Personal versus interpersonal contributions to depressive symptoms among Hong Kong adolescents

Cross‐cultural theory proposes that an essential distinction between cultures lies in the extent to which individual members see themselves as either independent agents preferentially valuing agency and efficacy, or as embedded within a social context preferentially valuing interpersonal relationships. A nonreferred sample of 605 boys and 503 girls from Hong Kong provided information regarding: (1) perceptions of their personal self‐efficacy or beliefs regarding their own ability to master challenges they face; (2) the degree of harmony in their interpersonal (peer and family) relationships; and (3) depressive symptoms as an assessment of their mood. Cognitive theories of emotions propose that both the individual's assessment of his/her self‐efficacy and of his/her relationships influence mood. Hypotheses, based on cross‐cultural theory, were that in this collective culture, interpersonal evaluations would predict more of the variance in mood than would personal self‐efficacy. Contrary to Western sex‐differences literature, it was predicted that the effect of interpersonal harmony on mood would be equally pronounced for girls and for boys. Structural equation modelling was used to test causal models. Consistent with findings from the West, evaluations of personal self‐efficacy as well as interpersonal relationship harmony were significantly associated with depressed mood. Consistent with cultural theory, interpersonal relationship harmony was more strongly associated with mood than was personal self‐efficacy for the entire sample of adolescents. In contrast to findings of sex differences in the salience of relationships in the West, the prediction of interpersonal relationships to mood was equal for boys and girls in Hong Kong. This preliminary study extends models of cognitive concomitants of mood disruption to a non‐Western culture, and provides a framework to understand relative contnbutors to mood in adolescence. The findings tentatively suggest that treatment for depressive mood in Chinese populations should prioritize enhancement of the perceived quality of interpersonal relationships over increasing a sense of mastery.     

The Hooded Man

The Hooded Man Paradox of Eubulides concerns the apparent failure of the substitutivity of identicals in epistemic (and other intentional) contexts. This paper formulates a number of different versions of the paradox and shows how these may be solved using semantics for quantified epistemic logic. In particular, two semantics are given which invalidate substitution, even when rigid designators are involved.     

Anger After Childbirth: An Overlooked Reaction To Postpartum Stressors

Other than postpartum depression, little is known about women's emotional responses to childbirth and subsequent stressors. Anger was explored on the basis of theory and evidence that it is a likely emotional response in this context. During their third trimester of pregnancy and approximately six weeks after delivery, 163 participants completed the Beck Depression Inventory and the anger subset of the Affect Balance Scale. A number of childbirth–relevant variables were examined as predictors of postpartum emotional response, controlling for prepartum levels and for the association between anger and depressed mood. As expected, a substantial group of women reported high levels of anger irrespective of depressed mood. Although the majority of variables predicted depressed mood, childcare stress, age, and religious self–identification were independently predictive of postpartum anger (all p values > .05). Implications for research and clinical intervention are discussed.     

Examining the Roles of Self-Objectification and Appearance Expectations in Young Women’s Indoor Tanning Behavior

Sex Roles - Indoor tanning among U.S. young women is a major public health concern that increases risk for skin cancer. Many young women engage in indoor tanning despite the risks, and prior...     

Longitudinal Effects of Latino Parent Cultural Stress,Depressive Symptoms,and Family Functioning on Youth Emotional Well‐Being and Health Risk Behaviors

U.S. Latino parents can face cultural stressors in the form of acculturative stress, perceived discrimination, and a negative context of reception. It stands to reason that these cultural stressors may negatively impact Latino youth's emotional well‐being and health risk behaviors by increasing parents' depressive symptoms and compromising the overall functioning of the family. To test this possibility, we analyzed data from a six‐wave longitudinal study with 302 recently immigrated (<5 years in the United States) Latino parents (74% mothers, M_age = 41.09 years) and their adolescent children (47% female, M_age = 14.51 years). Results of a cross‐lagged analysis indicated that parent cultural stress predicted greater parent depressive symptoms (and not vice versa). Both parent cultural stress and depressive symptoms, in turn, predicted lower parent‐reported family functioning, which mediated the links from parent cultural stress and depressive symptoms to youth alcohol and cigarette use. Parent cultural stress also predicted lower youth‐reported family functioning, which mediated the link from parent cultural stress to youth self‐esteem. Finally, mediation analyses indicated that parent cultural stress predicted youth alcohol use by a way of parent depressive symptoms and parent‐reported family functioning. Our findings point to parent depressive symptoms and family functioning as key mediators in the links from parent cultural stress to youth emotional well‐being and health risk behaviors. We discuss implications for research and preventive interventions.     

On the Dynamics of Conversation

There is a longstanding debate in the literature about static versus dynamic approaches to meaning and conversation. A formal result due to van Benthem ( 1986 , 1996 ) is often thought to be important for understanding what, conceptually speaking, is at issue in the debate. We introduce the concept of a conversation system, and we use it to clarify the import of van Benthem's result. We then distinguish two classes of conversation systems, corresponding to two concepts of staticness. The first class corresponds to a generalization of the class of systems that van Benthem's result concerns. These are the strongly static conversation systems. The second class is broader, and allows for a certain commonly recognized form of context sensitivity. These are the weakly static conversation systems. In the vein of van Benthem's result, we supply representation theorems which independently characterize these two varieties of conversation system. We observe that some canonically dynamic semantic systems correspond to weakly static conversation systems. We close by discussing some hazards that arise in trying to bring our formal results to bear on natural language phenomena, and on the debate about whether the compositional semantics for natural language should take a dynamic shape.     

'Geraniums (red) and Delphiniums (blue)': Trauma,Ethics, and Medical Communications

More official complaints about medical treatment in the UK relate to poor communications than to wrong diagnoses. This article, in considering the importance of communications training for clinicians, is structured into three sections. From use of a story that introduces the idea of miscommunication and trauma in the first section, the article moves, in the second, to a theorisation of trauma as a concept, addressing issues of intersubjectivity, the relationship between embodied and psychological being, and ethics. From this, the third section engages directly with medical communications training, exemplifying a particular literary-studies approach to matters of communication.     

The gestural repertoire of the wild bonobo (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Pan paniscus</Emphasis>): a mutually understood communication system

In animal communication, signallers and recipients are typically different: each signal is given by one subset of individuals (members of the same age, sex, or social rank) and directed towards another. However, there is scope for signaller–recipient interchangeability in systems where most signals are potentially relevant to all age–sex groups, such as great ape gestural communication. In this study of wild bonobos (Pan paniscus), we aimed to discover whether their gestural communication is indeed a mutually understood communicative repertoire, in which all individuals can act as both signallers and recipients. While past studies have only examined the expressed repertoire, the set of gesture types that a signaller deploys, we also examined the understood repertoire, the set of gestures to which a recipient reacts in a way that satisfies the signaller. We found that most of the gestural repertoire was both expressed and understood by all age and sex groups, with few exceptions, suggesting that during their lifetimes all individuals may use and understand all gesture types. Indeed, as the number of overall gesture instances increased, so did the proportion of individuals estimated to both express and understand a gesture type. We compared the community repertoire of bonobos to that of chimpanzees, finding an 88 % overlap. Observed differences are consistent with sampling effects generated by the species’ different social systems, and it is thus possible that the repertoire of gesture types available to Pan is determined biologically.     

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore,or How I Learned to Embrace My Inner Minecraft

This article briefly describes the history of the use of toys in child psychotherapy, from its early years with Anna Freud and Melanie Klein through modern electronic devices. The function and purpose of the use of toys is discussed with an eye toward what is the same as the field’s early pioneers and what might be different. Ultimately, the author contends that it is how the players use the toys and games in their relationship that is primary, echoing sentiments voiced by Anna Freud many years ago before the advent of Minecraft, GoPro, and smartphones.