Mentors Enhance Resilience in At-Risk Children and Adolescents

Mentors can play an important role in promoting resilience among at-risk children and adolescents. Nonparental adults who serve as mentors can provide reliable support, communicate moral values, teach information and skills, inspire, motivate, enhance interpersonal relatedness, and foster self-esteem. A number of researchers have reported that at-risk children who have mentors, especially nonparental kin, exhibit fewer problem behaviors, more positive attitudes towards school, greater school efficacy, less marijuana use, less nonviolent delinquency, and lower levels of anxiety and depression. The most successful mentors are those who invest time and energy and have frequent and prolonged contact with the children they guide. The relationship between mentoring and resilience in at-risk children and adolescents may best be understood from psychological, social, and neurobiological perspectives. As described and recommended by Allen and Hauser, the in-depth analysis of narratives provided by at-risk children and adolescents, particularly over the course of their development into young adulthood, will undoubtedly help researchers to isolate specific features of mentoring that are critical for fostering resilience.     

Youth’s Negative Self-Statements as Related to Social Self-Efficacy Among Differing Relationships

Background

Cognitive variables are often neglected in child and adolescent populations despite their roles in the development and maintenance of psychopathology. Furthermore, the importance of examining these variables contextually is underestimated.

Objective

The present study aimed to examine the relationship between two theoretically related cognitive variables in a contextually relevant fashion by proposing several models demonstrating the association between negative self-statements and social self-efficacy holistically and among differing relationships (i.e., peers, adults, strangers) using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) techniques.

Method

As part of a larger study, 126 participants (ages from 11 to 14 years) were recruited for participation from the middle school grades. Participants’ parents were contacted for informed consent, and subsequently, participants were asked to fill out a set of measures in assembly format.

Results

Results indicated that the structural model was well-fitted to the data. Specifically, the frequency of negative self-statements was found to indicate the amount of social self-efficacy present with more negative self-statements being associated with less social self-efficacy. Further, when examined among differing relationships via path analysis, the frequency of negative self-statements was found to be indicative of the social self-self efficacy with peers and adults, but not with strangers.

Conclusions

These findings provide useful information concerning cognitive trends, which are likely relevant for the enhancement of treatment processes in children and adolescents. Implications and recommendations are discussed.     

The Fakability of Bar-On's Emotional Quotient Inventory Short Form: Catch Me if You Can

We developed a method for estimating the dollar utility of changes in job performance associated with illnesses and their treatments. Then we applied this method to predict, for each job in the economy, the difference in productivity costs associated with the illness of Seasonal Allergic Rhinitis (SAR) and that due to the difference between 2 commonly used treatments of SAR. The findings suggest that workers are 5% less productive when affected by SAR, and that when workers treat their SAR with desloratadine (a nonsedating antihistamine) instead of diphenhydramine (an over-the-counter 1st-generation antihistamine), they are 7% more productive, translating to a daily productivity cost differential between the 2 treatments of $11 per day, or $2.6 billion annually. The jobs most affected require high amounts of selective attention and perceptual speed (e.g., Aircraft Pilots and Flight Engineers, and those in the fields of manufacturing, security, and emergency response).     

Physiological profiles of overtrained and stale athletes: A review

Abstract

Recently, it has become apparent that many athletes are exposed to very high volumes of intense training. Sometimes, rather than adapting normally to the training stimulus (i.e., improving in performance), the athlete experiences a reduction in his or her performance capacity. This occurrence has been termed overtraining or a state of staleness. The intent of this review is to characterize the physiological changes found in athletes exposed to overtraining or exhibiting a state of staleness. Changes and responses in five general physiological systems are discussed 1) neuromuscular, 2) cardiovascular, 3) metabolic-endocrine, 4) im-munological, kind 5) kinanthropometric. Perturbations within each of the major physiological systems associated with physical performance have been reported. Inconsistencies, however, exist in the degree and nature of the physiological changes. The present treatment for staleness consists of rest, and in some cases, complete abstention from training and sporting activities may be necessary. Many athletes find such treatment practices extremely undesirable. Unfortunately, until more extensive research examining the physiological changes and responses of the overtrained/stale athlete is conducted, few other recourses appear to exist.     

Spiritual Coping in American Buddhists: An Exploratory Study

Researchers in the United States have examined spiritual coping in Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims, but rarely Buddhists. Using qualitative methodology, the present study represents an initial investigation into Buddhist forms of coping. Twenty-four Buddhists from across the United States were interviewed by phone, examining how their spirituality is used to cope with stress. Thematic analyses revealed six forms of Buddhist coping—right understanding, meditation, mindfulness, spiritual struggles, morality, and finding support in one's sangha. Implications of the study are discussed, including possibilities for future research on Buddhist coping.     

Reflection-Impulsivity and Locus of Control in Emotionally Disturbed Children

Impulsive and reflective emotionally disturbed children were compared on their perceived locus of control. Contrary to prediction, there were no differences in locus of control for these two groups.     

State-Space Analysis of Working Memory in Schizophrenia: An FBIRN Study

The neural correlates of working memory (WM) in schizophrenia (SZ) have been extensively studied using the multisite fMRI data acquired by the Functional Biomedical Informatics Research Network (fBIRN) consortium. Although univariate and multivariate analysis methods have been variously employed to localize brain responses under differing task conditions, important hypotheses regarding the representation of mental processes in the spatio-temporal patterns of neural recruitment and the differential organization of these mental processes in patients versus controls have not been addressed in this context. This paper uses a multivariate state-space model (SSM) to analyze the differential representation and organization of mental processes of controls and patients performing the Sternberg Item Recognition Paradigm (SIRP) WM task. The SSM is able to not only predict the mental state of the subject from the data, but also yield estimates of the spatial distribution and temporal ordering of neural activity, along with estimates of the hemodynamic response. The dynamical Bayesian modeling approach used in this study was able to find significant differences between the predictability and organization of the working memory processes of SZ patients versus healthy subjects. Prediction of some stimulus types from imaging data in the SZ group was significantly lower than controls, reflecting a greater level of disorganization/heterogeneity of their mental processes. Moreover, the changes in accuracy of predicting the mental state of the subject with respect to parametric modulations, such as memory load and task duration, may have important implications on the neurocognitive models for WM processes in both SZ and healthy adults. Additionally, the SSM was used to compare the spatio-temporal patterns of mental activity across subjects, in a holistic fashion and to derive a low-dimensional representation space for the SIRP task, in which subjects were found to cluster according to their diagnosis.     

Complicated Grief: An Evolving Theoretical Landscape

The bereavement literature has proliferated in recent decades, generating a shift from conceptualizing grief as a stepwise, uniform process to an idiosyncratic experience that varies among individuals. Among the most notable developments is the empirical exploration of complicated grief—a protracted, debilitating, sometimes life‐threatening response to the death of a loved one—and the testing of novel interventions to treat it. This article provides counselors with recommendations for identifying and treating complicated grief.     

Integrating Criminological and Decision Research Theory: Implications for Understanding and Addressing Crime in Marginalized Communities

Minority groups are significantly overrepresented in crime. Theories of racial differences in crime developed using two separate and distinct approaches that highlight either increased exposure to criminogenic factors at the individual level or greater risk of crime due to disadvantaged neighborhood conditions. Neighborhood theories describe how structural disadvantage disrupts neighborhood social processes and produces oppositional street cultures. In the article, we advance theorizing on race and crime by linking the neighborhood experience to individual-level decision making via new conceptualizations of culture. Rather than a “values as goals” view of culture, culture may include a “tool kit” of ways to solve problems and this cultural toolkit may, in turn, influence how an individual makes decisions. Specifically, culturally learned toolkits may increase flaws in the decision process (e.g., fast and intuitive rather than deliberate decision processes, the use of decision heuristics) to produce more crime, which would explain the association between race and crime. We integrate this conceptualization of culture and these flaws in the decision-making process into rational choice theory at the individual level and describe how they may be exacerbated in disadvantaged neighborhood contexts. Implications for understanding race and crime and directions for future research are discussed.