Stigma and Psychological Distress in People With HIV/AIDS

Using a community sample of 197 people living with HIV/AIDS, we examined how awareness of societal stigma (felt stigma) and negative feelings toward oneself as a member of a stigmatized group (self-stigma) are related to psychological well-being. Both felt stigma and self-stigma were significantly correlated with symptoms of depression and anxiety, but controlling for felt stigma reduced self-stigma's association with depressive symptoms to nonsignificance. Global self-esteem and social avoidance fully mediated the associations between self-stigma and distress but only partially mediated the associations between felt stigma and distress. Felt stigma mediated the relationship between distress and HIV-related changes in physical appearance.     

Gambling counselling in Australia: focus on cognitive counselling techniques

A number of specialised counselling services are now available to assist individuals who experience difficulties as a result of problem gambling behaviour. Clinicians within these services may utilise one or a number of counselling approaches depending on their own preferences and their assessment of the counselling style suitable for use with particular clients. The purpose of this paper is twofold. The first is to describe the range of specialised gambling counselling services now available in Australia. The second aim is to provide clinicians in the field with a range of practical cognitive counselling strategies that may be used to good effect to assist clients to reassess their attitudes towards and thoughts about gambling.     

Informed Consent at Gunpoint: When Psychiatry Affects Gun Ownership

As states take more steps to connect patients’ gun ownership to their mental health, psychiatrists are being asked to provide mental health information after clinical interviews as well as after confiscation. This move into the patient–physician relationship raises new questions about how psychiatrists should obtain informed consent when interviews may result in reports to legal authorities. Consent warnings are already practiced more in the breach than in the observance and informed consent is imperfect at its best. In communities torn by controversies surrounding gun control, vehement political views will further influence these established themes to result in unprecedented pressures on patient confidentiality. This analysis draws on new movements in ethical theory and behavioral medicine that go beyond balancing principles to question the use of psychiatry in firearm reporting, and support a vigorous practice of informed consent to protect both individuals and the communities they live in. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

REFEREES' DECISION MAKING ABOUT TRANSGRESSIONS: THE INFLUENCE OF PLAYER GENDER AT THE HIGHEST NATIONAL LEVEL

Prior research has found that referees are harsher toward sporting offenses in regional-level matches between women than in regional-level matches between men. We tested whether this bias also occurs at a higher, national level of competition, despite the greater pressures for objectivity and fairness at this level. Referees' decisions were examined in 15 national-level handball matches between women and 15 national-level handball matches between men after transgressions that varied in severity. The results suggest that referees made harsher decisions in female than in male matches. Although more research is needed, this study supported the hypothesis that referees may use the gender of players as a powerful judgmental heuristic for deciding how to respond to aggression.     

AN INVESTMENT MODEL ANALYSIS OF RELATIONSHIP STABILITY AMONG WOMEN COURT-MANDATED TO VIOLENCE INTERVENTIONS

This investigation examined relationship stability among 60 women court-mandated to violence interventions by applying a general model (i.e., Rusbult's 1980 Investment Model) to predict intentions to leave current relationships. As in past research, results showed that Investment Model predictions were supported such that court-mandated women who reported lesser relationship satisfaction, greater alternatives, and fewer investments in current relationships endorsed lower levels of commitment and greater intentions to leave those relationships. Secondary analyses showed that court-mandated women's violence perpetration and experiences of being victimized were minimally related to model factors or women's intentions to leave. Taken together, results of this study provide additional evidence that general models should be used to predict relationship termination decisions among women involved in violent relationships, and violence experiences alone do not affect that decision.     

Prototypicality in sentence production

Three cued-recall experiments examined the effect of category typicality on the ordering of words in sentence production. Past research has found that typical items tend to be mentioned before atypical items in a phrase—a pattern usually associated with lexical variables (like word frequency), and yet typicality is a conceptual variable. Experiment 1 revealed that an appropriate conceptual framework was necessary to yield the typicality effect. Experiment 2 tested ad hoc categories that do not have prior representations in long-term memory and yielded no typicality effect. Experiment 3 used carefully matched sentences in which two category members appeared in the same or in different phrases. Typicality affected word order only when the two words appeared in the same phrase. These results are consistent with an account in which typicality has its origin in conceptual structure, which leads to differences in lexical accessibility in appropriate contexts.     

Individual differences in insular sensitivity during loss anticipation predict avoidance learning

The anterior insula has been implicated in both the experience and the anticipation of negative outcomes. Although individual differences in insular sensitivity have been associated with self-report measures of chronic anxiety, previous research has not examined whether individual differences in insular sensitivity predict learning to avoid aversive stimuli. In the present study, insular sensitivity was assessed as participants anticipated monetary losses while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. We found that insular responsiveness to anticipated losses predicted participants' ability to learn to avoid losses (but not to approach gains) in a behavioral test several months later. These findings suggest that in addition to correlating with self-reported anxiety, heightened insular sensitivity may promote learning to avoid loss.     

Social information processing and cardiac predictors of adolescent antisocial behavior

The relations among social information processing (SIP), cardiac activity, and antisocial behavior were investigated in adolescents over a 3-year period (from ages 16 to 18) in a community sample of 585 (48% female, 17% African American) participants. Antisocial behavior was assessed in all 3 years. Cardiac and SIP measures were collected between the first and second behavioral assessments. Cardiac measures assessed resting heart rate (RHR) and heart rate reactivity (HRR) as participants imagined themselves being victimized in hypothetical provocation situations portrayed via video vignettes. The findings were moderated by gender and supported a multiprocess model in which antisocial behavior is a function of trait-like low RHR (for male individuals only) and deviant SIP. In addition, deviant SIP mediated the effects of elevated HRR reactivity and elevated RHR on antisocial behavior (for male and female participants).     

The developmental mental-disorder histories of adults with posttraumatic stress disorder: a prospective longitudinal birth cohort study

Clinical and epidemiologic studies have established that posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is highly comorbid with other mental disorders. However, such studies have largely relied on adults' retrospective reports to ascertain comorbidity. The authors examined the developmental mental health histories of adults with PTSD using data on mental disorders assessed across the first 3 decades of life among members of the longitudinal Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study; 100% of those diagnosed with past-year PTSD and 93.5% of those with lifetime PTSD at age 26 had met criteria for another mental disorder between ages 11 and 21. Most other mental disorders had first onsets by age 15. Of new cases of PTSD arising between ages 26 and 32, 96% had a prior mental disorder and 77% had been diagnosed by age 15. These data suggest PTSD almost always develops in the context of other mental disorders. Research on the etiology of PTSD may benefit from taking lifetime developmental patterns of comorbidity into consideration. Juvenile mental-disorder histories may help indicate which individuals are most likely to develop PTSD in populations at high risk of trauma exposure.