Acceptance and expressed emotion in Mexican American caregivers of relatives with schizophrenia

The relation between Expressed Emotion (EE) and caregiver acceptance was tested with the use of video-recorded interactions between 31 Mexican American family caregivers and their relatives with schizophrenia. Borrowing the concept from Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy, acceptance was defined as caregiver's engagement with the ill relative along with low levels of expectations for behavioral change. Three aspects of caregiver acceptance were measured: global acceptance of the patient, unified detachment (i.e., nonblaming but engaged problem discussion), and low aversive responses to patient behavior (e.g., criticisms and demanding change). Relative to high EE caregivers, low EE caregivers were consistently more accepting of their ill relatives across the three measures of acceptance. Unified detachment was negatively associated with emotional overinvolvement and aversive responses were positively related to criticism. Warmth was not related to acceptance. The findings suggest that the study of acceptance in family caregivers is a heuristic avenue for future research due to its potential to shed light on specifically what family members do in caring for their ill relatives with schizophrenia.     

What Underlies Appraisals? Experimentally Testing a Knowledge‐and‐Appraisal Model of Personality Architecture Among Smokers Contemplating High‐Risk Situations

ABSTRACT We tested a theoretical model of personality structures underlying patterns of intra-individual variability in contextualized appraisals. The KAPA (Knowledge-and-Appraisal Personality Architecture) model was tested experimentally among smokers appraising their efficacy to resist the urge to smoke in high-risk situations. In a novel design, we assessed self-knowledge and situational beliefs idiographically and employed cognitive priming to manipulate the accessibility of self-knowledge experimentally. The results confirmed the unique KAPA-model prediction that priming would affect appraisals in a contextualized manner. Priming positively valenced self-knowledge enhanced self-efficacy appraisals specifically within that subset of situations that were relevant to the primed knowledge. The results were consistent with the hypothesis that systems of self- and situational knowledge underlie consistency and variability in appraisals.     

Perceived collective continuity and social well‐being: exploring the connections

Research has shown that people tend to perceive the groups to which they belong (e.g., national groups) as temporally persistent. In this paper we argue that enhanced perceptions of collective continuity lead to lower levels of anomy and misfit, and to higher levels of social well‐being (SWB). Furthermore, we argue that the effects of perceived collective continuity (PCC) on SWB are mediated by collective self‐esteem (CSE). Finally, we contend that PCC has positive effects on perceived group entitativity (PGE), which in turn has a positive influence on CSE. This model is tested by means of a cross‐sectional study using a sample of Spanish nationals (N = 145) drawn from the general public. Results confirm that the data fit the model well. These findings are in line with research demonstrating that a sense of personal continuity through time is related with better mental health and personal well‐being. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Medicine and Humanities: Voicing Connections

Accepting as a given that the humanities disciplines are not product or "results" driven, this paper argues that the core of an interdisciplinary field of medicine and humanities, or medical humanities, is an interpretive enterprise that is not readily open to quantitative assessment. A more humanistically oriented medical practice can derive, however, from the process that produces new insights and works toward the development of a new, mutually shared, and humanizing language.     

Ethnic Differences in Parental Perceptions of Genetic Testing for Deaf Infants

As genetic testing becomes an integral part of the evaluation of deaf infants and children, it is important to understand parental views on genetic testing. The purpose of this study is to examine parental reasons for, and beliefs about, genetic testing for deafness in early-identified infants, and to determine if they differ as a function of ethnicity. We present baseline data collected from 56 Caucasian, 59 Hispanic, and 24 Asian parents of deaf children participating in a longitudinal, prospective study on genetic testing for connexin-related deafness. The overall finding is that reasons for, and beliefs about, genetic testing for deafness varied as a function of ethnicity. Virtually all parents sought genetic testing to understand why their child is deaf. However, Asian and/or Hispanic parents were more likely than Caucasian parents to view family planning, helping with their child's medical care, and helping the family as other important reasons for testing, and were more likely than Caucasian parents to perceive genetic testing to be useful for these purposes. Asian and Hispanic parents were more likely than Caucasian parents to perceive genetic testing in harmful terms. Genetic testing fulfills a cognitive need for parents to understand why their child is deaf, yet differences in responses suggest that Asian and Hispanic parents may seek testing for other purposes. Understanding different perspectives on genetic testing for deafness will enhance genetic counselors' cultural competence and facilitate the pre-test genetic counseling session.     

Psychiatric Disorders in Clinical Genetics II: Individualizing Recurrence Risks

This is the second article of a two-part professional development series on genetic counseling for personal and family histories of psychiatric disorders. It is based on an Educational Breakout Session presented by The Psychiatric Special Interest Group of the National Society of Genetic Counselors at the 2006 Annual Education Conference. While the first article in this two part series dealt with addressing family histories of psychiatric disorders in clinical practice, the following discussion deals with the generation and provision of individualized recurrence risks for psychiatric disorders, based on empiric risk data. We present four cases that illustrate important components of and process for generating individualized risk assessment for family histories of psychiatric disorders.     

Examining cultural socialization within African American and European American households

This preliminary study explored the cultural socialization processes of 227 African American and European American parents of elementary schoolchildren. The Cultural Value Socialization Scales (K. M. Tyler, A. W. Boykin, C. M. Boelter, & M. L. Dillihunt, 2005) were used to garner parents' reports of their cultural value socialization activities at home. The scales contained written vignettes depicting persons involved in activity that reflected a specific cultural value. Ethnocultural values examined were communalism, verve, movement, and affect, and mainstream cultural values included individualism, competition, bureaucracy, and materialism. Regression analyses reveal that being an African American parent was predictive of competition and materialism scores. Race was not a significant predictor of the remaining cultural value socialization scores. Limitations to the study are discussed.     

Under-represented college students and extracurricular involvement: the effects of various student organizations on academic performance

Several studies indicate that students who are involved in extracurricular activities during college are more academically successful than are those who are not; however, most studies do not distinguish between different types of activities nor do they adequately consider the unique experiences of under-represented college students. Drawing on Ogbu’s theory of oppositional culture and Tinto’s theory of educational departure, I examine the effect of involvement in six different types of student organizations, as well as involvement in a co-ethnic student organization, on the academic performance of African American and Latino college students attending 27 different selective colleges. I find that student organizations differentially affect academic performance, depending on the type of organization and the race and gender of the students.

The quest for generalizations over consonants: Asymmetries between consonants and vowels are not the by-product of acoustic differences

Consonants and vowels may play different roles during language processing, consonants being preferentially involved in lexical processing, and vowels tending to mark syntactic constituency through prosodic cues. In support of this view, artificial language learning studies have demonstrated that consonants (C) support statistical computations, whereas vowels (V) allow certain structural generalizations. Nevertheless, these asymmetries could be mere by-products of lower level acoustic differences between Cs and Vs, in particular the energy they carry, and thus their relative salience. Here we address this issue and show that vowels remain the preferred targets for generalizations, even when consonants are made highly salient or vowels barely audible. Participants listened to speech streams of nonsense CVCVCV words, in which consonants followed a simple ABA structure. Participants failed to generalize this structure over sonorant consonants (Experiment 1), even when vowel duration was reduced to one third of that of consonants (Experiment 2). When vowels were eliminated from the stream, participants showed only a marginal evidence of generalizations (Experiment 4). In contrast, participants readily generalized the structure over barely audible vowels (Experiment 3). These results show that different roles of consonants and vowels cannot be readily reduced to acoustical and perceptual differences between these phonetic categories.     

Developing symbolic capacity one step at a time

The present research examines the ability of children as young as 4 years to use models in tasks that require scaling of distance along a single dimension. In Experiment 1, we found that tasks involving models are similar in difficulty to those involving maps that we studied earlier (Huttenlocher, J., Newcombe, N., & Vasilyeva, M. (1999). Spatial scaling in young children. Psychological Science, 10, 393-398). In Experiment 2, we found that retrieval tasks, where children indicate the location of a hidden object in an actual space are substantially more difficult than placement tasks, where children put a visible object in a particular location in an actual space. We discuss possible implications of the differential difficulty of retrieval and placement tasks for the understanding of symbolic development.