Multicultural perspectives on suicide

Cultural differences exist as to suicide rates, suicide attempts, suicide attitudes such as acceptability, and appropriate treatment of suicide. Although suicide has been studied cross-nationally to highlight cross-cultural differences, the nuances of suicide among racioethnic groups within the United States have been at times been overlooked. The present article discusses suicide among the four (African American, Hispanic American, Native American, Asian American) most populous minority sociopolitical groups in the United States, and makes culture-specific recommendations for treatment and research.     

Collaborative coping and daily mood in couples dealing with prostate cancer

Collaborative coping (i.e., spouses pooling resources and problem solving jointly) may be associated with better daily mood because of heightened perceptions of efficacy in coping with stressful events. The study examined the daily processes of collaborative coping (individuals' perceptions that the spouse collaborated), perceived coping effectiveness (ratings of how well they dealt with the event), and mood (i.e., Positive and Negative Affect Scale) across 14 days in 57 older couples coping with stressors involving the husband's prostate cancer and daily life in general. In hierarchical multivariate linear models, collaborative coping was associated with more positive same-day mood for both husbands and wives and less negative mood for wives only. These associations were partially mediated by heightened perceptions of coping effectiveness. Exploratory analyses revealed that collaborative coping was more frequent among wives who performed more poorly on cognitive tests and couples who reported greater marital satisfaction and more frequently using collaboration to make decisions. The results suggest that older couples may benefit from collaborative coping in dealing with problems surrounding illness.     

Effecting science, affecting medicine: homosexuality, the Kinsey reports, and the contested boundaries of psychopathology in the United States, 1948-1965

Despite the well-documented intensive battle between Alfred Kinsey and American psychiatrists around the mid-twentieth century, this paper argues that Kinsey's work, in fact, played a significant role in transforming mental health experts' view of homosexuality starting as far back as the late 1940s and extending all the way through the mid-1960s. After analyzing the way in which Kinsey's work pushed American psychiatrists to re-evaluate their understanding of homosexuality indirectly through the effort of clinical psychologists, I then focus to a greater extent on examples that illustrate how the Kinsey reports directly influenced members of the psychiatric community. In the conclusion, using a Foucauldian conception of "discourse," I propose that in order to approach the struggle around the pathological status of homosexuality in the 1950s and the 1960s, thinking in terms of a "politics of knowledge" is more promising than simply in terms of a "politics of diagnosis." Central to the struggle was not merely the matter of medical diagnosis, but larger issues regarding the production of knowledge at an intersection of science and medicine where the parameters of psychopathology were disputed in the context of mid-twentieth-century United States.     

Activation of amygdaloid PKC pathway is necessary for conditioned cues-provoked cocaine memory performance

Drug-associated cues are critical in reinstating the drug taking behavior even during prolonged abstinence and thus are thought to be a key factor to induce drug craving and to cause relapse. Amygdaloid complex has been known for its physiological function in mediating emotional experience storage and emotional cues-regulated memory retrieval. This study was undertaken to examine the role of basolateral nuclei of amygdala and the intracellular signaling molecule in drug cues-elicited cocaine memory retrieval. Systemic anisomycin treatment prior to the retrieval test abolished the cues-provoked cocaine conditioned place preference (CPP) memory. Likewise, a similar blockade of cues-provoked cocaine CPP performance was achieved by infusion of anisomycin and cycloheximide into the basolateral nuclei of amygdala before the test. Intra-amygdaloid infusion of H89, a protein kinase A inhibitor, or U0126, a MEK inhibitor, did not affect retrieval of the cues-elicited cocaine CPP memory. In contrast, intra-amygdaloid infusion of NPC 15437, a PKC inhibitor, abolished the cues-elicited cocaine CPP expression, while left the memory per se intact. Intra-amygdaloid infusion of NPC 15437 did not seem to affect locomotor activity or exert observable aversive effect. Taken together, our results suggest that activation of PKC signaling pathway and probably downstream de novo protein synthesis in the basolateral nuclei of amygdala is required for the cues-elicited cocaine memory performance. However, temporary inhibition of this signaling pathway does not seem to affect cocaine CPP memory per se.     

Learning geographical information from hypothetical maps

People show biases or distortions in their geographical judgments, such as mistakenly judging Rome to be south of Chicago (the Chicago-Rome illusion). These errors may derive from either perceptual heuristics or categorical organization. However, previous work on geographic knowledge has generally examined people's judgments of real-world locations for which learning history is unknown. This article reports experiments on the learning of hypothetical geographical spaces, in which participants acquired information in a fashion designed to control real-world factors, such as variable travel experiences or stereotypes about other countries, as well as to mimic initial encounters with locations through reading or conventional school-based geography education. Five experiments combine to suggest that biases in judgment based on learning of this kind are different in key regards from those seen with real-world geography and may be based more on the use of perceptual heuristics than on categorical organization.     

Hierarchical, job content, and double plateaus: A mixed-method study of stress, depression and coping responses

Hierarchically, job content, and double plateaued employees from a variety of industries were surveyed regarding their experiences. Plateau-specific stress was higher than the stress experienced by the general population. Plateaued employees also reported more depression than the general population. Double plateaued employees reported higher depression than hierarchically plateaued employees. Content analysis revealed 27 distinct coping strategies reported by employees, representing 7 coping meta-themes. The most frequently occurring meta-themes were Discuss Problem, Job Withdrawal, and Mental Coping. Hierarchically plateaued employees reported slightly greater use of Mental Coping strategies than job content and double plateaued employees.     

Bridging the partisan divide: Self-affirmation reduces ideological closed-mindedness and inflexibility in negotiation

Three studies link resistance to probative information and intransigence in negotiation to concerns of identity maintenance. Each shows that affirmations of personal integrity (vs. nonaffirmation or threat) can reduce resistance and intransigence but that this effect occurs only when individuals' partisan identity and/or identity-related convictions are made salient. Affirmation made participants' assessment of a report critical of U.S. foreign policy less dependent on their political views, but only when the identity relevance of the issue rather than the goal of rationality was salient (Study 1). Affirmation increased concession making in a negotiation over abortion policy, but again this effect was moderated by identity salience (Studies 2 and 3). Indeed, although affirmed negotiators proved relatively more open to compromise when either the salience of their true convictions or the importance of remaining faithful to those convictions was heightened, the reverse was true when the salient goal was compromise. The theoretical and applied significance of these findings are discussed.     

Initial Validation of the Children’s Worry Management Scale

We investigated the psychometric properties of a new instrument, the Children’s Worry Management Scale (CWMS). The CWMS has three subscales that specify methods of regulating worry: inhibition (the suppression of worry), dysregulation (exaggerated displays of worry), and coping (constructive ways of managing worry). Using a Caucasian, middle-class sample of 214 children (M = 9 years, 1 month), Study 1 provides reliability and validity data through patterns of correlations to parent- and child-completed measures of emotion management and behavioral problems. Internal consistencies range from .69 to .74. Study 2 establishes discriminant validity by demonstrating that the CWMS Dysregulation and Coping subscales differentiated, in the expected directions, between a group of children (n = 27) with DSM-IV anxiety diagnoses and a control group of children with no psychological disorders.     

Are bad experiences stronger than good ones in mentoring relationships? Evidence from the protégé and mentor perspective

Two studies examined the relative importance of good versus bad mentoring experiences in predicting subjective states associated with the mentoring relationship. Study 1 examined the protégé perspective and found general support for the proposition that, on average, bad is stronger than good in predicting protégé outcomes. Study 2 adopted the mentor perspective and found mixed support for the prediction that, on average, bad is stronger than good. The results are discussed in terms of advancing research and theory on the relational processes associated with mentoring in the workplace and the need to consider the relational context to more fully understand the relative predictive power of good and bad mentoring experiences.