Personal Loss,Parental Relationships,and Caregiving Intentions among Adult Siblings of Individuals with Mental Illness

Journal of Child and Family Studies - Although parents often provide care for adult children coping with serious mental illness, adult siblings are typically expected to assume caregiving...     

Predictors of mental distress and poor physical health among homeless women

Abstract

We tested a latent variable path model in which situational, personal, and social resources predicted several mediators and the key health outcomes of mental distress and poor physical health among 871 homeless women. Mental distress was predicted by risky sexual behavior, less social support, avoidant coping, less self-esteem, client abuse history, social support from deviant sources, less drug self-efficacy and health care utilization. Poor physical health was predicted by a client abuse history, less drug self-efficacy, fewer perceived rewards for drug use, higher perceived costs for drug use, and a doctor visit. Current risky sexual behavior was predicted by a parent drug abuse history, less drug self-efficacy, and more social support from deviant sources. Current drug use was predicted by parent drug abuse history, less drug self-efficacy, more social support from deviant sources and by high perceived costs for drug use. Implications of results for intervention and theory are discussed.     

Attentional priming releases crowding

Views of natural scenes unfold over time, and objects of interest that were present a moment ago tend to remain present. While visual crowding places a fundamental limit on object recognition in cluttered scenes, most studies of crowding have suffered from the limitation that they typically involved static scenes. The role of temporal continuity in crowding has therefore been unaddressed. We investigated intertrial effects upon crowding in visual scenes, showing that crowding is considerably diminished when objects remain constant on consecutive visual search trials. Repetition of both the target and distractors decreases the critical distance for crowding from flankers. More generally, our results show how object continuity through between-trial priming releases objects that would otherwise be unidentifiable due to crowding. Crowding, although it is a significant bottleneck on object recognition, can be mitigated by statistically likely temporal continuity of the objects. Crowding therefore depends not only on what is momentarily present, but also on what was previously attended.     

Manual rotation training improves direction-estimations in a virtual environmental space

This study investigated in a virtual environment, whether the training of a small-scale ability, i.e., manual or mental rotation, has an influence on the large-scale ability to estimate a direction. Ninety-six participants completed a direction estimation task as a pretest and then received either a manual rotation or a mental rotation training or played a nonspatial computer game. After that they completed the direction estimation task once again. The results showed that the direction estimation error decreased from the pre- to posttest only for the manual rotation training group. For that, the small-scale spatial ability was at least partially related to the large-scale ability, which supports the Partial Dissociation Model.     

Oral health and dental well‐being: testing a self‐determination theory model

This study tested a self‐determination theory (SDT) process model of oral health and subjective dental well‐being. The results showed that: (1) patients' perceptions of autonomy‐supportive dental professionals were significantly positively predictive of patients' psychological needs satisfaction in treatment; (2) needs satisfaction was significantly related to perceived dental competence (positive), autonomous motivation (positive), and controlled motivation (negative) for dental care; (3) perceived competence was significantly positively, and controlled motivation was significantly negatively associated with self‐rated oral health and oral‐health‐related quality of life; (4) autonomous motivation for dental treatment was significantly positively associated with valuing continued dental treatment; and (5) the three oral‐health‐related variables were all significantly positively linked to subjective dental well‐being. A structural equation model supported the SDT process model.     

The Creation of Ideals: A Question of the Energy-Distribution in the Personality Field

Semantic contrast occurs when Ss' ratings of the meaning of a word shift as a function of the context in which that word occurs. The current set of studies, using male and female undergraduates as Ss, was designed to determine the conditions necessary to produce semantic contrast. In Experiment 1 (N = 50), words referring to physical beauty and temperature were scaled and used to construct stimuli for subsequent experiments. In Experiment 2 (N = 72), contrast occurred with the temperature expressions with both a limited and extended response mode. However, no contrast effects occurred with either response mode for the expressions of beauty in Experiment 3 (N = 72). These findings suggest that the elaboration of information in semantic memory varies. To the extent that there is an elaborate representation, items will be resistant to contextual effects, while the meaning of less-elaborated items will be affected by the context in which they are experienced.     

Walker on the voluntariness of judgment 1

In his paper ‘The Voluntariness of Judgment’ Mark Thomas Walker claims that judgments are voluntary acts. According to Walker, theoretical reasoning can be seen as an instance of practical reasoning, and the outcomes of practical reasoning are actions. There are two reasons why Walker's argument does not establish this conclusion: (i) There are non‐reflective judgments which cannot reasonably be described as instances of practical reasoning; Walker's argument does not apply to these judgments, (ii) If one judges that p as a result of deliberation, one has had no choice sincerely to judge as well that non‐p instead of p, that is, one cannot judge contrary to one's evidence. Therefore, reflective judgments are not voluntary actions. Walker cannot show that reflective judgments are voluntary, because he fails to give a clear notion of a voluntary action and the role of choice.