Drug-Intake Methods and Social Identity: The Use of Marijuana in Blunts Among Southeast Asian Adolescents and Emerging Adults

This article examines why Southeast Asian American adolescents and emerging adults in two urban settings prefer to use "blunts," or hollowed-out cigars filled with marijuana, over other methods of drug intake. Rationales for preferring blunts were both instrumental and social. Blunts allowed users to more easily share marijuana, the preferred drug among their peers, and protected against potential adverse effects associated with the "high." Blunts also allowed users to identify with the dominant style of drug use and differentiate themselves from users of stigmatized drugs such as crack cocaine and methamphetamine. This article highlights the importance of drug-intake methods in the formation and performance of drug-using behaviors among adolescents, emerging adults, and members of ethnic minority subgroups.     

The Bright Forms … . .: Commentary on Paper by Vivian Dent

This brief commentary on Vivian Dent's paper about my way of introducing the horizontal axis of siblings engages in a two-way dialogue about what art can tell us of the unconscious psyche and what psychoanalysis can tell us of the art object. It urges us to look at siblings in the transference and countertransference.     

Oregon's Gun Relief Program for Adjudicated Mentally Ill Persons: The Psychiatric Security Review Board

This article describes the State of Oregon's implementation of two programs designed to comply with federal gun laws regarding reporting individuals who have received mental health adjudications in criminal and civil courts. One mandate requires that states submit names of adjudicated individuals to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) while the second requires that the state establish a qualifying gun restoration program for those disqualified from gun ownership. In 2009, Oregon's Legislature developed an administrative approach to gun restoration and assigned the responsibility for conducting these hearing to the Oregon Psychiatric Security Review Board (PSRB). The PSRB is a state administrative board that has existed since 1977 and has been primarily focused on the supervision and treatment of adult and juvenile insanity acquittees. The gun restoration program began in 2010, but to date has only received three completed petitions requesting restoration of firearm rights. The article concludes with a discussion that surmises why very few of the Oregonians who are listed in NICS have submitted petitions for relief. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Rephrasing between Disjunctives and Conditionals: Mental Models and the Effects of Thematic Content

Two experiments are reported thatinvestigate whether the logical equivalence of conditionals and disjunctives is paralleled by a psychological equivalence. In these experiments, subjects rephrased from one form into the other. Experiment 1 demonstrated strong effects of familiarity and causality of rule content. Similar findings were found in Experiment 2 with a different conditional rule syntax. An account of the experiments is given in terms of mental models theory: In this account, task performance can be seen to depend upon the extent to which the model sets used by subjects to generate rephrasings are complete, task content being the most important factor affecting model set completion. A 'Minimal Completion' strategy is proposed to operate in the absence of thematic content. The experiments also falsify the long-held assumption that conditionals with negative antecedents are always interpreted as their disjunctive equivalents. This raises doubts about the mental models explanation for matching bias in conditional reasoning.     

Developmental trajectories of internalising behaviour in the prediction of adolescent depressive symptoms

Using a community‐based Australian birth cohort, groups with distinct longitudinal profiles (trajectories) of internalising behaviour from early childhood through mid‐adolescence were identified for boys and girls from parent ratings. Six internalising trajectories were identified for both genders, comprising stable, decreasing, and increasing pathways. Hierarchical regression models predicted the contribution of internalising trajectories to self‐reported age 17 depressive symptoms for males (n = 557) and females (n = 633), after controlling for the effects of a range of adolescent precursors. Internalising trajectories and adolescent psychosocial factors, each contributed to the prediction of subsequent depressive symptoms, with girls and boys on increasing internalising trajectories and boys on a fluctuating high trajectory particularly at risk. Results suggest that parent ratings can identify coherent internalising behaviour pathways that originate early in life and influence subsequent adjustment.     

Infants avoid 'labouring in vain' by attending more to learnable than unlearnable linguistic patterns

Every environment contains infinite potential features and correlations among features, or patterns. Detecting valid and learnable patterns in one environment is beneficial for learners because doing so lends predictability to new environments where the same or analogous patterns recur. However, some apparent correlations among features reflect spurious patterns, and attempting to learn the latter costs time and resources with no advantage to the learner. Thus, an efficient learner in a complex environment needs to devote more attention to input that reflects a real and learnable pattern than to input that reflects a spurious or ultimately unlearnable pattern. However, in order to achieve such efficiency in the absence of external feedback, learners need to have an implicit metric of their own learning progress. Do human infants have such a metric? Data from two experiments demonstrate that 17‐month‐olds attend longer to learnable vs. unlearnable linguistic grammars, taking more trials to habituate and more overall time to habituate for grammars in which a valid generalization over input stimuli can be made. These data provide the first evidence that infants have an implicit metric of their own learning progress and preferentially direct their attention to learnable aspects of their environment.     

The New Russian Business Leaders – By Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, Stanislav Shekshnia, Konstantin Korotov, and Elizabeth Florent-Treacy

Books reviewed:
The New Russian Business Leaders . By Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, Stanislav Shekshnia, Konstantin Korotov, and Elizabeth Florent-Treacy. Edward Elgar: Cheltenham, UK, and Northampton, MA, USA. 2004. 313 pp.     

Parent influences on early childhood internalizing difficulties

Children's internalizing problems are a concerning mental health issue, due to significant prevalence and continuity over time. This study tested a multivariate model predicting young children's internalizing behaviors from parenting practices, parents' anxiety–depression and family stressors. A community sample of 2 year old children (N = 112) was followed longitudinally to 4 years. Parents completed questionnaires and playroom observations provided independent measures of parenting and child variables. Predictors of early childhood internalizing difficulties were over-involved/protective parenting, low warm-engaged parenting, and parental anxiety–depression. Family life-stress and parental anxiety–depression also predicted problematic parenting practices. These findings were discussed within the context of the design of early childhood parenting programs to prevent anxiety and depression in children.     

When groups help and when groups harm: Origins,developments, and future directions of the “Social Cure” perspective of group dynamics

A substantial literature supports the important role that social group memberships play in enhancing health. While the processes through which group memberships constitute a “Social Cure” are becoming increasingly well defined, the mechanisms through which these groups contribute to vulnerability and act as a “Social Curse” are less understood. We present an overview of the Social Cure literature and then go beyond this to show how the processes underpinning the health benefits of group membership can also negatively affect individuals through their absence. First, we provide an overview of early Social Cure research. We then describe later research concerning the potential health benefits of identifying with multiple groups, before moving on to consider the “darker side” of the Social Cure by exploring how intra‐group dynamics can foster Curse processes. Finally, we synthesise evidence from both the Cure and Curse literatures to highlight the complex interplay between these phenomena and how they are influenced by both intra‐ and inter‐group processes. We conclude by considering areas we deem vital for future investigation within the discipline.     

Response-restriction analysis: I. Assessment of activity preferences

We used procedures based on response-restriction (RR) analysis to assess vocational and leisure activity preferences for 3 adults with developmental disabilities. To increase the efficiency of the analysis relative to that reported in previous research, we used criteria that allowed activities to be restricted at the earliest point at which a preference could be determined. Results obtained across two consecutive RR assessments showed some variability in overall preference rankings but a high degree of consistency for highly ranked items. Finally, we compared results of the RR assessment with those of an extended free-operant assessment and found that the RR assessment yielded (a) more differentiated patterns of preference and (b) more complete information about engagement with all of the target activities.