Decision to Leave Scale: Perceived Reasons to Stay In or Leave Violent Relationships

The 30-item Decision to Leave Scale (DLS) was developed with 631 college women and 420 college women and women in shelters. Seven DLS subscales emerged for concerns in deciding to stay or leave: Fear of Loneliness, Child Care Needs, Financial Problems, Social Embarrassment, Poor Social Support, Fear of Harm, Hopes Things Change. Mean internal reliability was .73, mean test-retest reliability was .70. Discriminant validity was demonstrated by expected associations between DLS concerns and self-esteem, children, and violence. Criterion validity was demonstrated by greater DLS concerns for women in shelters than for college women. Women in violent relationships who decided to stay reported more Fear of Loneliness than women who decided to leave.     

The Relationship of Recruiting Sources and Pre-Hire Outcomes: Examination of Yield Ratios and Applicant Quality

The study reported in this paper examined the relationship between 5 recruiting sources (college placement offices, newspaper advertisements, employee referrals, direct applicants, and job fairs) and several important but neglected pre-hire outcomes (e.g., percentage of qualified applicants generated, percentage of applicants who were hired). As hypothesized, applicants who applied directly for jobs and those who were referred by current employees were more likely to receive job offers and to become employees than were applicants recruited via other sources. Unexpectedly, recruiting sources were not related to the measures of applicant quality used in this study.     

Lethal Stereotypes: Hair and Eye Color as Survival Characteristics During the Holocaust1

In spite of many false negatives and false positives quite familiar to the people of Nazi‐dominated Europe, dark hair and eyes were salient among the physical stereotypes of Jews that the Nazis promulgated along with psychosocial ones. Many narratives of the Holocaust refer to someone surviving because he or she “did not look Jewish,” and others being caught and killed because they did. A quantitative test of the validity and impact of this attribution showed that a higher proportion of Holocaust survivors than of a North American Jewish control group had light‐colored hair, eyes, or both during the relevant period. The paper discusses possible reasons why these were survival characteristics under the conditions of the Holocaust, the possible short‐ and long‐term effects of such selectivity, and implications for stereotyping in other situations of ethnic persecution and genocide.     

Telemetry provides new insights into entrainment of activity wheel circadian rhythms and the role of body temperature in the development of ulcers in the activity-stress paradigm

Two methods of monitoring the circadian rhythm of activity in rodents: (1) an activity wheel cage, which detects the number of wheel revolutions, and (2) an internal radio transmitter, which records gross motor activity (GMA) of the animal, were compared in both normal circadian cycles and during the development of activity-stress ulcers. Rats were implanted with a biotelemetry transmitter that detected GMA and body temperature (BT) and placed in activity wheel cages. A 12 hour/12 hour light/dark cycle was maintained throughout the experiment. Subjects were subdivided into two groups: (1) unlimited access to activity wheel (AW) cages and (2) locked activity wheel (LW) cages. Following an ad-libitum habituation period, animals were allowed food access for 1 hour/day during the light. In the habituation period, the animals showed higher GMA and BT during the dark phase when housed in AW cages than in LW cages. Both GMA and number of wheel revolutions increased dramatically after the onset of food restriction for the AW animals. There was a deleterious drop in BT in AW animals as the food-restricted period continued and a significant correlation existed between severity of ulcerations and BT. The findings of this experiment demonstrate that the activity wheel imposes an alternation of the circadian cycle, which, in turn, influences rhythmicity through reentrainment. Additionally, in the activity-stress paradigm, a significant drop in BT correlates with severity of ulcerations. A disrupted circadian cycle, involving hypothermia, is proposed as the mechanism underlying the demise of animals in the activity-stress paradigm.     

Peace, scholarship and disciplinary limits: Postcolonial problems and potential in the study of religion

Through its explorations of the work of peace in Sri Lanka, Qadri Ismail's Abiding by Sri Lanka offers both a reconceptualization of democracy and a critique of certain academic disciplines as antithetical to peace and opposition to colonialism. This article considers his criticisms of history and anthropology in order to ask whether, in his terms, it would be possible to have a postcolonial, postempiricist analysis of religion. An exploration of the problems that the study of religion, specifically the category of religion and production of religious authority, pose for Ismail's criteria of postcolonial scholarship points toward the limitations of academic disciplinarity.     

Abiding by Sri Lanka Qadri Ismail's way

Qadri Ismail's book, Abiding by Sri Lanka: On Peace, Place, and Postcoloniality (2005) suggests that literary theory might help Sri Lankans re-imagine the colonial social categories and histories that underwrite their long-running conflict. Ismail also argues that the social sciences (particularly anthropology) and history fail Sri Lanka. They fail either because, like anthropology, their colonial origins render them epistemologically unable to ‘abide by’ Sri Lanka (or to see its politics as political); or because, like history, their embrace of an empiricist belief in an objectively real history betrays them into reconfirming nationalism. My article will argue that while the first part of Ismail's thesis is fascinating and useful (if a bit lacking in practical details), his claim that anthropology and history writing as such must be ‘de-authorized’ is too broad. It concludes by arguing for a cease-fire in Sri Lanka.     

The explicit learning of new names for known objects is improved by dexamphetamine

A randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, between subjects study design (N=37) was used to investigate the effects of dexamphetamine on explicit new name learning. Participants ingested 10mg of dexamphetamine or placebo daily over 5 consecutive mornings before learning new names for 50 familiar objects plus fillers. The dexamphetamine group recognised and recalled the new names more accurately than the placebo group over the 5 days and 1 month later. Word learning success was not associated with baseline neuropsychological performance, mood, cardiovascular arousal, or sustained attention. These results may have implications for the pharmacological treatment of acquired naming difficulties.     

"I need to talk about it": a qualitative analysis of trauma-exposed women's reasons for treatment choice

A significant proportion of individuals suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder do not seek or receive effective treatment. Understanding the reasons why an individual chooses to seek treatment or prefers one treatment to another is a critical step to improve treatment seeking. To begin to understand these reasons, we conducted a qualitative analysis of the reasons women gave for choosing a cognitive-behavioral treatment, prolonged exposure (PE), or a pharmacological treatment, sertraline (SER). A community sample of women with trauma histories were asked to view standardized rationales, to choose among PE, SER, or no treatment, and to give 5 reasons for their choice. Women indicated that they were more likely to prefer the psychotherapy to the medication. Across reasons given, the most commonly cited reason for treatment preference highlighted why or how the treatment worked (e.g., I need to talk about it); and this reason emerged as the strongest predictor of preference for PE. Understanding this role of perceived treatment mechanism may aid clinicians and public health policy officials to identify and address help-seeking barriers regarding treatment.