Gray Matters: A Deployed Physician’s Perspective on Combat Medicine in Iraq

A female physician who was serving as a first-year medicine resident in Manhattan in September 2001 writes this paper. It details her experience of signing up for military service as a result of the September 11th attack on the United States. She lays out the surroundings, atmosphere, and reactions of those around her during the attack and details her own personal motivations for joining the military, her need to take control and help those in need heal while also trying to heal herself. Grateful, yet haunted by her experience, she provides an intimate glimpse into her time serving as a combat physician at a trauma hospital in Balad, Iraq during the 2007 military surge. A trained geriatrician and palliative care physician she recounts the stories of several patients that have forever shaped her life and explores the contradictions and ethical challenges she faced while caring for them ultimately struggling with the uncertainty of whether what she was truly doing was good for those she served or herself.     

Implicit theories moderate the relation of positive future fantasies to academic outcomes

We hypothesized and observed that the degree to which students endorsed entity theories - the view that intelligence is fixed rather than malleable - attenuated the affective benefits and exacerbated the achievement drawbacks of positive fantasies in the academic domain. Positive fantasies only predicted low anger and anxiety for schoolchildren who did not strongly endorse entity theories (Study 1), and positive fantasies only predicted poor final school grades for vocational students who did strongly endorse entity theories (Study 2). An experiment indicated that for university students with stronger entity theories, positive fantasies demanded relatively little attention (Study 3), suggesting that positive fantasies obscure the opportunity for the preemptive self-regulation which promotes successful performance.     

Public house patrons' engagement in hypothetical sexual assault: a test of Alcohol Myopia Theory in a field setting

Previous research has found that drinking establishments are often antecedent to sexual aggression outcomes. In this study, male participants were randomly selected from public houses (i.e., "pubs") and asked to imagine themselves in a hypothetical intimate encounter in which the female in the scenario stops consenting to sexual contact. Participants were given the option to continue making sexual advances up to and including sexual intercourse against the woman's will. It was hypothesized based on Alcohol Myopia Theory that participant blood alcohol concentration (BAC) levels would be associated with hypothetical sexual aggression when stereotypical cues of a woman's sexual availability (revealing clothing and alcohol use) were present in the scenario. Men's engagement in hypothetical sexual aggression was associated with BAC levels, but only when the woman was wearing revealing clothing. The sobriety of the female actor was not associated with sexual aggression. Results indicate that Alcohol Myopia Theory generalizes to a field setting.     

Predictors of treatment attendance among adolescent substance abusing runaways: a comparison of family and individual therapy modalities

This study explored and compared predictors of session attendance among substance abusing runaway adolescents and their parents using three manual‐driven interventions: ecologically‐based family therapy (EBFT), motivational enhancement therapy (MET), and the community reinforcement approach (CRA). Individual and family‐level variables, as well as time between intake and first session were used as predictors of session attendance. Adolescents (N=179) between the ages of 12–17 years old were recruited from the only runaway shelter in Columbus, Ohio. The findings showed that adolescents assigned to EBFT were more likely to attend at least one therapy session than those assigned to either CRA or MET. Fewer days between intake and the first therapy session were associated with higher family therapy attendance. Overall, individual and family factors predicted therapy attendance but these factors differed depending upon the treatment modality.     

Cognition and Emotion Lecture at the 2010 SPSP Emotion Preconference

One of the most fundamental distinctions in the field of emotion is the distinction between emotion generation and emotion regulation. This distinction fits comfortably with folk theories, which view emotions as passions that arise unbidden and then must be controlled. But is it really helpful to distinguish between emotion generation and emotion regulation? In this article, we begin by offering working definitions of emotion generation and emotion regulation. We argue that in some circumstances, the distinction between emotion generation and emotion regulation is indeed useful. We point both to citation patterns, which indicate that researchers from across a number of sub-areas within psychology are making this distinction, and to empirical studies, which indicate the utility of this distinction in many different research contexts. We then consider five ways in which the distinction between emotion generation and emotion regulation can be problematic. We suggest that it is time to move beyond debates about whether this distinction is useful to a more specific consideration of when and in what ways this distinction is useful, and in this spirit, we offer recommendations for future research.     

Cognitive control moderates early childhood temperament in predicting social behavior in 7‐year‐old children: an ERP study

Behavioral inhibition (BI) is a temperament associated with heightened vigilance and fear of novelty in early childhood, and social reticence and increased risk for anxiety problems later in development. However, not all behaviorally inhibited children develop signs of anxiety. One mechanism that might contribute to the variability in developmental trajectories is the recruitment of cognitive‐control resources. The current study measured N2 activation, an ERP (event‐related potential) associated with cognitive control, and modeled source‐space activation (LORETA; Low Resolution Brain Electromagnetic Tomography) at 7 years of age while children performed a go/no‐go task. Activation was estimated for the entire cortex and then exported for four regions of interest: ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dorsal ACC), and dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). BI was measured in early childhood (ages 2 and 3 years). Anxiety problems and social reticence were measured at 7 years of age to ascertain stability of temperamental style. Results revealed that BI was associated with increased performance accuracy, longer reaction times, greater (more negative) N2 activation, and higher estimated dorsal ACC and DLPFC activation. Furthermore, early BI was only associated with social reticence at age 7 at higher (more negative) levels of N2 activation or higher estimated dorsal ACC or DLPFC activation. Results are discussed in the context of overcontrolled behavior contributing to social reticence and signs of anxiety in middle childhood.     

Global coherence in younger and older adults: Influence of cognitive processes and discourse type

The purpose of the present research was to examine the influence of cognitive processes on discourse global coherence ability measured across different discourse tasks and collected from younger (n = 40; 20–39 years) and older (n = 40; 70–87 years) cognitively healthy adults. Study participants produced oral language samples in response to five commonly used discourse elicitation tasks and they were analyzed for maintenance of global coherence. Participants also completed memory and attention measures. Group differences on the global coherence scale were found for only one type of discourse—recounts. Across discourse elicitation tasks the lowest global coherence scores were found for recounts compared to the other discourse elicitation tasks. The influence of cognitive processes on maintenance of global coherence differed for the two age groups. For the younger group, there were no observed significant relationships. For the older group, cognitive measures were related to global coherence of stories and procedures.     

Making room: a place for children’s spirituality in the Christian church

A relatively uncharted territory until recently, the concept of children as innate spiritual beings has garnered significant attention among scholars over the past two decades. The more that is learned about children’s spirituality, the more apparent it becomes that the Christian church in the United States generally fails to provide sufficient space for children to explore, develop and share their spirituality. This potentially leads children to suppress or disconnect from their spirituality in later years and also deprives a Christian community of the ability to learn and grow from children’s unique experiences of God and spirituality. This paper examines the underlying theories that foster environments among Christian churches where the ennoblement of a ‘grown-up faith’ and the resulting power adults hold because of that, inhibit the ability for children to be regarded and approached as capable of spiritual and faithful beliefs and understanding apart from adult intervention.     

Emotional and Behavioral Problems Among Impoverished Kenyan Youth: Factor Structure and Sex-Differences

Data on youth emotional and behavioral problems from societies in Sub-Saharan Africa are lacking. This may be due to the fact that few youth mental health assessments have been tested for construct validity of syndrome structure across multicultural societies that include developing countries, and almost none have been tested in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Youth Self-Report (YSR), for example, has shown great consistency of its syndrome structure across many cultures, yet data from only one developing country in Sub-Saharan Africa have been included. In this study, we test the factor structure of YSR syndromes among Kenyan youth ages 11–18 years from an informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya and examine sex-differences in levels of emotional and behavioral problems. We find the eight syndrome structure of the YSR to fit these data well (Root Mean Square Error of Approximation = 0.049). While Kenyan girls have significantly higher internalizing (Anxious/Depressed, Withdrawn/Depressed, Somatic) problem scores than boys, these differences are of similar magnitude to published multicultural findings. The results support the generalizability of the YSR syndrome structure to Kenyan youth and are in line with multicultural findings supporting the YSR as an assessment of emotional and behavioral problems in diverse societies.