Sexual Coercion,Trauma, and Sex Work in Justice-Involved Women with Substance Use Disorders

Sexual victimization is associated with mental health problems, trauma, substance use, and incarceration. We recruited 200 formerly incarcerated women with substance use disorders in Chicago. We examined whether empowerment moderates relationships between trauma symptoms, trading sex, and being forced to have sex. There was a significant 3-way interaction among sexual coercion, trading, and empowerment scores on trauma symptoms. For women who have not traded sex, lower levels of empowerment were associated with a larger difference in trauma symptoms between women who have been coerced or traded sex. For women who had been coerced, lower levels of empowerment were associated with a larger difference in trauma symptomatology between those who have traded sex or not. Promoting empowerment in sexually traumatized women might reduce the harm that results from being victimized. Furthermore, providing interventions that educate women regarding gender and cultural roles could help women avoid situations that result in exploitation.     

Parental Monitoring,Association with Externalized Behavior,and Academic Outcomes in Urban African‐American Youth: A Moderated Mediation Analysis

African‐American adolescents exposed to neighborhood disadvantage are at increased risk for engaging in problem behavior and academic underachievement. It is critical to identify the mechanisms that reduce problem behavior and promote better academic outcomes in this population. Based on social disorganization and socioecological theories, the current prospective study examined pathways from parental monitoring to academic outcomes via externalizing behavior at different levels of neighborhood disadvantage. A moderated mediation model employing maximum likelihood was conducted on 339 African‐American students from 9th to 11th grade (49.3% females) with a mean age of 14.8 years (SD ± 0.35). The results indicated that parental monitoring predicted low externalizing behavior, and low externalizing behavior predicted better academic outcomes after controlling for externalizing behavior in 9th grade, intervention status, and gender. Mediation was supported, as the index of mediation was significant. Conversely, neighborhood disadvantage did not moderate the path from parental monitoring to externalizing behavior. Implications for intervention at both community and individual levels and study limitations are discussed.     

Manipulated flow reduces downstream defensiveness

Flow is a psychological state people experience when performing highly challenging tasks with a high degree of skill. It is related to happiness, creativity, and productivity. In three experiments, we developed a manipulation of flow and assessed its effects on subsequent defensive behavior. In all three experiments, participants who played a game with more features of flow (e.g. engagement, match of challenge and skill, performance feedback) reported more feelings of flow (e.g. enjoyment, concentration and interest) and less downstream defensiveness. The results suggest that we developed a flexible, reliable manipulation of flow, and that inducing people to experience flow may reduce their subsequent defensive behavior.     

Cultural Aid and Jewish Identity in Post-Communist Hungary

This paper is based on current research which is concerned with the revival of religious and ethnic identity among Jews in Hungary after the collapse of communism. Several non-governmental institutions, groups and individuals from various countries, but especially Israel, the UK and the USA, are involved in the revitalization and transformation of Jewish life in the areas of education, ethnicity, religion and social welfare. I examine the complex relationship between emigre donors, often from an Hungarian background, and local Hungarian Jews, to show how cultural aid is accepted, transformed and sometimes resisted. Such aid is not uni-directional from donor to recipient. Rather, it may require the donors to modify their goals; to realize that their assessment of Hungarian needs may be based on anachronistic attitudes. The impact of the recipients on the donors is such that reciprocal change occurs between the two parties.     

Demonstrating the effect of context on order effects for an army air defense task using the patriot simulator

The results reported herein support the hypotheses that (1) situation-specific, contextual features of a task can cause people to use explanation-based reasoning (Pennington and Hastie, 1993); (2) such reasoning can cause experienced personnel, both individually and in two-person teams, to reinterpret the meaning of the same information when it is presented in two different ordered sequences; and (3) the result will be primacy or recency (or no) effects depending on whether the most recent conflicting information can be explained away or not, respectively. These results extend the belief-adjustment model proposed by Hogarth and Einhorn (1992), which does not address information reinterpretations, and always predicts recency effects for an evaluation task with a short series of conflicting information. More generally, the results demonstrate the importance of situation-specific, contextual features in understanding judgment processes. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Autobiographical memory specificity and the persistence of depressive symptoms in HIV-positive patients: Rumination and social problem-solving skills as mediators

Individuals infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) are at elevated risk for depressive conditions, which in turn can negatively impact health-related behaviours and the course of illness. The present study tested the role of autobiographical memory specificity and its interaction with perceived stress in the persistence of depressive symptoms among dysphoric HIV-positive individuals. Additionally, we examined whether rumination and social problem solving mediated these effects. Results indicated that memory specificity moderated the impact of perceived stress, such that perceived stress was more strongly associated with follow-up depressive symptoms among those with greater memory specificity. Rumination, but not social problem solving, mediated this effect. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

A Different View of Anger: The Cognitive‐Neoassociation Conception of the Relation of Anger to Aggression

The common, everyday understanding of anger is problematic in a number of respects—in its inattention to the prototypic nature of this emotional state; in its failure to recognize the important role often played by the critical event's aversiveness; and in its neglect of the frequently close connection between anger arousal and aggression‐related motor impulses. This article discusses all of these matters from the point of view of my cognitive‐neoassociation perspective [Berkowitz, 1990, 1993, 2010; Berkowitz and Harmon‐Jones, 2004]. The role of automatic, nonconscious reactions is considered, and it is also emphasized that angry feelings are linked to approach motivation—movement toward the perceived source of the anger. The article also briefly summarizes relevant research dealing with the self‐regulation of anger reactions. This broad review hopefully will prompt further inquiries into the arousal, nature, and operation of anger. Aggr. Behav. 38:322‐333, 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.