Aetiology of Coexisting Mental Health and Alcohol and Other Drug Disorders: Perspectives of Refugee Youth and Service Providers

In the general population, people with comorbid mental health (MH) and alcohol and other drug (AOD) disorders (comorbidity) have great difficulty accessing appropriate services, and poor outcomes. Little is known about comorbidity in resettled refugees in Australia. This study was designed to identify risk factors and patterns of comorbidity development in young people from refugee backgrounds living in a disadvantaged urban region of Adelaide, South Australia. This qualitative study utilised in‐depth semi‐structured interviews (n = 30) with resettled refugee youth and workers from MH, AOD, and refugee support services. Thematic analyses were conducted to investigate the aetiology of MH and AOD disorders in young refugees. Interviews with both groups revealed how the interrelated nature of risk factors may place young people from refugee backgrounds at heightened risk of experiencing MH and AOD problems. The situations and conditions described by both groups are discussed under six main themes: pre‐migration experiences of torture and trauma; familial factors of intergenerational conflict; post‐migration adjustment difficulties in terms of language, culture, education, and employment; exposure to and availability of substances; maladaptive coping strategies and self‐medication; and access to information and services. Implications for psychologists and MH professionals are identified, emphasising the need for clinicians to understand the complexities surrounding the aetiology of comorbidity in these youth. The initial assessment needs to be comprehensive, including pre‐ and post‐settlement experiences and cultural and family dimensions of their current situation. Treatment may often need to simultaneously address multiple contributing factors and involve culturally sensitive psycho‐education.     

Best Practice Recommendations Still Fail to Result in Action: A National 10‐Year Follow‐up Study of Investigative Interviews in CSA Cases

The present study examined a national sample of Norwegian investigative interviews in alleged child sexual abuse cases (N = 224) across a 10‐year period (2002–2012), in order to decide whether practice had improved over the decade in terms of the types of questions asked. The results indicate that the frequency of open‐ended, directive, option‐posing, and suggestive questions asked was unchanged during the 10‐year period, but that the frequency of repeated questions had increased significantly. When analyzed together with the results from a previous study of interview practice covering the period of 1990–2002, long‐term trends were found to be similarly stable, with no change in the frequency of open‐ended and suggestive questions asked over a 22‐year perspective. However, a decreasing frequency of option‐posing questions observed accompanied by an increasing frequency of directive questions may be considered a positive trend. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

PREDICTORS OF SELF‐REPORTED GAINS IN A RELATIONSHIP‐BASED HOME‐VISITING PROJECT FOR MOTHERS AFTER CHILDBIRTH

We assessed mothers’ self‐reported gains from a postpartum home‐visiting (HV) project in which home visitors are volunteer mothers from the community. Hypotheses were that gains are positively related to (a) mothers’ felt‐closeness with their home visitor, (b) mothers’ level of sociodemographic risk, and (c) the home visitors’ preproject training in support services for families or children (Professionalism). One hundred sixty‐four clients returned written evaluations of the HV project. Items assessing gains were reduced to two factors: Improved Well‐Being (“Self”) and Improved Infant Care (“Infant”). Repeated measures general linear models, with Gains (Self, Infant) as the repeated measure, and multiple regression analyses evaluated the hypotheses. Across the sample, gains on both factors were moderate, although gain scores were higher regarding Self than for Infant. Results show that (a) Mothers’ felt‐closeness with their volunteer was strongly related to mothers’ gains; (b) high‐risk mothers gained more from the project than did mothers of lower risk, particularly regarding Infant Care; and (c) mothers visited by volunteers who were professionals reported more substantial gains than did mothers visited by volunteers who were not professionals. Findings can help explain variance in mothers’ gains from such projects and could be useful in improving their efficacy.     

Age-related differences in inhibitory control in the early school years

The transition to school is associated with a greater requirement to inhibit irrelevant or inappropriate thought and behavior in order to concentrate on effective learning and to interact successfully with peers. Current knowledge of inhibitory control development in the early school years is limited due to a lack of normative data from age-appropriate, sensitive measures. In this study, three pictorial versions of the Stroop task were administered to investigate inhibitory control development in early school-aged children. Age-related trajectories of inhibition and effects of gender were examined in 80 children (42 boys) aged 5 to 8 years. All children were assessed with the Cognitive Assessment System Expressive Attention subtest (Big-Small Stroop), Fruit Stroop, and Boy-Girl Stroop. The Big-Small Stroop revealed substantial age-related improvement in inhibition from 5 to 7 years with a levelling of performance at 8 years of age, while the Fruit Stroop and Boy-Girl Stroop demonstrated clear but nonsignificant age trends. In particular, older children committed fewer errors and corrected their errors more frequently than younger children. Performance on all Stroop tasks correlated significantly, providing evidence that they tap similar cognitive abilities. Some gender differences were found. This study indicates that inhibitory skills develop rapidly in the early school years and suggests that error awareness may be a useful indicator of the development of cognitive inhibition for this age group.     

Autobiographical memory and clinical anxiety

Abstract

Previous experiments on the recall of threatening and neutral information in clinically anxious subjects have yielded mixed results. The present study assessed autobiographical memory in patients with generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), and normal controls. Subjects were first presented with neutral cue words and asked to respond with any personal memory. GAD subjects judged the content of their own memories as more consistent with anxious mood, and less consistent with pleasant mood, than that reported by controls. Subjects were then again presented with neutral cue words, but with instructions to provide either “anxious” or “nonanxious” personal memories, on specified trials. Significant interactions between group and instruction condition indicated that anxious subjects recalled more anxiety-evoking memories, and recalled them more rapidly, relative to controls. Ratings by blind judges did not support the hypothesis that this apparent difference in the content of autobiographical recall was an artefact due to anxious subjects labelling memories as being more anxiety evoking than would controls. Possible explanations of the findings, and reasons for the apparent discrepancy between these and earlier results, are discussed.     

An Investigation of Middle School Classroom Libraries

Given that much of the research on classroom libraries focus on elementary school classrooms, this study sought to examine classroom libraries at the middle school level. Access to books is especially important for middle school students given the persistent decline in reading engagement at this level. The research questions guiding this investigation focused on the nature of the libraries, the physical features of the libraries, the contributions made by the libraries to the literacy environment of the classrooms, the contents of the libraries, and teacher perceptions of their own classroom libraries. Findings indicate that teachers value classroom libraries for promoting literacy engagement and understand how these libraries provide students with immediate and easy access to books. The contents of the libraries that were examined varied in terms of genre, multicultural literature, and social justice issues.     

Teleology,Deontology, and the Priority of the Right: On Some Unappreciated Distinctions

The paper analyses Rawls’s teleology/deontology distinction, and his concept of priority of the right. The first part of the paper aims both 1) to clarify what is distinctive about Rawls’s deontology/teleology distinction (thus sorting out some existing confusion in the literature, especially regarding the conflation of such distinction with that between consequentialism and nonconsequentialism); and 2) to cash out the rich taxonomy of moral theories that such a distinction helpfully allows us to develop. The second part of the paper examines the concept of priority of the right. It argues that such a concept should not be identified with that of deontology—indeed, deontological theories do not necessarily assign priority to the right over the good. However, it contends that the concept of priority of the right is essential to explaining what specific kind of deontological theory “justice as fairness” is. Justice as fairness is a deontological theory which assigns priority to the right as a consequence of its commitment to a neutral position with respect to different accounts of what is ultimately valuable and good.     

EVERYONE FEELS EMPOWERED: UNDERSTANDING FEMINIST SELF-LABELING

Research findings raise questions about whether the feminist identity development model provides information about women's social identification as a feminist. Specifically, the penultimate stage, Synthesis, has been theorized to capture when feminist identity formation coalesces and women take on the feminist label. However, available data have suggested this stage may not be related to feminist self-labeling, calling for a better understanding of the variables associated with identifying oneself as a feminist. An online questionnaire was administered to 653 female self-identified feminists and nonfeminists in order to investigate the association between feminist self-labeling and Synthesis scores and to better understand what it means to take on the social identity of a feminist. Feminist self-labeling was not associated with Synthesis; however, women who self-labeled as feminists were more likely to acknowledge the existence of sexism, view the current gender system as unjust, and believe that women should work together in order to enact change. Synthesis was related to a combination of feminism- and conservatism-related constructs. Women high in Synthesis viewed the current gender system as just yet also believed that women should work together to enact change. We discuss the paradox represented by this combination of beliefs as well as their implications for the feminist identity development model and the women's movement in general.