GENDER AND SERIOUS MENTAL ILLNESS: A Feminist Perspective

Perhaps in reaction to criticisms of woman as problem formulations, psychological literature has nearly ignored women with serious mental illnesses (SMI), although epidemiological research indicates that women are overrepresented in these diagnoses. Data are presented on characteristics, functioning, and services received for a sample of nearly 2,500 SMI clients. Statistical clustering of clients with similar profiles produced four out of six clusters with significant differences in proportions of female versus male clients represented. The results indicate that the extent to which SMI clients display gender-related symptoms and behaviors is a significant factor in clinician perceptions and in service utilization. However, results also show substantial overlap in gender composition of the clusters. Discussion centers on the quality of care and appropriateness of services for female clients. Future research is suggested, utilizing a feminist understanding of women's diversity and of sociopolitical factors related to mental health.     

Race,Exclusionary Discipline,and Connectedness to Adults in Secondary Schools

This study examines racial differences in students' connectedness to school adults and considers the possibility that disparities in exclusionary discipline practices may reduce all students' sense of connection to educators, not just those who have been disciplined or are from racial groups overrepresented in out‐of‐school suspensions. Data sources include a self‐report survey of secondary school students (n = 29,148) linked to administrative data (n = 107 schools) from a large urban district. Multilevel modeling techniques were used to estimate the relationships between students' racial background, youths' connection to school adults, and school‐level racial discipline gaps. Controlling for school racial composition, gender, grade level and other covariates, students of color were significantly less likely to feel connected to school adults than their White peers. Additionally, the racial discipline gap was significantly and negatively associated with connectedness for all students. Results indicate that strategies to improve educational outcomes for youth of color need to attend to relational dynamics between students and school adults. Research findings also suggest that efforts to reduce discipline disparities may improve all students' connectedness.     

Media representations of majority and minority groups

This research series replicated and extended earlier findings of Gardikiotis, Martin, and Hewstone ( 2004 ), who examined via content analysis UK media representations of numeric majority and minority groups. Using news articles from North and South Dakota, where majority/minority population characteristics mirror those of the UK in terms of number and power, Study 1 replicated the patterns of results found in Gardikiotis et al. Study 2, in which articles from California newspapers were analyzed, yielded findings contrary to Gardikiotis et al. and our Dakota analyses: Minority headlines were more frequent in California, and majority articles were longer than minority articles. Consistent with UK and Dakotas findings, majority headlines in California were associated with politics and identity adjectives, whereas minority headlines were linked to social issues and ethnicity‐based adjectives. Arguably, these differences occurred because in California, unlike the UK and the Dakotas, Whites are not simultaneously the social power and the numeric majority. Variations in power and number associated with majority and minority status were discussed in explaining differences across contexts, and in signaling possible shortcomings in the conceptualization and methods used to investigate minority and majority influence. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Children's and adults' processing of anomaly and implausibility during reading: evidence from eye movements

The eye movements of 24 children and 24 adults were monitored to compare how they read sentences containing plausible, implausible, and anomalous thematic relations. In the implausible condition the incongruity occurred due to the incompatibility of two objects involved in the event denoted by the main verb. In the anomalous condition the direct object of the verb was not a possible verb argument. Adults exhibited immediate disruption with the anomalous sentences as compared to the implausible sentences as indexed by longer gaze durations on the target word. Children exhibited the same pattern of effects as adults as far as the anomalous sentences were concerned, but exhibited delayed effects of implausibility. These data indicate that while children and adults are alike in their basic thematic assignment processes during reading, children may be delayed in the efficiency with which they are able to integrate pragmatic and real-world knowledge into their discourse representation.