A Mild Panic? Media Accounts of Kratom

ABSTRACT

Historically, the news media has been a primary participant in the construction of moral panics surrounding various drugs and their users. The current study utilizes the moral panic framework to depict how the media represents a drug new to the Western world: kratom. Kratom, a traditional plant-based substance from South Asia, came in to the public’s view when the DEA announced its intent to emergency schedule the substance, citing a threat to public health. We use content analysis to explore how kratom and kratom use is depicted in a sample of news media articles gathered from an online source. Broadly, we find that the news media seems to report more information about the substance and less hyperbole than is typical of media reports on drugs in the past.     

A Study of the Use and Interpretation of Standardized Suicide Risk Assessment: Measures within a Psychiatrically Hospitalized Correctional Population

The reliability, validity, and utility of the Adult Suicidal Ideation Questionnaire (ASIQ), Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS), Beck Scale for Suicide Ideation (BSS), and Reasons for Attempting Suicide Questionnaire (RASQ) with correctional mental health populations was evaluated. Evidence was found indicating good to excellent reliability for all measures. Each of the measures significantly differentiated multiple attempters from single attempters and nonattempters, providing evidence of convergent and divergent validity. Logistic regression and receiver operating characteristic analyses revealed strong associations between multiple attempts and the ASIQ, BSS, and RASQ, but not the BHS. Implications for suicide risk assessment processes in correctional settings are discussed.     

Psychiatric and Self‐Injury Profiles of Adolescent Suicide Attempters versus Adolescents Engaged in Nonsuicidal Self‐Injury

To better delineate the unique correlates of self‐injurious behaviors (SIB), psychiatric profiles of mutually exclusive groups of adolescents who made a suicide attempt (SA) versus those engaged in nonsuicidal self‐injury (NSSI) were examined. Contrary to hypotheses, the NSSI group endorsed earlier onsets of SIB and suicidal ideation (SI), as well as higher rates of depression and anxiety compared with their SA counterparts. Future work is warranted to understand the role of SI, including duration of SI and anxiety in the development of NSSI, and to identify risk and resiliency factors useful in predicting an adolescent's SIB status.     

Early Caregiver–Child Interaction and Children’s Development: Lessons from the St. Petersburg-USA Orphanage Intervention Research Project

Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review - We review a series of interrelated studies on the development of children residing in institutions (i.e., orphanages) in the Russian Federation or...     

Background context affects word-object mapping

Children encounter new words across variable and noisy contexts. This variability may affect word learning, but the literature includes discrepant findings. The current experiment investigated one source of these discrepant findings: whether contexts with familiar, nameable objects are associated with less robust label learning. Two year olds were exposed to word-object pairings on variable contexts that either included nameable objects or did not. Target selection was more robust when exposure occurred without other nameable objects. The difference was present immediately, but not after a delay. This study provides the evidence that context effects are context-bound.