Mental Health, Social Environment and Sexual Risk Behaviors of Adolescent Service Users: A Gender Comparison

We examined individual mental health problems (depression, conduct disorder, and substance abuse) and social environment (family, peer, and neighborhood) factors associated with the sexual risk behaviors of male and female adolescents. Interviews with 778 adolescents, aged 14 to 18, showed that both mental health problems and social environment were related to adolescents' involvement in sexual risk behaviors. Conduct disorder symptoms, substance abuse or dependence symptoms, and the interaction between peer misbehavior and neighborhood problems were significantly associated with risky sexual behaviors. Peer misbehavior was a particularly strong factor related to sexual risk behaviors for youths who lived in neighborhoods with multiple problems. The only gender differences were found in age, with older males more likely to report engaging in high risk sexual behaviors. This study suggests the utility of multidimensional intervention strategies to deal with various adolescent problem behaviors, including risky sexual behaviors, within the context of their social environment.     

Reviews: Books

ZEN MASTERS: A MAVERICK, A MASTER OF MASTERS, AND A WANDERING POET. By John Stevens, 161 pp. Kodansha International: Tokyo/NY/London, 1999. $13.00. THE DEVELOPING MIND: TOWARD A NEUROBIOLOGY OF INTERPERSONAL EXPERIENCE. By Daniel J. Siegel. 394 pp. New York: The Guilford Press, 1999. $37.95. JESUS: A PSYCHOLOGICAL BIOGRAPHY. By Donald Capps. 288 pp. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2000. $29.99.     

Grammatical awareness in the spoken and written language of language-disabled children

Experiments examined grammatical judgement, and error-identification deficits in relation to expressive language skills and to morphemic errors in writing. Language-disabled subjects did not differ from language-matched controls on judgement, revision, or error identification. Age-matched controls represented more morphemes in elicited writing than either of the other groups, which were equivalent. However, in spontaneous writing, language-disabled subjects made more frequent morphemic errors than age-matched controls, but language-matched subjects did not differ from either group. Proficiency relative to academic experience and oral language status and to remedial implications are discussed.     

Memory for modality of presentation: Within-modality discrimination

Two experiments demonstrated that Ss are capable of making within-modality memory discriminations in both visual and auditory modalities. In Experiment I Ss studied mixed lists of pictures and labels representing common objects and were subsequently required to judge whether the original presentation was pictorial or verbal The high level of performance achieved on this task was unaffected by degree of categorical relatedness of items within method of presentation or by instructions to produce visual images when items were presented verbally. In Experiment II Ss demonstrated the ability to remember whether a sentence was originally presented by a male or a female speaker. Some strategies by which within-modality discrimination in memory might be accomplished are discussed.