender bias and moral decision making: The moral orientations of justice and care

This study investigated gender related moral reasoning in student essays containing arguments on moral issues. Undergraduate students in a medical ethics course viewed two films on morally controversial issues. The students wrote brief essays about the films which were transcribed and numerically coded to conceal the author's gender from the evaluator. Using a coding scheme originated by Lyons, the evaluator classified each essay as a justice/right essay or a care/response essay or an equal response essay. Subsequently, calculations were made to determine the percentage of male authored essays that were justice/rights essays or care/response essays and the percentage of female authored essays that were justice/rights or care/response essays. The males (87.7%) tended to exhibit the justice/rights moral orientation, and the females (69.4%) exhibited the care/response moral orientation. Several different calculations were made to determine various degrees of gender related orientations also. The difference in orientation was highly statistically significant (p≤0.001). These data contribute to understanding moral orientation and development. Interpretations are given to explain some differences between the genders and help explain the traditional roles in society that males and females have played historically.     

Latina Mothers’ Involvement in an HIV/STI and Substance Use Prevention Program for Adolescents: A Parallel Intervention Curriculum

As part of a larger HIV/STI/Substance Abuse Prevention intervention targeted to middle school students, we offered students’ parents an opportunity to participate in an adult education class. The same curricular materials were used for students enrolled in the intervention and for their parents. In the current study, mothers who had completed the adult education class participated in a focus group. The focus group explored what components of the intervention were perceived by mothers as particularly useful to them or to their child. Three core themes emerged from interpretive analyses of the focus group: (1) positive relationships with intervention staff and school personnel enticed students to participate in the intervention and facilitated parents’ involvement; (2) both students and parents felt respected and empowered by the intervention’s cornerstone values and curricular philosophy of cultural richness and pride in Hispanic/Latino heritage; and (3) mothers perceived their mastery of the course content—materially wholly dedicated to the health and wellness of their children—benefitted them in terms of both understanding the material and potentially allowing mothers to discuss health-oriented behavior with their young adolescent child.     

Maternal Depression and Child Psychopathology: A Meta-Analytic Review

Although the association between maternal depression and adverse child outcomes is well established, the strength of the association, the breadth or specificity of the outcomes, and the role of moderators are not known. This information is essential to inform not only models of risk but also the design of preventive interventions by helping to identify subgroups at greater risk than others and to elucidate potential mechanisms as targets of interventions. A meta-analysis of 193 studies was conducted to examine the strength of the association between mothers’ depression and children’s behavioral problems or emotional functioning. Maternal depression was significantly related to higher levels of internalizing, externalizing, and general psychopathology and negative affect/behavior and to lower levels of positive affect/behavior, with all associations small in magnitude. These associations were significantly moderated by theoretically and methodologically relevant variables, with patterns of moderation found to vary somewhat with each child outcome. Results are interpreted in terms of implications for theoretical models that move beyond main effects models in order to more accurately identify which children of depressed mothers are more or less at risk for specific outcomes.     

Doing gender in the bedroom: investing in gender norms and the sexual experience

People often believe that they must be consistent with gender norms to obtain others' approval. The authors believe people who invest in gender norms tend to base self-esteem on others' approval, which undermines their sexual autonomy and ultimately diminishes their sexual satisfaction in intimate relationships. A survey of 309 sexually active college students examined whether placing importance on conforming to gender norms undermines sexual relationships because of its link to basing self-worth on others' approval and decreased sexual autonomy. Using structural equation modeling, the authors found that valuing gender conformity (but not avoiding gender deviance) negatively affects sexual pleasure for both men and women through increased contingency on others' approval and restricted sexual autonomy. The model fit the data for both men and women.     

Modeling effects of rhythmic context on perceived duration: a comparison of interval and entrainment approaches to short-interval timing

Relative merits of interval and entrainment conceptions of the internal clock were assessed within a common theoretical framework by 4 time-judgment experiments. The timing of tone onsets marking the beginning and ending of standard and comparison time intervals relative to a context rhythm were manipulated: onsets were on time, early, or late relative to the implied rhythm, and 2 distinct accuracy patterns emerged. A quadratic ending profile indicated best performance when the standard ended on time and worst performance when it was early or late, whereas a flat beginning profile (Experiments 1-3) indicated uniform performance for the 3 expectancy conditions. Only in Experiment 4, in which deviations from expected onset times were large, did significant effects of beginning times appear in time-discrimination thresholds and points of subjective equality. Findings are discussed in the context of theoretical assumptions about clock resetting, the representation of time, and independence of successive time intervals.     

Comprehension of televised stories by preschool children with ADHD.

Investigated visual attention to and story comprehension of televised stories in 4- to 6-year-old children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and comparison children. Half of the children in each group watched the program with toys in the room, and the other half watched without toys. Visual attention to the television was recorded, and story comprehension was assessed by performance on cued recall questions. All children attended significantly less when toys were present, but the difference when toys were present was greater for children with ADHD. The groups did not differ on recall of factual information when toys were absent. When toys were present, the comparison children showed no decrement in performance on factual questions, whereas the performance of children with ADHD was significantly worse. On questions testing causal connections, the children with ADHD performed more poorly than comparison children regardless of whether toys were present. Implications of these results for understanding and treating the academic and social difficulties of children with ADHD are discussed.     

Story Comprehension in Children with ADHD

A wealth of research is available examining children's story comprehension. However, little attention has been directed toward understanding the story comprehension of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The present paper attempts to integrate the developmental literature on children's story comprehension with the little that is known about the story comprehension processes of children with ADHD. This review is guided by a network model of story representation that emphasizes the structure of causal and enabling relations between story events. Examination of the available studies indicates that children with ADHD lag behind their peers in their understanding of causal relations, and that their attentional problems may contribute to difficulties in understanding factual information in the preschool years and causally related information in the elementary years. Some evidence also is presented suggesting that children with ADHD are less effective in taking advantage of story structure features in guiding their recall of story events. Suggestions for future research are offered that would elaborate our knowledge of the developmental progression in the processing of complex information by children with ADHD.