A genetically informed study of marital instability and its association with offspring psychopathology

Parental divorce is associated with a number of emotional and behavioral problems in young-adult offspring, but theoretical and empirical considerations suggest that the relation may be partially or fully accounted for by passive gene-environment correlation or environmental selection characteristics. The current study used the Children of Twins Design to explore whether shared environmental or genetic factors confound the relationship between parental marital instability and measures of psychopathology. Comparisons of the offspring of adult twins in Australia on 3 factors of abnormal behavior, including drug and alcohol, behavioral, and internalizing problems, suggest that environmental influences associated with divorce account for the higher rates of psychopathology. The results are consistent with a causal connection between marital instability and psychopathology in young-adult offspring.     

Adult age differences in visual word identification: functional neuroanatomy by positron emission tomography

Adult age differences in the neural systems mediating semantic (context-independent) memory were investigated using positron emission tomography (PET). Younger (20-29 years) and older (62-70 years) participants performed lexical decision (word/nonword discrimination) and nonsemantic (simple visual search) baseline tasks during PET scanning. Within the lexical decision task, display duration and presentation rate were varied across scans. The behavioral data suggested that although an age-related slowing was evident in visual feature and response processing, the retrieval of semantic/lexical information was similar for younger and older adults. For both age groups, lexical-related activation occurred in inferior prefrontal and occipitotemporal regions of the left hemisphere. Differential activation, as a function of age group, was observed in the left occipitotemporal pathway as a result of older adults' maintaining higher levels of neural activity in striate cortex (during visual search) and in inferior temporal cortex (during lexical decision). The prefrontal activation was similar for the two age groups. Thus, although this form of semantic memory retrieval does not undergo significant age-related decline, an age-related change in the associated pattern of neural activation is evident. These findings differ from previous neuroimaging studies of episodic (context-dependent) memory retrieval, which have suggested that age-related compensatory mechanisms are expressed primarily by greater activation of prefrontal regions for older adults than for younger adults.     

Adult age differences in attentional selectivity and capacity

Abstract

This paper reviews empirical research on adult age differences in the use of attention during visual search and classification tasks. This research suggests that the selective aspect of attention, in the sense of the ability to discriminate relevant and irrelevant information, is relatively resistant to age-related change. The capacity aspect of attention, in the sense of the limited processing resources that underlie task performance, appears to undergo age-related decline. Questions remain, however, regarding whether capacity-reduction explanations of age differences in cognitive performance have any advantages over explanations based on task complexity. Recent analyses of ageing and attention emphasise the potential contribution of formal models of cognitive performance.     

The Impact of an Economic Boom on the Level and Distribution of Subjective Well-Being: Ireland, 1994–2001

The impact of increased affluence on life satisfaction is a matter of some controversy. This paper examines the impact of the recent economic boom in Ireland upon the level and distribution of various domains of well-being. There is evidence of a substantial increase in life satisfaction in the domain of finance and of an improvement in mental well-being. There is a reduction in inequality and polarisation for virtually all domains of life satisfaction. A social welfare function which is increasing and concave in individual well-being would show an improvement in social welfare over the period.     

‘It's not really us discriminating against immigrants,it's more telling people how to fit in’: Constructing the nation in immigration talk in New Zealand

Previous research has demonstrated that talk about immigration can function to produce, reproduce and stabilize racism (Capdevila & Callaghan, 2008 ). In New Zealand (NZ), changes in immigration policy have seen a rapid increase in diverse groups of migrants with varied cultural backgrounds entering the country in the past two decades. Given its unique colonial history and ‘settler nationality in a bicultural nation’ (Bell, 2009 ), we explored how young NZ adults talk about and produce meanings and understandings of immigration, immigrants and cultural diversity. Appealing to notions of NZ as ‘one society’, as English speaking, and as English looking participants constructed NZ, NZ national identity and the NZ economy in particular ways. This constituted a nationalist rhetoric that was taken up in common‐sense ways by participants to legitimize racist talk whilst simultaneously acting to locate participants themselves as reasonable and moral individuals. It is concluded that nationalist discourses function to reinforce patterns of social dominance and perpetuate the notion of New Zealanders as largely white, European‐looking and English‐speaking. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Risk for suicidal thoughts and behavior after childhood sexual abuse in women and men

Earlier studies have found an elevated risk for psychopathology and suicidal behavior associated with childhood sexual abuse (CSA); however, the degree to which risk is mediated by depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in women and men remains unclear. We examined these issues in data from a family study of childhood maltreatment (N = 2,559). We found significant CSA-associated risk for depression, PTSD, and suicidal behavior for women and men. In survival analyses controlling for these disorders, we observed persistent but somewhat reduced CSA-associated risk for suicidal ideation and suicide attempt. Our findings suggest that these disorders partially mediate CSA-associated risk.