Reinventing the University Through the Teaching of Diversity

University reform encompasses an increased emphasis on the social and emotional development of students. In particular, the development of caring, empathy, and community are emphasized. This team of psychology professors approaches the task of university reform by presenting both its philosophy of diversity inclusion and specific inclusion strategies as means of promoting enhanced development of our students. Although the discipline of psychology is used as an example, the philosophical argument and the strategic approaches may be applied to other disciplines.     

Time perspective and sleep problems

In this study of 137 university students, we examined the relationships among the five dimensions of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory and three scales that measure aspects of sleep problems. All of the Zimbardo Inventory dimensions correlated significantly with each of the sleep problem-related scales. These data suggest that concern about time, regardless of the specific nature of individuals' time perspective, and certain sleep problems are significantly related.     

THE NEED FOR POWER IN WOMEN WHO WERE SEXUALLY ABUSED AS CHILDREN An Exploratory Study

Ten women who had been sexually abused as children and a matched group of women who had not been sexually abused participated in a preliminary study to explore the hypothesis that feelings of powerlessness and a compensatory need for power continue into adulthood for survivors of childhood sexual abuse. The Picture-Story Exercise (PSE) was used as an indirect assessment technique to determine the level of the need for power (McClelland, 1985; Winter, 1973, 1988). Results indicated that the stories of women with sexual abuse histories revealed a higher need for power and greater fear of power than those of nonabused women. Further content analysis of the PSE revealed that sexual abuse survivors' stories also contained more references to Finkelhor and Browne's (1986) dynamics of powerlessness, traumatic sexualization, betrayal, and stigmatization. These findings suggest important directions for future research as well as areas for therapeutic exploration.     

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     

Suicide Attempts in Preadolescent Child Psychiatry Inpatients

This paper describes a preliminary study examining the relative power of measures of perceived family support, hopelessness, and depression for the classification of suicide attempters and nonattempters in a series of 8- to 13-year-old psychiatric inpatients. Results of a stepwise discriminant-function analysis indicated that a measure of a child's perceived family support discriminated between suicide attempters and nonattempters with an 88% accuracy rate. The addition of measures of hopelessness and depression at later steps did not lead to improved classification. The results are interpreted as providing strong support for a link between suicide attempts in children and perceptions of low family support.