People with physical disability in Serbia: Relationship between internalized stigma,experienced and anticipated discrimination,and empowerment

The aim of present study was to explore relationships between experienced and anticipated discrimination, internalized stigma, and empowerment among people with physical disabilities in Serbia. The convenience sample consisted of persons with different types of physical disabilities. The following scales were administrated: The Discrimination and Stigma Scale, the Internalized Stigma of Mental Illness Scale, and the Boston University Empowerment Scale. An analysis showed that internalized stigma was correlated with experienced and anticipated discrimination and empowerment, while no correlation was found between empowerment and discrimination. People with physical disabilities who experienced and anticipated discrimination are at higher risk of reporting internalized stigma.     

Community Data Collection with Children of Mothers Living with HIV: Boundaries of the Researcher Role

The TRACK‐II program is a multi‐site, community‐based randomized controlled trial evaluating an intervention to assist mothers living with HIV (MLH) in disclosing their HIV status to their young children. Many participants—both mothers and children—reported significant depression and/or suicidal ideation, a phenomenon that presented ethical challenges. This article focuses on participants at one site (Atlanta). Through the vignette of “Jordan,” we describe ethical challenges that may arise when faced with the responsibility of maximizing participants’ safety while maintaining the boundaries of the researcher role. Guided by community psychology values, our team has taken measures within our role as researchers to empower and protect children and mothers endorsing suicidal ideation. For example, we have relied on relationships with community‐based organizations and AIDS service organizations to connect HIV‐affected families to mental health services. Furthermore, we have expanded our system of documentation to follow‐up adequately with families at risk, and we track family resources to promote a strengths‐based framework. We have solicited families’ feedback about their supports and needs to understand how we may best serve them by connecting them to the resources they report needing most and empowering them to care for themselves.     

Safety in Online Research With Women Experiencing Intimate Partner Violence: What About the Children?

The significant co-occurrence between men’s violence against female partners and child abuse and neglect is well documented. It is less clear how child safety should be managed in family violence research with their mothers. This issue is salient to isafe, a New Zealand–based Internet intervention study testing improvement in safety decisions and mental health outcomes for women experiencing intimate partner violence. This article discusses the legislative, professional, and ethical considerations that contribute to the development of the child safety protocols and discusses the development of the isafe protocol. Hypothetical scenarios of the application of the isafe protocol are used to illuminate the issues and provide a basis for future discussion.     

Rape Myth Acceptance among Social Work Students

It is important to examine rape myth acceptance and the pertinent situational factors that affect attitudes and beliefs concerning the act of rape, perpetrators, and survivors. This study examines the influence of alcohol consumption and perceptions of alcohol use on levels of rape myth acceptance among social work students. Results showed differences in levels of rape myth acceptance based on race or ethnicity and gender. Results also showed that the version of the vignette read by the participant was a significant predictor of rape myth acceptance. Respondents’ perceptions of alcohol consumption were also a strong predictor of rape myth acceptance levels. These results demonstrate there are multiple factors that influence social work students’ rape myth acceptance levels that need further examination.     

Understanding Voter Vengeance

This article proposes that, in electoral contexts, decision makers may experience a desire for vengeance or a desire to “get even” with an entity, such as a political candidate, in response to a perceived wrongdoing. This article draws on research from the domains of psychology and sociology to develop a theoretical framework for examining factors that may influence the extent to which voters exact revenge on political candidates with their voting behavior. The results of 3 experiments are reported in which voters are shown to exact revenge on a candidate who has won an earlier round of elections by defeating a favored candidate. This process is mediated by damage to self‐identity and is strengthened by perceived share of blame attributed to the perpetrator candidate. This research shows how vengeful voters are delighted when a perpetrator candidate later performs poorly while in office. This research also shows how making salient a shared affiliation with the perpetrator candidate (such as race or university major) can attenuate vengeful voting behavior. The research builds on a growing body of work that explores negative and potentially counterproductive emotions in choice contexts.     

Neurophysical substrates of arousal and attention

The study of arousal and attention could be of prominent importance for elucidating both fundamental and practical aspects of the mind–brain puzzle. Defined as “general activation of mind” (Kahnemann in Attention and effort. Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1973), or “general operation of consciousness” (Thacher and John in Functional neuroscience: foundations of cognitive processing. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, 1977), arousal can be considered as a starting point of fundamental research on consciousness. Similar role could be assigned to attention, which can be defined by substituting the attributes “general” with “focused”. Concerning the practical applications, the empirically established correlation between neuronal oscillations and arousal/attention levels is widely used in research and clinics, including neurofeedback, brain–computer communication, etc. However, the neurophysical mechanism underlying this correlation is still not clear enough. In this paper, after reviewing some present classical and quantum approaches, a transition probability concept of arousal based on field–dipole quantum interactions and information entropy is elaborated. The obtained analytical expressions and numerical values correspond to classical empirical results for arousal and attention, including the characteristic frequency dependence and intervals. Simultaneously, the fundamental (substrate) role of EEG spectrum has been enlightened, whereby the attention appears to be a bridge between arousal and the content of consciousness. Finally, some clinical implications, including the brain-rate parameter as an indicator of arousal and attention levels, are provided.     

Religious Values in Clinical Practice are Here to Stay

Research to date has shown that health professionals often practice according to personal values, including values based on faith, and that these values impact medicine in multiple ways. While some influence of personal values are inevitable, awareness of values is important so as to sustain beneficial practice without conflicting with the values of the patient. Detecting when own personal values, whether based on a theistic or atheistic worldview, are at work, is a daily challenge in clinical practice. Simultaneously ethical guidelines of tone-setting medical associations like American Medical Association, the British General Medical Council and Australian Medical Association have been updated to encompass physicians’ right to practice medicine in accord with deeply held beliefs. Framed by this context, we discuss the concept of value-neutrality and value-based medical practice of physicians from both a cultural and ethical perspective, and reach the conclusion that the concept of a completely value-neutral physician, free from influence of personal values and filtering out value-laden information when talking to patients, is simply an unrealistic ideal in light of existing evidence. Still we have no reason to suspect that personal values, whether religious, spiritual, atheistic or agnostic, should hinder physicians from delivering professional and patient-centered care.

     

The impact of national integration policies on prejudice and psychological well-being: The fundamental role of the clarity and coherence of integration policies

Recent advances in social psychological research have shown that national integration policies influence how immigrants are perceived and treated by the mainstream population. However, the processes by which these policies come to have an impact on prejudice and well-being of the general population are largely unknown. Moreover, past research has often relied on unrepresentative samples limiting generalizability. The present research proposes that when the national integration policies of a given society are perceived as clearly defined and coherent, they have a direct impact on the perceived cultural norm related to those national integration policies. In turn, the perceived cultural norm affects personal attitudes toward cultural norms (i.e., the degree to which individuals support a given policy), which influence the level of anti-immigrant prejudice as well as psychological well-being. Findings from two correlational studies with representative samples of the mainstream population conducted in France on the policy of secularism (N = 940) and in Québec on the policy of interculturalism (N = 912) supported the proposed theoretical model.     

The need for contextual and technical knowledge in judgmental forecasting

The purpose of this research is to assess the extent to which judgmental forecasts are improved by having more contextual and technical knowledge. Contextual information is knowledge gained by practitioners through experience on the job, consisting of general forecasting experience in the industry as well as specific product knowledge. Technical knowledge is knowledge about data analysis and formal forecasting procedures, including information on how to analyze data judgmentally. We directly compared judgmental forecasts of business practitioners with those generated by students, using 22 real-world time series. The practitioners had considerable contextual but no technical knowledge. The students had no contextual but two different levels of technical knowledge. We also generated forecasts with statistical methods to benchmark performance. Results show that contextual knowledge is particularly important in making good judgmental forecasts, while technical knowledge has little value. Practitioner forecasts are better than student forecasts in almost all comparisons. A decisive factor affecting forecast performance appears to be data variability, measured by the coefficient of variation of the time-series data. As the variability of a time series increases, the performance of all forecasts deteriorates, but judgmental forecasts by practitioners become more preferable. Statistical methods have difficulty achieving reasonable forecasts when the data are more variable, whereas judgemental forecasts reinforced by contextual information do relatively well. Data variability is one explanation for the mixed findings of past studies, relative to how well statistical techniques compare with judgment as a forecasting method.