Cystic Fibrosis Prenatal Screening in Genetic Counseling Practice: Recommendations of the National Society of Genetic Counselors

For over a decade, prenatal screening for cystic fibrosis (CF) has been considered a model for the integration of genetic testing into routine medical practice. Data from pilot studies and public policy discourse have led to recommendations by some professional organizations that CF screening should be offered or made available to pregnant women and their partners, and to couples planning a pregnancy. It is crucial that genetic counselors gain thorough understanding of the complexities of CF and the implications of positive test results, so that they may serve as a reliable, educated referral base and resource for health care providers and their patients. While not all pregnant women will be referred for genetic counseling prior to CF carrier testing, genetic counselors often will be asked to counsel clients after they have a positive test result, or who are found to be at increased risk. Genetic counselors can play an important role in providing accurate and current information as well as support for patients informed decisions. These recommendations were created by a multicenter working group of genetic counselors with expertise in CF and are based on personal clinical experience, review of pertinent English language medical articles, and reports of expert committees. The recommendations should not be construed as dictating an exclusive course of management, nor does the use of such recommendations guarantee a particular outcome. These recommendations do not displace a health care providers professional judgment based on the clinical circumstances of a particular client.     

Anxiety modulates the degree of attentive resources required to process emotional faces

The present study contributes to the ongoing debate over the extent to which attentive resources are required for emotion perception. Although fearful facial expressions are strong competitors for attention, we predict that the magnitude of this effect may be modulated by anxiety. To test this hypothesis, healthy volunteers who varied in their self-reported levels of trait and state anxiety underwent an attentional blink task. Both fearful and happy facial expressions were subject to a strong attentional blink effect for low-anxious individuals. For those reporting high anxiety, a blink occurred for both fearful and happy facial expressions, but the magnitude of the attentional blink was significantly reduced for the fearful expressions. This supports the proposals that emotion perception is not fully automatic and that anxiety is related to a reduced ability to inhibit the processing of threat-related stimuli. Thus, individual differences in self-reported anxiety are an important determinant of the attentional control of emotional processing.     

The Association between Religious Discrimination and Health: Disaggregating by Types of Discrimination Experiences,Religious Tradition,and Forms of Health

Research finds that experiences of religious discrimination are often associated with poorer health outcomes. However, there remain important questions to consider gaps, including whether religious discrimination has similar health impacts on religious minority groups and religious majority groups, whether religious discrimination is equally harmful for both mental and physical health, and whether specific types of discrimination have different impacts on health. Using survey data from a probability sample of U.S. adults and measures representing a variety of discrimination experience types, our analyses suggest that religious discrimination is indeed harmful for health, but that experiences of religious discrimination do not universally affect mental and physical health in the same ways. Rather than significant differences in the health impacts of religious discrimination across different religious groups, we find more variation in the health impacts of different types of experiences with discrimination. Further, we find that mental health is negatively impacted by a wider range of experiences with religious discrimination than physical health. These findings are in line with social psychological research on the differential health impacts of discrimination, and they highlight the importance of context in studies of the health effects of religious discrimination.     

Perceptual grouping and visual selective attention

The present study demonstrates that incongruent distractor letters at a constant distance from a target letter produce more response competition and negative priming when they share a target’s color than when they have a different color. Moreover, perceptual grouping by means of color, attenuated the effects of spatial proximity. For example, when all items were presented in the same color, near distractors produced more response competition and negative priming than far distractors (Experiment 3A). However, when near distractors were presented in a different color and far distractors were presented in the same color as the target, the response competition × distractor proximity interaction was eliminated and the proximity × negative priming interaction was reversed (Experiment 3B). A final experiment demonstrated that distractors appearing on the same object as a selected target produced comparable amounts of response competition and negative priming whether they were near or far from the target. This suggests that the inhibitory mechanisms of visual attention can be directed to perceptual groups/objects in the environment and not only to unsegmented regions of visual space.     

Book Reviews

Pastoral Psychology -     

EMOTIONAL CONTAGION Gender and Occupational Differences

Theorists have proposed that men and women and those in various occupational groups should differ in their susceptibility to primitive emotional contagion. Study 1 was designed to explore the extent to which gender and occupation affected respondents' self-reports of emotional contagion, as measured by the Emotional Contagion (EC) scale. As predicted, women in a variety of occupations secured higher total EC scores than did men. Study 2 was designed to determine the extent to which gender affected self-reports of emotional contagion (again as measured by the EC scale) and actual responsiveness to others' emotions. As predicted, women received higher EC scores, reported sharing the targets' emotions to a greater extent, and were rated by judges as displaying more emotional contagion than did men.     

Methodological issues in prevention research: An introduction to the special issue

In recent years increased attention has been directed to prevention research as a means of solving the multitude of complex social and health problems which confront individuals and their societies. Abuse of substances, behavioral dysfunctions, violence, emotional disorders, educational failures, unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases are but a few examples of these most difficult problems. As our recognition of the need for sound prevention strategies has grown, so has our sophistication in designing prevention research studies to evaluate the effectiveness of these new strategies. And that sophistication has brought new challenges, some of which are capable of stifling progress because of their complexity. This problem is certain to grow in importance as interventions with multiple components are used more frequently to meet the challenges of the complex social and health problems we face. This special issue evolved out of the recognition that prevention researchers are confronted by a myriad of difficult methodological issues which have inhibited progress in this area. The articles in the issue present innovative methodological solutions designed to overcome these problems so the field can move forward. Editor's Note: Dr. Edward Seidman edited Methodological Issues in Prevention Research while serving as Associate Editor for Methodology.     

Models of positive and negative symptoms in schizophrenia: an empirical evaluation of latent structures

The present investigation empirically evaluated three competing models of the relations between positive and negative symptoms in schizophrenia, namely the severity-liability model (Gottesman, McGuffin, & Farmer, 1987), Andreasen's unidimensional bipolar model (Andreasen & Olsen, 1982), and Crow's independent dual-process model (Crow, 1980a, 1980b). Using positive and negative symptom ratings based on 220 schizophrenic subjects, the results of a LISREL VI (Joreskog & Sorbom, 1984) confirmatory factor analysis revealed that Crow's model of positive and negative symptoms provided the best fit to the observed data among the three models. The severity-liability model provided a modest fit to observed data, and Andreasen's model fit the data poorly. Results are interpreted as supporting the validity of the positive and negative symptom distinction in schizophrenia and as providing substantive empirical support for Crow's independent dual-process model. The methodological advantages of confirmatory factor analysis in the specification and evaluation of theoretical models in experimental and developmental psychopathology are discussed.