Taking responsibility for health in an epistemically polluted environment

Proposals for regulating or nudging healthy choices are controversial. Opponents often argue that individuals should take responsibility for their own health, rather than be paternalistically manipulated for their own good. In this paper, I argue that people can take responsibility for their own health only if they satisfy certain epistemic conditions, but we live in an epistemic environment in which these conditions are not satisfied. Satisfying the epistemic conditions for taking responsibility, I argue, requires regulation of this environment. I describe some proposals for such regulation and show that we cannot reject all regulation in the name of individual responsibility. We must either regulate individuals’ healthy choices or regulate the epistemic environment.     

Mediation of Mothers’ Anxiety and Parenting in Children’s Behavior Problems during COVID-19

The outbreak of COVID-19 is affecting the lives of millions of families around the world. The current study was carried out in Israel, following the pandemic’s initial outbreak and during the resulting enforced quarantine, confining parents and children to their homes. A sample of 141 Israeli mothers with at least one child between the ages of 3 and 12 (M?=?6.92, SD?=?2.55) participated as volunteers. About half the sample (50.7%) consisted of girls. Most mothers were cohabiting with a spouse (93%). Mothers completed online questionnaires about their perceptions about the health and economic threats of COVID-19, availability of social support, their anxiety symptoms, hostile/coercive and supportive/engaged parenting behavior, and their children’s behavior problems. Results showed expected significant associations between the mothers’ reports about having little social support, their anxiety symptoms, hostile/coercive and supportive/engaged parenting behavior, and children’s externalizing problems. Likewise, expected significant associations were found between mothers’ perceptions about the health and economic threats of COVID-19, their anxiety symptoms, hostile/coercive parenting behavior, and children’s internalizing and externalizing problems. Importantly, maternal anxiety and hostile/coercive parenting behavior mediated the associations between lack of support, negative perceptions about the health and economic threats of COVID-19, and children’s behavior problems. These findings stress the importance of mothers’ mental health and parenting behaviors for children’s socioemotional adaptation in the context of COVID-19. Implications of the findings for family interventions intended to help parents and children at this time are suggested.

     

An Examination of Gendered Violence and School Push-Out Directed Against Urban Black Girls/Adolescents: Illustrative Data,Cases and a Call to Action

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on Black girls/adolescents, a frequently neglected group, given a dominant focus on Black males and their risk status within the school-to-prison pipeline. This article provides a framework for the analysis of the gendered violence to which Black girls/adolescents are subjected while urging a shift in focus from individual-level behavior to a focus on social contextual, structural, and social determinant factors; this means a shift from focusing on proximal factors to distal or upstream factors operating as underlying mechanisms. Both illustrative data and cases are presented and analyzed to highlight how racial disparities in suspension, expulsion, and discipline—which disproportionately negatively impact Black girls/adolescents compared to White girls/adolescents—necessitate a major call to action to close these disturbing gaps.     

The development of a psychodynamic treatment for patients with borderline personality disorder: a preliminary study of behavioral change.

This study examines the effectiveness of a modified psychodynamic treatment called Transference Focused Psychotherapy (TFP) designed specifically for patients, with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Twenty-three female patients diagnosed with DSM-IV BPD began twice-weekly TFP. Patients were assessed at baseline and at the end of 12 months of treatment with diagnostic instruments, measures of suicidality, self-injurious behavior, and measures of medical and psychiatric service utilization. Compared to the year prior to treatment, the number of patients who made suicide attempts significantly decreased, as did the medical risk and severity of medical condition following self-injurious behavior. Compared to the year prior, study patients during the treatment year had significantly fewer hospitalizations as well as number and days of psychiatric hospitalization. The dropout rate was 19.1%. This uncontrolled study is highly suggestive that this structured and manualized psychodynamic treatment modified for borderline patients shows promise for the ambulatory treatment of these patients and warrants further study.     

Individual differences in race schematicity as predictors of African American and white children's race-relevant memories and peer preferences

Race schematicity, memories for racially stereotyped portrayals, and race-based peer preferences of 70 young children (32 African American, 38 White) were assessed. Consistent with schema-based models of stereotyping, race schematicity was positively and significantly associated with memory distortions of racial stereotype-inconsistent drawings into stereotype-consistent ones. Conversely, race schematicity was negatively and significantly associated with accurate memories for racial stereotype-inconsistent content, and with memory distortions of racial stereotype-consistent portrayals into stereotype-inconsistent ones. As predicted, race schematicity was positively and significantly associated with same-race peer preference bias, as was children's age in months. Results support application of the schematicity construct and relevant social psychological research with adults to the study of young African American and White children's racial stereotyping and processing of race-relevant information.     

Conceptual structure and the structure of concepts: a distributed account of category-specific deficits

We present a new account of the fine-grained structure of semantic categories derived from neuropsychological, behavioral, and developmental data. The account places theoretical emphasis on the functions of the referents of concepts. We claim (i) that the distinctiveness of functional features correlated with perceptual features varies across semantic domains; and (ii) that category structure emerges from the complex interaction of these variables. The representational assumptions that follow from these claims make strong predictions about what types of semantic information are preserved in patients showing category-specific deficits following brain damage. These claims are illustrated with a connectionist simulation which, when damaged, shows patterns of preservation of distinctive and shared functional and perceptual information which varies across semantic domains. The data model both dissociations between knowledge for artifacts and for living things and recent neuropsychological evidence concerning the robustness of functional information in the representation of concepts.     

The community alcohol use scale: A scale for use in prevention programs

The Community Alcohol Use Scale (CAUS) was developed as a continuous, reliable, valid, and acceptable measure for primary prevention studies. Items were written following a comprehensive review of the literature on alcohol dependence and alcoholism. Based upon the responses of 315 respondents to the 100-item initial version of the scale, the 45-item CAUS was developed. The CAUS was then cross-validated on a local sample (n = 274) and a provincial sample (n = 745). Estimates of internal consistency were .91, .96, and .94, respectively, for the initial and cross-validation samples. Correlations of .48 and .69 were obtained between the CAUS and the Michigan Alcohol Screening Test for the initial and local cross-validation samples. In the provincial cross-validation sample a correlation of .62 was obtained between the CAUS and the Usual Weekly Alcohol Index. Preliminary cutting scores were developed to identify those at risk for alcoholism, and alcoholics. The CAUS has potential use as an evaluative and predictive instrument in a variety of primary prevention programs.     

Perceptual asymmetries in left- and right-handers for cartoon and real faces

We examined 40 left-handers and 40 right-handers on two free-vision tests of face processing. A chimeric face composed of a smiling half-face joined to either a neutral half-face (real faces) or a sad half-face (cartoon faces) and its mirror image were presented on each trial. Subjects judged which chimeric face looked happier, the one with the smile to the left or the one with the smile to the right. Right-handers, but not left-handers, had a highly significant leftward attentional bias, since chimeras with the smile to the left were judged happier than those with the smile to the right. The cartoon- and real-face tasks did not differ in the mean perceptual asymmetries they elicited. However, correlations between attentional-asymmetry scores for the two tasks, although high for both left- and right-handers, were significantly smaller than task reliabilities. Thus, the cartoon- and real-face tasks overlap to a major extent in the lateralized processes they measure, but to a lesser extent, they also index different lateralized processes.     

Assessment of children's Type A behavior: relationship with negative behavioral characteristics and children and teacher demographic characteristics

Thirty-two teachers rated Type A behavior, using Matthews Youth Test for Health, (MYTH) and negative characteristics of hyperactivity, negative peer relations, social withdrawal, and depression in 105 children, between the ages of 6 and 11, from lower to middle class Black and White families. Children's age, gender, race, and socioeconomic status (SES) and teachers' gender, grade taught, and years of teaching experience were not related to teachers' MYTH ratings. However, White teachers rated children higher on Type A behavior than Black teachers. Controlling for teacher race effects, MYTH total scores, rather than reflecting a global negative view of the child, showed a strong overlap with hyperactivity and were differentiated from social withdrawal and depression. The MYTH Impatience/Aggression factor was highly related to hyperactivity and negative peer interactions; the Competitiveness factor was associated with a lack of social withdrawal. The conclusions verify the multidimensional nature of children's Type A behavior pattern and the importance of rater demographic characteristics in the assessment of children's behavior.