Top Ten Questions Male Sexual Abuse Survivors Want to Know from Health Care Research

Sexual abuse is an often overlooked public health issue for boys and men. Given its prevalence and well-documented connection to mental and physical health disorders, the relevance of male survivor input and engagement in health care research is profound. Using a community-based participatory research design, an in-person focus group with male survivors of sexual abuse and researchers was conducted. This paper describes the top ten research questions male sexual abuse survivors would like to have answered. Survivors were most interested in knowing how sexual abuse and assault impact men’s emotional and sexual functioning, what factors are involved in preventing and treating sexual assault-related emotional distress, and what can be done to prevent sexual abuse of boys and men. The fact that some of the questions survivors expressed an interest in knowing about have actually previously been investigated by researchers suggests a disconnect in translating evidence-based findings. Clinical and research implications include designing outreach interventions and gender-specific psychoeducation to increase engagement and access to care for men.     

The use of religion in coping with grief among bereaved Malay Muslim parents

The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of religion on bereaved parents after the death of a child. Literature had attempted to understand how religiosity may influence parental grief both in positive and negative ways. However, this area is scarcely explored in the Malaysian context. This qualitative study involved 11 bereaved parents who lost their children due to accidents (n?=?9) and homicide (n?=?2). Open-ended questions that focused on the importance, activities, and role of religion in the grieving process among Malay parents were asked. According to the thematic analysis, some of the main themes found were that the bereaved parents described religion as a beneficial mechanism in helping them to adapt with their losses through various responses that indicated the perception that religion as a guidance. However, other than the positive impact, religiosity can also lead the bereaved parents to experience negative effects of using religion as a coping strategy. The influence of culture is prevalent in the current study as the theme of mystical belief and paranormal experiences were also reported. This study provides some professional implication from the possible use of religion in intervention.     

Gender differences in STEM undergraduates' vocational interests: People–thing orientation and goal affordances

This study addressed why women have greater representation in some STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields compared to others by linking two theoretical approaches, people–thing orientation (PO, TO) and role congruity theory, which emphasizes occupation goal affordances associated with traditionally feminine and masculine roles. Vocational interest and goal affordance ratings (having a positive social impact, family, and occupation status) for occupations characterized as working with people or things were assessed in 1848 students (42% female; 81% white non-Hispanic) majoring in biology (gender balanced), non-biology STEM (male-dominated), and female-dominated health fields. Participant PO and TO interests were also collected. Results indicated that non-biology STEM majors showed lower PO and higher TO interests than biology and health majors. Non-biology STEM majors also endorsed PO and TO interests at similar levels, but the other two major groups indicated higher PO than TO. People Jobs were perceived to more likely afford goals related to family and positive social impact; whereas Thing Jobs were perceived to more likely afford status goals. Interest in People Jobs was similar for women in both STEM major groups. Female non-biology STEM majors were equally interested in People and Thing Jobs; whereas biology majors preferred People Jobs. PO, TO, and goal affordance ratings independently predicted interest in People and Thing Jobs, and gender accounted for very little additional variance. Taken together, the findings point to the importance of using both person–thing orientation and role congruity theory when explaining varied gender representations in different STEM fields.     

Eye movements of young and older adults while reading with distraction

The authors used eye-tracking technology to examine young and older adults' online performance in the reading in distraction paradigm. Participants read target sentences and answered comprehension questions following each sentence. In some sentences, single-word distracters were presented in either italic or red font. Distracters could be related or unrelated to the target text. Online measures, including probability of fixation, fixation duration, and number of fixations to distracting text, revealed no age differences in text processing. However, young adults did have an advantage over older adults in overall reading time and text comprehension. These results provide no support for an inhibition deficit account of age differences in the reading in distraction paradigm, but are consistent with J. Dywan and W. E. Murphy's (1996) suggestion that older adults are less able than the young to distinguish target and distracter information held in working memory.     

Asymmetric cultural effects on perceptual expertise underlie an own-race bias for voices

The own-race bias in memory for faces has been a rich source of empirical work on the mechanisms of person perception. This effect is thought to arise because the face-perception system differentially encodes the relevant structural dimensions of features and their configuration based on experiences with different groups of faces. However, the effects of sociocultural experiences on person perception abilities in other identity-conveying modalities like audition have not been explored. Investigating an own-race bias in the auditory domain provides a unique opportunity for studying whether person identification is a modality-independent construct and how it is sensitive to asymmetric cultural experiences. Here we show that an own-race bias in talker identification arises from asymmetric experience with different spoken dialects. When listeners categorized voices by race (White or Black), a subset of the Black voices were categorized as sounding White, while the opposite case was unattested. Acoustic analyses indicated listeners’ perceptions about race were consistent with differences in specific phonetic and phonological features. In a subsequent person-identification experiment, the Black voices initially categorized as sounding White elicited an own-race bias from White listeners, but not from Black listeners. These effects are inconsistent with person-perception models that strictly analogize faces and voices based on recognition from only structural features. Our results demonstrate that asymmetric exposure to spoken dialect, independent from talkers’ physical characteristics, affects auditory perceptual expertise for talker identification. Person perception thus additionally relies on socioculturally-acquired dynamic information, which may be represented by different mechanisms in different sensory modalities.     

Cocaine addiction and personality: A mathematical model

The existence of a close relation between personality and drug consumption is recognized, but the corresponding causal connection is not well known. Neither is it well known whether personality exercises an influence predominantly at the beginning and development of addiction, nor whether drug consumption produces changes in personality. This paper presents a dynamic mathematical model of personality and addiction based on the unique personality trait theory (UPTT) and the general modelling methodology. This model attempts to integrate personality, the acute effect of drugs, and addiction. The UPTT states the existence of a unique trait of personality called extraversion, understood as a dimension that ranges from impulsive behaviour and sensation‐seeking (extravert pole) to fearful and anxious behaviour (introvert pole). As a consequence of drug consumption, the model provides the main patterns of extraversion dynamics through a system of five coupled differential equations. It combines genetic extraversion, as a steady state, and dynamic extraversion in a unique variable measured on the hedonic scale. The dynamics of this variable describes the effects of stimulant drugs on a short‐term time scale (typical of the acute effect); while its mean time value describes the effects of stimulant drugs on a long‐term time scale (typical of the addiction effect). This understanding may help to develop programmes of prevention and intervention in drug misuse.     

Emotional context at learning systematically biases memory for facial information

Emotion influences memory in many ways. For example, when a mood-dependent processing shift is operative, happy moods promote global processing and sad moods direct attention to local features of complex visual stimuli. We hypothesized that an emotional context associated with to-be-learned facial stimuli could preferentially promote global or local processing. At learning, faces with neutral expressions were paired with a narrative providing either a happy or a sad context. At test, faces were presented in an upright or inverted orientation, emphasizing configural or analytical processing, respectively. A recognition advantage was found for upright faces learned in happy contexts relative to those in sad contexts, whereas recognition was better for inverted faces learned in sad contexts than for those in happy contexts. We thus infer that a positive emotional context prompted more effective storage of holistic, configural, or global facial information, whereas a negative emotional context prompted relatively more effective storage of local or feature-based facial information