Stress,Sex Differences,and Coping Strategies Among College Students

The sources of stress (academics, financial, family, social, and daily hassles) and coping strategies (self-help, approach, accommodation, avoidance, and self-punishment) of 166 college students were examined. The relationship between sex, specific sources of stress, and coping strategies was also investigated. Students completed a stress assessment inventory and a stress coping inventory based on a 5-factor revised COPE model (Zuckerman and Gagne Journal of Research in Personality, 37:169–204, 2003). Results found that college women reported a higher overall level of stress and greater use of emotion-focused coping strategies than college men. College men and women also reported different coping strategies for different stressors; however the use of emotion-focused coping strategies dominated over problem-solving strategies for both men and women. These results have implications for designing stress reduction workshops that build on the existing adaptive emotion-focused strategies of college students.     

German Muslims and the ‘Integration Debate’: Negotiating Identities in the Face of Discrimination

Based on five focus groups (total N?=?56) with German Muslims, we analyze discourses on the experience of discrimination and feelings of national and religious attachment. The focus groups took place in mid to late 2010 in four German cities. Whereas only few participants describe personal discrimination by non-Muslim Germans, almost all participants complain about being collectively discriminated and rejected. This perception triggers processes of confirming their original cultural identity, primarily their Muslim affiliation and of strengthening the boundary towards the wider society. The analysis of the discourse shows the participants to fall back into an essentialized way of thinking that makes their ethnic being incompatible with being German; and they resort to their Muslim roots as a cultural resource for identity construction and self-worth. Others cope with their feeling of rejection by engaging in local politics and sports activities that allows them to attribute themselves a hyphenated identity as Turkish-Germans. The findings are discussed in terms of social identity, psychological essentialism, transnationalized religion, and boundary making.     

Co‐Occurring Disorders in Treatment‐Based Courts: Results of a National Survey

Drug courts and mental health courts have expanded rapidly in the past several decades to provide more efficient coordination of treatment and supervision of offenders with behavioral health problems. A significant number of offenders in these court‐based programs have co‐occurring mental and substance use disorders, which predict early termination, relapse, rearrest, and other negative outcomes. A web‐based national survey examined programmatic adaptations for co‐occurring disorders (CODs) among 54 drug courts, mental health courts, and freestanding COD dockets. COD dockets were smaller and of longer duration, and provided more intensive services than programs situated in drug courts or in mental health courts. However, more similarities than differences were noted across the different types of court‐based program. Key adaptations for CODs included extended program duration, highly intensive and integrated treatment, smaller, less formal, and more frequent hearings, and use of specialized supervision teams and dually credentialed staff. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Anxiety Sensitivity and Negative Interpretation Biases: Their Shared and Unique Associations with Anxiety Symptoms

Anxiety sensitivity (AS) is a psychological risk factor for anxiety disorders. Negative interpretation biases are a maladaptive form of information-processing also associated with anxiety disorders. The present study explored whether AS and negative interpretation biases make independent contributions to variance in panic and generalized anxiety symptoms and whether particular interpretation bias domains (e.g., of ambiguous arousal sensations) have specific associations with panic and/or generalized anxiety symptoms. Eighty-nine female undergraduates (44 low AS; 45 high AS) completed measures of AS, interpretation biases, and panic and generalized anxiety symptoms. Findings showed that AS and negative interpretation biases both significantly added to the prediction of anxiety symptoms. Negative interpretations of ambiguous arousal sensations were uniquely associated with panic symptoms, while negative interpretations of ambiguous general and social events were uniquely associated with generalized anxiety symptoms. Findings support the conceptual validity of AS and negative interpretation biases and their unique and shared contributions to anxiety symptoms.     

A quarter of a century of job transitions in Germany

By examining trends in intra-organizational and inter-organizational job transition probabilities among professional and managerial employees in Germany, we test the applicability of mainstream career theory to a specific context and challenge its implied change assumption. Drawing on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), we apply linear probability models to show the influence of time, economic cycle and age on the probability of job transitions between 1984 and 2010. Results indicate a slight negative trend in the frequency of job transitions during the analyzed time span, owing to a pronounced decrease in intra-organizational transitions, which is only partly offset by a comparatively weaker positive trend towards increased inter-organizational transitions. The latter is strongly influenced by fluctuations in the economic cycle. Finally, the probability of job transitions keeps declining steadily through the course of one's working life. In contrast to inter-organizational transitions, however, this age effect for intra-organizational transitions has decreased over time.     

Improving School Readiness in Preschoolers with Behavior Problems: Results from a Summer Treatment Program

To examine a) the feasibility of delivering a summer treatment program for pre-kindergarteners (STP-PreK) with externalizing behavior problems (EBP) and b) the extent to which the STP-PreK was effective in improving children’s school readiness outcomes. Participants for this study included 30 preschool children (77 % boys; Mean age?=?5.33 years; 77 % Hispanic background) with at-risk or clinically elevated levels of EBP. The STP-PreK was held at an early education center and ran for 8-weeks (M-F, 8 a.m.–5 p.m.) during the summer between preschool and kindergarten. In addition to a behavioral modification system and comprehensive school readiness curriculum, a social-emotional curriculum was also embedded within the STP-PreK to target children’s self-regulation skills (SR). Children’s pre- and post-school readiness outcomes included a standardized school readiness assessment as well as parental report of EBP, adaptive functioning, and overall readiness for kindergarten. SR skills were measured via a standardized executive functioning task, two frustration tasks, and parental report of children’s emotion regulation, and executive functioning. The STP-PreK was well received by parents as evidenced by high attendance and satisfaction ratings. Additionally, all school readiness outcomes (both parent and observational tasks) significantly improved after the intervention (Cohen’s d effect sizes ranged from 0.47 to 2.22) with all effects, except parental report of emotion regulation, being maintained at a 6-month follow-up. These findings highlight the feasibility and utility of delivering an early intervention summer program that can successfully target multiple aspects of children’s school readiness, including behavioral, social-emotional/self-regulation, and academics.     

Age-Related Changes and the Attention Network Task: An Examination of Alerting,Orienting, and Executive Function

ABSTRACT

The effects of aging on alerting, orienting, and executive function were examined with the use of the Attention Network Task, which combines the Posner spatial cuing task and the Eriksen flanker task into a single procedure. We found that older adults showed significantly less alerting than young adults in response to a warning cue, although there were no age differences in orienting or executive function once processing speed was taken into account. We suggest that age differences in alerting may depend in part upon the presentation duration or persistence of the warning cue.     

Recollection Training and Transfer Effects in Older Adults: Successful Use of a Repetition-Lag Procedure

Abstract

We examined an approach aimed at training consciously-controlled recollection, introduced by Jennings and Jacoby (2003) Jennings, J. M. and Jacoby, L. L. 2003. Improving memory in older adults: Training recollection. Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, 13: 417–440. [CSA][CROSSREF][Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], for its ability to replicate and generalize. A continuous recognition task, requiring recollection to identify the occurrence of repeated items over gradually increasing lag intervals (number of intervening items between the first and second presentation of a repeated word), was given to a group of older adults twice a week for three weeks. Pre-and-post training performance was assessed on multiple measures and compared with a recognition practice and no contact control group. Recollection training proved successful; accurate identification of repeated items increased across a lag interval of 2 to 18 intervening items. Post-training gains following recollection training were found on n-back, self-ordered pointing, source discrimination and digit symbol substitution, but not with reading span or the CVLT-II. No changes were identified in the other groups. Gains from recollection training seem to transfer successfully in older adults.     

Cities, Migrant Incorporation, and Ethnicity: A Network Perspective on Boundary Work

In this article, I am interested in the different types of boundaries emerging in a city characterized by a highly diverse population. The analysis of the personal social networks of 250 inhabitants of a small Swiss City—different types of migrants as well as non-migrants—supplemented by data from qualitative interviews brings to light the important categories for the creation of boundaries and the place of ethnicity among them. The inhabitant’s network structures display specific network boundaries that are translated into symbolic and also social boundaries: four different clusters emerge among the population, pointing to their stratified social positioning in this city. Hereby an interplay of nationality, education, local establishment, mobility type, “race,” and religion are the most important structuring factors. It becomes clear that the common ideas of assimilation cannot grasp the complexity of the “categorical game” at place in this city when it comes to migrant’s incorporation.