Evidence for clinical smoking cessation for adolescents.

OBJECTIVE: This report reviews the evidence that informs the role of health and mental health care providers in addressing youth smoking cessation. DESIGN: Qualitative literature review. RESULTS: Physicians do not consistently screen adolescents for tobacco use and fail to provide recommended cessation advice. Challenges to addressing smoking cessation include the need for procedures to ensure confidentiality and the existence of competing demands to provide other services. Few published studies have specifically addressed the effectiveness of clinical interventions. Interventions that require return visits or follow-up phone contacts are technically difficult to implement in this population. Successful interventions may require resources not available in nonresearch settings. Most studies have used brief clinical intervention as a control condition, making it impossible to evaluate its effectiveness. CONCLUSION: There is little evidence that supports current clinical smoking cessation guidelines for adolescents. More research is needed to develop inexpensive, efficient clinical interventions that can provide youths access to smoking cessation help. Future challenges include reorganizing clinical systems to offer greater counseling by support staff or in electronic formats and to provide effective booster messages and follow-up care in a population that is difficult to track.     

When two limbs are weaker than one: Sensorimotor syncopation with alternating hands

This study addresses the demands of alternating bimanual syncopation, a coordination mode in which the two hands move in alternation while tapping in antiphase with a metronomic tone sequence. Musically trained participants were required to engage in alternating bimanual syncopation and five other coordination modes: unimanual syncopation where taps are made (with the left or right hand) after every tone; unimanual syncopation where taps are made after every other tone; bimanual synchronization with alternating hands; unimanual synchronized tapping with every tone; and unimanual tapping with every other tone. Variability in tap timing was greatest overall for alternating bimanual syncopation, indicating that it is the most difficult. This appears to be due to instability arising from the simultaneous presence of two levels of antiphase coordination (one between the pacing sequence and the hands, the other between the two hands) rather than factors relating to movement frequency or dexterity limits of the nonpreferred hand.     

What does it mean to ‘live’ and ‘die’? A cross‐linguistic analysis of parent–child conversations in English and Indonesian

Previous work on children's intuitive knowledge about the natural world has documented their difficulty in acquiring an overarching concept of biological life that includes plants as well as humans and non‐human animals. It has also suggested that the acquisition of fundamental biological concepts like alive and die may be influenced by the language used to describe them, as evidenced by differences between English‐ and Indonesian‐speaking children's performance in tasks involving these concepts. Here, we examine one particularly important source of linguistic information available to children during this acquisition process: everyday conversations with their parents. We take a cross‐linguistic approach in analysing the evidence available to English‐ and Indonesian‐speaking children as they acquire meanings for words corresponding to the concepts alive and die . Our analysis illustrates that young children acquiring English and Indonesian are faced with distinct problems, but that parental input in both languages does little to support the acquisition of broad, inclusive biological concepts.     

A measurement model of women's behavioral risk taking.

The current study was designed to gain a better understanding of the nature of the relationship between substance use and sexual risk taking within a community sample of women (N = 1,004). Using confirmatory factor analysis, the authors examined the factor structure of sexual risk behaviors and substance use to determine whether they are best conceptualized as domains underlying a single, higher order, risk-taking propensity. A 2 higher order factor model (sexual risk behavior and substance use) provided the best fit to the data, suggesting that these 2 general risk domains are correlated but independent factors. Sensation seeking had large general direct effects on the 2 risk domains and large indirect effects on the 4 first-order factors and the individual indicators. Negative affect had smaller, yet still significant, effects. Impulsivity and anxiety were unrelated to sexual health risk domains.     

Reducing STD/HIV Stigmatizing Attitudes Through Community Popular Opinion Leaders in Chinese Markets

Reducing STDs and HIV/AIDS incidence requires campaigns designed to change knowledge, attitudes, and practices of risky sexual behavior. In China, a significant obstacle to such changes is the stigma associated with these diseases. Thus 1 campaign intervention strategy is to train credible community leaders to discuss these issues in everyday social venues. This study tested the effectiveness of such an approach on reducing HIV/AIDS stigma, across 2 years, from a sample of over 4,500 market vendors, in 3 conditions. Results showed an increasing growth in market communication about intervention messages, and concomitant declines in stigmatizing attitudes, across time, with the greatest changes in community popular opinion leaders, significant changes in intervention nonopinion leaders, and little change in the control markets.