Enrichment and Stress in Families Caring for a Child with a Serious Emotional Disorder

We examined enrichment and stress in 214 families who had children with severe emotional disorders. Caregivers' ratings of enrichment and stress were obtained through a newly developed instrument, the Effects of the Situation Questionnaire, which used parallel items covering 17 life areas. While ratings of stress were generally higher than enrichment, caregivers reported some enrichment in areas encompassing self concept and family relationships, Bivariate and multivariate analyses using various child, family, and service-system variables revealed that stress was notably associated with severity of the child's disorder, low empowerment, and a lack of coordination among service providers. Enrichment was unrelated to severity but associated with high empowerment and spiritual support. Our findings suggest that families' experiences of caregiving can have both positive and negative aspects and that a comprehensive approach to serving and studying families should take both into account.     

The New Old-Fashioned Girl: Effects of Gender and Social Desirability on Reported Gender-Role Ideology

In order to assess the effects of socialdesirability on (1) reported gender-role ideology and(2) the relative acceptance of rape myths, a shortsocial desirability (SD) scale was integrated into aquestionnaire containing items from both attitude sets.Participants were 160 university students. Less than 5%of the sample was of other than European ethnicity. Agender by SD interaction was predicted, wherein high SD would predict more feminist beliefs for men;the relationship was expected to be less strong forwomen. Although a significant gender by SD interactionwas found, the pattern of results was unexpected. SD did not predict attitudes for men, and womenwho were high in SD actually reported more traditionalgender-role attitudes and were more accepting of rapemyths than women lower in SD. Interpretations and implications of these unexpected findingsare discussed.     

Revisiting the relationship between attributional style and academic performance

Previous research into the relationship between attributions and academic performance has produced contradictory findings that have not been resolved. The present research examines the role of specific dimensions of attributional style in predicting subsequent academic performance in a sample of pupils (N = 979) from both high‐ and low‐achieving schools. Hierarchical regression and moderation analyses indicate that internal, stable, and global, attributional styles for positive events predict higher levels of academic performance. Global attributions for negative events were related to poorer performance across all schools. Stable attributions for negative events were related to higher levels of performance in high‐achieving schools but not in low‐achieving schools. Higher levels of internality for negative events were associated with higher performance only in low achieving schools.     

Social Determinants of HIV Among Men Who Have Sex with Men in Cape Town

Little is known about how social factors influence vulnerability to, and consequences of, HIV infection among men who have sex with men (MSM) in South Africa. This study aimed to analyse social stratification and its links with HIV among MSM in Cape Town, South Africa. Six interviews and six focus group discussions (n = 25) were conducted. Tools were based on the World Health Organisation’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health framework. Directed content analysis was used to analyse data. Race and education were directly linked to social position. MSM from lower social positions were more vulnerable to HIV, and had more negative consequences of HIV infection, compared to wealthier MSM. Engagement with community leaders, health workers and police to promote inclusion could reduce vulnerability of MSM to HIV. Increased access to free, non-discriminatory HIV-related services would reduce inequities in access to HIV services by MSM.     

Self-affirmation and affective forecasting: Affirmation reduces the anticipated impact of negative events

When forecasting how they will feel in the future, people overestimate the impact that imagined negative events will have on their affective states, partly because they underestimate their own psychological resiliency. Because self-affirmation enhances resiliency, two studies examined whether self-affirmation prior to forecasting reduces the extremity of affective forecasts. Participants in self-affirmation conditions completed a values scale or wrote an essay asserting their most important value, whereas participants in the no-affirmation condition asserted a relatively unimportant value. Participants then predicted their affective reactions to a negative or positive imagined event. In both studies, self-affirmation reduced the unpleasant affect expected to result from a negative event, but had no impact on affective forecasts for a positive event. This pattern was mediated by participants’ cognitive appraisals of the imagined event, but not by differential focus on that event. Results are consistent with self-affirmation activating or enhancing psychological resiliency to counteract immune neglect during affective forecasting of a negative event.     

Grammatical Encoding in Aphasia: Evidence from a “Processing Prosthesis”

Agrammatic aphasia is characterized by severely reduced grammatical structure in spoken and written language, often accompanied by apparent insensitivity to grammatical structure in comprehension. Does agrammatism represent loss of linguistic competence or rather performance factors such as memory or resource limitations? A considerable body of evidence supports the latter hypothesis in the domain of comprehension. Here we present the first strong evidence for the performance hypothesis in the domain of production: an augmentative communication system that markedly increases the grammatical structure of agrammatic speech while providing no linguistic information, functioning merely to reduce on-line processing demands. Copyright 2000 Academic Press and Unisys Corporation.