The Problematization of Sexuality among Women Living with HIV and a New Feminist Approach for Understanding and Enhancing Women’s Sexual Lives

In the context of HIV, women’s sexual rights and sexual autonomy are important but frequently overlooked and violated. Guided by community voices, feminist theories, and qualitative empirical research, we reviewed two decades of global quantitative research on sexuality among women living with HIV. In the 32 studies we found, conducted in 25 countries and composed mostly of cis-gender heterosexual women, sexuality was narrowly constructed as sexual behaviours involving risk (namely, penetration) and physiological dysfunctions relating to HIV illness, with far less attention given to the fullness of sexual lives in context, including more positive and rewarding experiences such as satisfaction and pleasure. Findings suggest that women experience declines in sexual activity, function, satisfaction, and pleasure following HIV diagnosis, at least for some period. The extent of such declines, however, is varied, with numerous contextual forces shaping women’s sexual well-being. Clinical markers of HIV (e.g., viral load, CD4 cell count) poorly predicted sexual outcomes, interrupting widely held assumptions about sexuality for women with HIV. Instead, the effects of HIV-related stigma intersecting with inequities related to trauma, violence, intimate relations, substance use, poverty, aging, and other social and cultural conditions primarily influenced the ways in which women experienced and enacted their sexuality. However, studies framed through a medical lens tended to pathologize outcomes as individual “problems,” whereas others driven by a public health agenda remained primarily preoccupied with protecting the public from HIV. In light of these findings, we present a new feminist approach for research, policy, and practice toward understanding and enhancing women’s sexual lives—one that affirms sexual diversity; engages deeply with society, politics, and history; and is grounded in women’s sexual rights.     

Important Elements of Aftercare Services for Youth Departing Group Homes

Aftercare services have been suggested to improve the outcomes of youth who depart group homes. The purpose of this study was to collect views from social service agency leaders about the aftercare supports they believed were most important for youth departing group homes. This project used a survey method and gathered views from 38 agency leaders who were 28–66 years of age, with an average of 21 years of experience working with residential care programs in 23 states across the United States. Participants ranked seven support domains (i.e., family, education, mental health, relationships, physical health, safety, and independent living) and rated 56 specific aftercare supports based on importance for youth who were departing group homes and returning to their homes/schools prior to high school graduation. Results suggested family, safety, and mental health supports were the most important domains of support for aftercare. Specific aftercare items that were rated critically important included support for self-harm/suicidal thoughts, accessing mental health services, coping with trauma, and managing medication for behavior/mental health. Tables are provided for the complete list of 56 specific support ratings. The findings are summarized and limitations are discussed. Also included are the implications the findings could have regarding future research on the design of aftercare services.     

Ethical Behavioral Intention in an Academic Setting: Models and Predictors

This study examines the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the multidimensional ethics scale (MES). Variables from both are included to determine which ones significantly correlate with student ethical behavioral intention in an academic setting. Using a survey, responses are collected from undergraduate business students from two southwestern universities in the United States using a scenario-based approach, looking at individual situations and group situations. SmartPLS was used to assess the results for four scenarios. From the theory of planned behavior, attitude was a significant predictor of behavioral intention across all four scenarios while subjective norm was significant in one scenario. From the multidimensional ethics scale, moral equity and relativism were significant in one group scenario while moral equity and utilitarianism were each significant in an individual scenario. The findings indicate support for the use of the TPB and the MES when exploring ethics in an academic setting and for the need to study both individual and group situations. A discussion of the findings and implications is given.     

WINDSOR: Windsor improved norms of distance and similarity of representations of semantics

Lexical co-occurrence models of semantic memory form representations of the meaning of a word on the basis of the number of times that pairs of words occur near one another in a large body of text. These models offer a distinct advantage over models that require the collection of a large number of judgments from human subjects, since the construction of the representations can be completely automated. Unfortunately, word frequency, a well-known predictor of reaction time in several cognitive tasks, has a strong effect on the co-occurrence counts in a corpus. Two words with high frequency are more likely to occur together purely by chance than are two words that occur very infrequently. In this article, we examine a modification of a successful method for constructing semantic representations from lexical co-occurrence. We show that our new method eliminates the influence of frequency, while still capturing the semantic characteristics of words.     

"I need to talk about it": a qualitative analysis of trauma-exposed women's reasons for treatment choice

A significant proportion of individuals suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder do not seek or receive effective treatment. Understanding the reasons why an individual chooses to seek treatment or prefers one treatment to another is a critical step to improve treatment seeking. To begin to understand these reasons, we conducted a qualitative analysis of the reasons women gave for choosing a cognitive-behavioral treatment, prolonged exposure (PE), or a pharmacological treatment, sertraline (SER). A community sample of women with trauma histories were asked to view standardized rationales, to choose among PE, SER, or no treatment, and to give 5 reasons for their choice. Women indicated that they were more likely to prefer the psychotherapy to the medication. Across reasons given, the most commonly cited reason for treatment preference highlighted why or how the treatment worked (e.g., I need to talk about it); and this reason emerged as the strongest predictor of preference for PE. Understanding this role of perceived treatment mechanism may aid clinicians and public health policy officials to identify and address help-seeking barriers regarding treatment.     

Third-party support for strike action

Labor strikes are often seen as battles for public support. Members of the public are asked to show respect for a strike by refusing to cross the picket line or by joining strikers on the picket line. Such public support may affect the morale of strikers and influence the strike's duration. Despite the perceived importance of the public in labor disputes, members of third parties have not been considered in previous strike research. In 2 studies, the authors show that a new measure of third-party strike support is unidimensional and highly reliable. In both cases, union attitudes and perceptions of distributive justice were significant predictors of support for strike action. Those who are more supportive of unions in general and believe that the contract offered to the strikers was unfair were more likely to support the strike by engaging in such actions as conversing with strikers, writing letters, and refusing to cross the picket line.     

The shape of thought

When children learn the name of a novel object, they tend to extend that name to other objects similar in shape – a phenomenon referred to as the shape bias. Does the shape bias stem from learned associations between names and categories of objects, or does it derive from more general properties of children's understanding of language and the world? We argue here for the second alternative, presenting evidence that the shape bias emerges early in development, is not limited to names, and is intimately related to how children make sense of categories.     

Philosophical Debates about Prostitution: State of the Question

This article aims to present “the state of the question” concerning prostitution. It is organized around an analysis of the various questions that current theorists take themselves to be answering when they defend decriminalization, some form of legalization, or the so‐called “Nordic model” of sex equality. By assessing these “framing questions,” as I shall call them, and the arguments stemming from them, we gain a powerful basis for understanding and critiquing the literature as a whole. In the end, I argue that the Nordic Model is superior in both its orienting method and its solution.     

Speech Perception Within an Auditory Cognitive Science Framework

ABSTRACT— The complexities of the acoustic speech signal pose many significant challenges for listeners. Although perceiving speech begins with auditory processing, investigation of speech perception has progressed mostly independently of study of the auditory system. Nevertheless, a growing body of evidence demonstrates that cross-fertilization between the two areas of research can be productive. We briefly describe research bridging the study of general auditory processing and speech perception, showing that the latter is constrained and influenced by operating characteristics of the auditory system and that our understanding of the processes involved in speech perception is enhanced by study within a more general framework. The disconnect between the two areas of research has stunted the development of a truly interdisciplinary science, but there is an opportunity for great strides in understanding with the development of an integrated field of auditory cognitive science.     

Memory fragments as components of autobiographical knowledge

Adults described and dated two kinds of personal remembrances: a fragment—a memory moment that is largely bereft of context—and an episodic, personal event memory—a narrative that consists of a number of related events. In Experiment 1 subjects reported memories from when they were 0–8 years of age and in Experiment 2, from when they were 0–16 years of age. Fragments were judged to be older than event memories, especially in Experiment 2 where the estimated ages of most fragments were from 0 to 8 years and of most episodic memories, from 8 to 16 years. Ratings of various features of the two kinds of memories also differed. We conclude that isolated memory moments possess validity and that although they are most likely to arise when the autobiographical memory system is not fully developed, they can also originate during a time when it is. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.