A comparison of health disparities among transgender adults in Colorado (USA) by race and income

Transgender individuals face heightened risks for discrimination, harassment, and violence that impact their psychosocial well-being and physical health. However, few studies have thoroughly examined the general physical and mental health of transgender adults or within-group health differences by race/ethnicity and income. To that end, after controlling for health insurance status, age, and engagement in exercise, this study asks: (a) Are transgender people of color more likely than White transgender individuals to experience poor health outcomes? and (b) Is lower annual household income among transgender adults associated with poorer health outcomes? The study analyzes secondary data from a survey of transgender adults (N = 417) in one state in the western United States using multiple linear regression and logistic regression models. Results showed that transgender people of color had significantly greater odds than their White counterparts of having arthritis/rheumatoid arthritis/gout/lupus/fibromyalgia, or asthma but lower odds of being told by a provider that they had depression. Having a lower income was significantly associated with worse general health as well as multiple indicators of poor physical and mental health, including depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. We discuss implications for health care delivery for transgender people and for future research.     

Iteration of Partially Specified Target Matrices: Application to the Bi-Factor Case

The current study proposes a new bi-factor rotation method, Schmid-Leiman with iterative target rotation (SLi), based on the iteration of partially specified target matrices and an initial target constructed from a Schmid-Leiman (SL) orthogonalization. SLi was expected to ameliorate some of the limitations of the previously presented SL bi-factor rotations, SL and SL with target rotation (SLt), when the factor structure either includes cross-loadings, near-zero loadings, or both. A Monte Carlo simulation was carried out to test the performance of SLi, SL, SLt, and the two analytic bi-factor rotations, bi-quartimin and bi-geomin. The results revealed that SLi accurately recovered the bi-factor structures across the majority of the conditions, and generally outperformed the other rotation methods. SLi provided the biggest improvements over SL and SLt when the bi-factor structures contained cross-loadings and pure indicators of the general factor. Additionally, SLi was superior to bi-quartimin and bi-geomin, which performed inconsistently across the types of factor structures evaluated. No method produced a good recovery of the bi-factor structures when small samples (N = 200) were combined with low factor loadings (0.30–0.50) in the specific factors. Thus, it is recommended that larger samples of at least 500 observations be obtained.     

Tracking the emergence of memories: A category-learning paradigm to explore schema-driven recognition

Previous research has shown that prior knowledge structures or schemas affect recognition memory. However, since the acquisition of schemas occurs over prolonged periods of time, few paradigms allow the direct manipulation of schema acquisition to study their effect on memory performance. Recently, a number of parallelisms in recognition memory between studies involving schemas and studies involving category learning have been identified. The current paper capitalizes on these findings and offers a novel experimental paradigm that allows manipulation of category learning between individuals to study the effects of schema acquisition on recognition. First, participants learn to categorize computer-generated items whose category-inclusion criteria differ between participants. Next, participants study items that belong to either the learned category, the non-learned category, both, or neither. Finally, participants receive a recognition test that includes old and new items, either from the learned, the non-learned, or neither category. Using variations on this paradigm, four experiments were conducted. The results from the first three studies suggest that learning a category increases hit rates for old category-consistent items and false alarm rates for new category-consistent lures. Absent the category learning, no such effects are evident, even when participants are exposed to the same learning trials as those who learned the categories. The results from the fourth experiment suggest that, at least for false alarm rates, the effects of category learning are not solely attributable to frequency of occurrence of category-consistent items during learning. Implications for recognition memory as well as advantages of the proposed paradigm are discussed.     

Social Job Resources as Sources of Meaningfulness and its Effects on Nurses’ Vigor and Emotional Exhaustion: A Cross-Sectional Study Among Spanish Nurses

This study investigates the mediating role of psychological meaningfulness among social job resources (i.e., coworkers and supervisor support), vigor, and emotional exhaustion in a nursing context. In spite of progress in understanding which organizational influence affects nurses’ vigor and emotional exhaustion, the psychological mechanisms assumed to underlie the associations have not been fully explored. The sample for this study consisted of 171 nurses from Spanish hospitals (54.4 %) and Primary Care Centers (45.6 %). The mediation model was tested using the bootstrapping procedure. Our findings confirmed that psychological meaningfulness fully mediates the impact of social job resources on vigor at work. Moreover, psychological meaningfulness partially mediated the impact of social job resources on emotional exhaustion. Results suggest that meaningfulness plays an important role in the connection between job resources, vigor, and emotional exhaustion. The findings contribute to our understanding of the psychological processes that can explain how job resources contribute to the energetic aspect of burnout and engagement among nurses. Providing nurses with more social job resources, such as coworker and supervisor support, could activate their levels of personal meaningfulness and thus enhance their levels of well-being at work.     

Exploring Feminist Women's Body Consciousness

In a qualitative investigation of young feminists' experience of body consciousness, 25 feminist women each participated in one of 6 focus groups examining the ways they experienced body image and negotiated cultural messages about women's appearance. Participants described their experience with objectification and its impact on their body image, sense of self, and relationships with other women. Although feminism provided an alternative way to understand cultural messages and reframe negative thoughts, this understanding did not necessarily affect aesthetic reactions. Participants experienced conflict between their feminist beliefs and their feelings about beauty ideals and their own appearance. This conflict is interpreted in terms of a mere exposure effect and existing gender/power relations. Suggestions of ways feminist psychologists can support young women's strategies for resisting negative cultural messages are provided.     

Motor skill learning in the middle-aged: limited development of motor chunks and explicit sequence knowledge

The present study examined whether middle-aged participants, like young adults, learn movement patterns by preparing and executing integrated sequence representations (i.e., motor chunks) that eliminate the need for external guidance of individual movements. Twenty-four middle-aged participants (aged 55–62) practiced two fixed key press sequences, one including three and one including six key presses in the discrete sequence production task. Their performance was compared with that of 24 young adults (aged 18–28). In the middle-aged participants motor chunks as well as explicit sequence knowledge appeared to be less developed than in the young adults. This held especially with respect to the unstructured 6-key sequences in which most middle-aged did not develop independence of the key-specific stimuli and learning seems to have been based on associative learning. These results are in line with the notion that sequence learning involves several mechanisms and that aging affects the relative contribution of these mechanisms.     

Can angelfish (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Pterophyllum scalare</Emphasis>) count? Discrimination between different shoal sizes follows Weber’s law

The ability to discriminate between larger and smaller quantities has been demonstrated in several mammalian and avian species suggesting the possibility of evolutionary conservation of this characteristic. Preference for the larger of two groups has also been shown in fish species, although this ability has rarely been systematically studied in lower order vertebrates, and thus the mechanisms of such ability are not understood. Here, we exploit the tendency of angelfish to seek protection in an unfamiliar environment by joining a group of conspecifics, a behaviour called shoaling. Test fish were given a simultaneous choice between shoals varying both in terms of numerical ratios and absolute numbers of fish. Our results provide evidence for quantity discrimination in angelfish. In general, experimental subjects chose the larger of two shoals. Furthermore, in agreement with Weber’s law, which holds that discrimination between two quantities depends on their ratio, the discrimination between shoals of different quantities of fish was more difficult when the shoal sizes became more similar. The limit of discrimination ratio was found to be below 2:1. Briefly, angelfish are able to discriminate between different quantities of conspecifics subject to a ratio limit, a finding that implies a fitness component in this behaviour similar to what has been demonstrated in higher order vertebrates.     

Effects of spatial frequency content on classification of face gender and expression

The role of different spatial frequency bands on face gender and expression categorization was studied in three experiments. Accuracy and reaction time were measured for unfiltered, low-pass (cut-off frequency of 1 cycle/deg) and high-pass (cutoff frequency of 3 cycles/deg) filtered faces. Filtered and unfiltered faces were equated in root-mean-squared contrast. For low-pass filtered faces reaction times were higher than unfiltered and high-pass filtered faces in both categorization tasks. In the expression task, these results were obtained with expressive faces presented in isolation (Experiment 1) and also with neutral-expressive dynamic sequences where each expressive face was preceded by a briefly presented neutral version of the same face (Experiment 2). For high-pass filtered faces different effects were observed on gender and expression categorization. While both speed and accuracy of gender categorization were reduced comparing to unfiltered faces, the efficiency of expression classification remained similar. Finally, we found no differences between expressive and non expressive faces in the effects of spatial frequency filtering on gender categorization (Experiment 3). These results show a common role of information from the high spatial frequency band in the categorization of face gender and expression.     

The Social Phobia Inventory: screening and cross-cultural validation in Spanish adolescents

Availability of brief, self-report measures to be used as screening instruments is crucial to detect correctly youth with social anxiety disorder and therefore, reach those otherwise under-detected and under-treated. A previous study revealed that the Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN) was potentially an appropriate measure for screening social anxiety among US adolescents. However, there is a lack of information concerning its properties as a screening test in other cultures and languages. This is the main objective of this study, although further validity of the scale is provided as well. The sample consisted of 192 adolescents (a sample composed of 114 subjects with a principal diagnosis of social anxiety disorder; and a group consisting of 78 subjects with no diagnosis of social phobia). Results suggest that the Social Phobia Inventory has demonstrated good psychometric properties and indeed may be used as a screening tool in Spanish-speaking adolescents.