A call to collaboration: the federal commitment to suicide prevention

The federal government, largely through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), sponsors an array of science-based suicide prevention initiatives. This article details the prevention-related agendas and collaborative efforts of five operating divisions within the Department of Health and Human Services: the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Indian Health Service, and Health Resources and Services Administration. The article highlights HHS's activities and their link to the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention, the plan which will guide the nation's suicide prevention efforts for the next decade.     

The evidence of sex-typed behaviors in professional Jamaican men and women

This investigation examines the extent to which a sample of 89 professional Jamaican men and women displays the traits of masculinity and femininity, measured by way of Bem's Sex-Role Inventory. The sample was drawn from the public and private sectors of society. Findings suggest that while, as expected, both sexes were classified mainly according to their appropriate sex-role traits, females in the private sector were much more “masculine” than their counterparts in the public sector. This was thought to reflect the pressure on private sector women to “prove themselves” as equals of men—a pressure which does not represent one of the criteria for promotion within the public sector.     

Twenty-Five Years of Groupthink Theory and Research: Lessons from the Evaluation of a Theory

In this paper, we examine the historical development of the groupthink model and discuss recent responses to the body of empirical evidence amassed on the model. We conclude by articulating general lessons implied by the evolution of research on the groupthink model.     

Animal,but not human,faces engage the distributed face network in adolescents with autism

Multiple hypotheses have been offered to explain the impaired face‐processing behavior and the accompanying underlying disruptions in neural circuitry among individuals with autism. We explored the specificity of atypical face‐processing activation and potential alterations to fusiform gyrus (FG) morphology as potential underlying mechanisms. Adolescents with high functioning autism (HFA) and age‐matched typically developing (TD) adolescents were scanned with sMRI and fMRI as they observed human and animal faces. In spite of exhibiting comparable face recognition behavior, the HFA adolescents evinced hypo‐activation throughout the face‐processing system in response to unfamiliar human, but not animal, faces. They also exhibited greater activation in affective regions of the face‐processing network in response to animal, but not human, faces. Importantly, this atypical pattern of activation in response to human faces was not related to atypical structural properties of the FG. This atypical neural response to human faces in autism may stem from abnormalities in the ability to represent the reward value of social (i.e. conspecific) stimuli.     

Educated and underemployed: Refugee integration into the Canadian labour market

This study explores issues of access to high-status occupations in the Canadian labour market, with particular emphasis on refugees who were in professional or managerial positions prior to their arrival in Canada. The study is based on interviews with a sample of 525 adult refugees who were initially resettled in the province of Alberta between 1992 and 1997. About two thirds of the respondents came from former Yugoslavia, the remainder from countries in the Middle East, Central America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Despite the generally high educational attainment of these refugees, the results show that they experience, much higher rates of unemployment, part-time employment, and temporary employment than do Canadian-born individuals. A variety of structural factors operating in a segmented Canadian labour market help to explain the downward mobility of these highly qualified refugees. The policy implications of these results are examined in detail.     

The Mind's Eye Mapped Onto the Brain's Matter

Research on visual mental imagery has been fueled recently by the development of new behavioral and neuroscientific techniques. This review focuses on two major topics in light of these developments. The first concerns the extent to which visual mental imagery and visual perception share common psychological and neural mechanisms; although the research findings largely support convergence between these two processes, there are data that qualify the degree of overlap between them. The second issue involves the neural substrate mediating the process of imagery generation. The data suggest a slight left-hemisphere advantage for this process, although there is considerable variability across and within subjects. There also remain many unanswered questions in this field, including what the relationship is between imagery and working memory and what representational differences, if any, exist between imagery and perception.     

Black Lives Matter: We are in the Same Storm but we are not in the Same Boat

Black Lives Matter is a clarion call for racial equality and racial justice. With the arrival of Africans as slaves in 1619, a racial hierarchy was formed in the United States. However, slavery is commonly dismissed as that less than noble aspect of the United States’ history without really confronting the legacies of racial inequality and racial injustice left in its wake. White supremacy, based on the myths of white superiority and Black inferiority, have obscured racial inequality and racial injustice, resulting in blaming the victims. Using Black Lives Matter as a platform, we focus on some key considerations for theory, research, education, training, and practice in clinical, community, and larger systems contexts. Broadly, we focus on Black Lives Matter, literally; Black dehumanization; historical oppression; healing; and implications for the field of family therapy. More specifically, we draw attention to health disparities, mass incarceration and aggressive policing, intergenerational racial trauma, restorative justice, and antiracist work.     

Fighting patterns in young coyotes: Initiation,escalation, and assessment

The fighting patterns of young coyotes were studied and 2,350 fights were analyzed. Our results can be summarized as follows: 1) No major injuries were sustained by any of the infants, even in unritualized bouts. 2) In pairs, there was no relationship between social rank and the proportion of fights that were initiated by either animal. 3) Dominant animals were more likely than subordinate individuals to escalate first (perform the first unprovoked dangerous move) during short interactions and to escalate and then subsequently win short fights. 4) Highest-ranking (alpha) individuals in litters did not fight the most. 5) Alpha individuals initiated 73% of the fights in which they partook. Alpha coyotes initiated and then won 86% of the contests that they initiated. 6) For fourth-ranking coyotes in litters, there was a perfect positive correlation between the proportion of times that they initiated fights and the proportion of times that they initiated and then won encounters. They initiated interactions least with the first- to third-ranking animals. 7) Alpha and fourth-ranking animals escalated about the same proportion of the time, but alpha coyotes escalated and then won a greater proportion of fights. 8) Both alpha and fourth-ranking animals initiated and then escalated the greatest proportion of time with individuals nearest in rank, with whom they may have experienced the greatest difficulty in assessing relative social standing. 9) Our data suggested that individuals, especially in litters, were able to make pre-fight assessments but that they were not perfect with respect to this ability. During-fight assessments appeared to be easier to make, using escalation to test an opponent.