BRCA1 Testing: Genetic Counseling Protocol Development and Counseling Issues

This article discusses the genetic counseling protocols which were developed and counseling issues that have arisen in the first 2 years of evaluating a large kindred with a BRCA1 mutation. The rationale for the development of the genetic counseling protocols and specific genetic counseling visual aids are presented and discussed. The protocols and counseling aids can serve as models for other programs offering cancer susceptibility testing. The observations of study counselors about study subject concerns and responses to genetic testing at the time of the pretest and posttest counseling sessions are presented.     

The Impact of Breast Cancer and Its Treatment on Marital Functioning

This article reviews the research that has examined the impact of breast cancer and its treatment on the patient's marital relationship. Breast cancer and its treatment affect not only the patient, but also her intimate partner and their relationship, including their communication, sexual relationship, and role identities. Both positive and negative effects of the experience have been identified. Predictors of marital adjustment following breast cancer are also reviewed, including demographic factors, illness factors, and characteristics of the couple. The strongest predictor of the impact of the cancer experience appears to be the premorbid quality of the relationship. A methodological critique identifies limitations of past research, and suggestions for future research are addressed. Finally, two theoretical paradigms that may account for the impact of breast cancer on relationships are discussed.     

The family relations,peer relations,and criminal activities of Caucasian and Hispanic-American gang members

Juvenile gang members present serious problems to society, yet few empirical studies have examined their criminal activity, family relations, and peer relations in comparison with other highly antisocial youths. In a 2 (Gang Membership) × 2 (Ethnicity: Hispanic-American vs. Caucasian) design, 131 incarcerated male juvenile offenders were administered a battery assessing criminal activity, family relations, and peer relations. Results demonstrated (a) higher rates of criminal behavior (i.e., general delinquency, index offenses, school delinquency) among gang members than among offenders who did not belong to gangs, (b) higher rates of general delinquency and home delinquency among Caucasian offenders than among Hispanic-American offenders, and (c) greater aggression and less social maturity in the peer relations of gang members than in the peer relations of offenders who did not belong to gangs. In addition, gang membership mediated sociocultural differences in hard drug use. Findings are integrated with the extant literature.The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance and advice of Dr. Michael Schumacher, the Honorable C. Robert Jameson, Gwen Kurz, Don Hallstrom, Jane Carmichael, and Drs. Malcolm Klein, Rae Newton, and James Madero.     

Sex role identity and self-esteem: A comparison of children and adolescents

While data from a sample of fourth-grade children indicate that both self-efficacy (masculinity) and relationality (femininity) are strongly associated with self-esteem for both girls and boys, results from a comparable sample of adolescents aged 14–18 and a subsample of the fourth graders when they were in twelfth grade indicate that only self-efficacy is generally associated with self-esteem. An association between relationality and self-esteem is found in adolescents only for a small, high-achieving, high-SES subset of androgynous males.We are grateful to the Center for the Study of Women in Society for support for the research reported in this article, to Jeanne McGee for providing access to part of the data used in this study, and to Robert O'Brien for statistical advice. Any opinions expressed in the article, however, are our own.     

A multipurpose software package for editing two-dimensional animated images

In this paper, we describe a software package, LEDA, for editing two-dimensional images and films. It is written in Turbo-C and was first conceived to work with a high-resolution graphics card (Adage PG90/10, 2,048 × 1,023 × 8 bits) on an IBM PC/AT or compatible computer. The program is intended for managing images and films used in the fields of visual psychophysics, electrophysiology, and so forth.     

A COMPARISON OF THREE STRATEGIES FOR TEACHING OBJECT NAMES

Researchers in applied behavior analysis have been charged to provide large-scale demonstrations of the outcomes of evaluations. In this research, three experiments were conducted to examine the relative efficacy of three methods of presenting stimuli in object naming tasks. Stimuli were introduced successively, simultaneously, or using a combination of the two procedures. College adults, mentally retarded children and adolescents, and preschool children were taught to produce the names of five Hebrew letters, English words, or American coins, respectively. Presentation method was a between-subjects treatment in a factorial design. Results from the series of systematic replications were consistent in showing better posttest performance for subjects in the Simultaneous and Combined conditions. Further, follow-up data in Experiment III showed that retention was also superior for subjects trained by the Simultaneous or Combined methods. Although the acquisition criterion was met in fewer trials by subjects in the Successive condition, only several minutes more training time was required by the Simultaneous and Combined conditions. From a cost-effectiveness point of view, either of the latter two techniques should be favored over the Successive procedure for teaching verbal naming skills.     

The effect of social cues on the eating behavior of obese and normal subjects1

Schachter's externality hypothesis suggests that overweight individuals are more likely to be induced to eat by salient external cues than normal weight individuals. While a range of studies have demonstrated the plausibility of this hypothesis in the case of sensory stimuli (e.g., taste cues), there is little evidence that the hypothesis applies to social stimuli. The current study examines this latter proposition by exposing male and female, overweight and normal weight subjects to a same-sex or opposite-sex peer model. Under the guise of engaging in a taste experiment, the subjects were either exposed to a model who tasted experiment, the subjects were either exposed to a model who tasted no crackers (no eat), one cracker (low eat), or twenty crackers (high eat). In addition, control model-absent conditions were also run for purposes of establishing baseline eating rates. If the externality hypotheses were to prevail in social domains, one would expect overweight subjects to be more prone to model the cracker-eating behavior of the peer than normal weight individuals. However, the findings indicate that all subject groups regardless of weight evidence a rather clear modeling effect and all subjects evidence social inhibition effects on their eating behavior as well. Several intriguing interactions among subject sex, model sex, subject weight, and social condition were also found. The discussion explores the relevance of an externality model of overweight eating in social domains, and focuses upon the interesting and somewhat distinct pattern of socially mediated eating exhibited by overweight females.