Talking about the silent fear: adolescents' experiences of violence in an urban high-rise community

The self-reported violent experiences of adolescents living in a public-subsidized urban high-rise building were examined. This effort was part of an interdisciplinary, community-university collaboration program called the HOME (High-rise On-site Multifamily Environments) Family Support Project. A survey of violent experiences and a one-on-one structured interview were conducted with 20 adolescent residents. Results of the quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed high degrees of exposure to violence among these adolescents, concerns for their personal safety, as well as insights into what they believe adults could and should be doing to address increasing levels of community violence. The implications of these results for conducting ecologically valid research on sensitive issues with adolescents and for family support program planning are discussed.     

Smiling and relative status in news photographs

To test the hypothesis that lower social status is associated with more smiling, the authors used newspaper photographs and their associated news stories as the basis for scoring the smiling and relative social status of the 2 individuals in each photograph. Independent raters judged smiling and 5 dimensions of relative status for 496 individuals in 248 newspaper photographs. There was no relation between status and smiling, although status and smiling were both related to other variables such as gender, age, and story valence. These findings add to a growing body of evidence that there is no generalized relation between smiling and status.     

Parental involvement with adolescents' education: do daughters or sons get more help?

This research examined whether parents were involved differently with the education of their adolescent daughters and sons. The investigation used data from the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), which collected information from approximately 25,000 eighth-grade students. Several types of parental involvement were analyzed for gender differences, including school discussion, parent-school connection, parental expectations, parental attendance at school events, and three measures of parental supervision (checking homework, limiting television watching, and limiting going out with friends). The results showed that, net of students' grades, tests scores, and educational aspirations, parents helped daughters in some ways and sons in other ways. Generally, daughters experienced more parental involvement with their education than did sons. The findings are discussed in terms of parents' traditional socialization practices versus a shift in parental treatment in response to social trends.     

Neurocognitive mechanisms of cognitive control: the role of prefrontal cortex in action selection, response inhibition, performance monitoring, and reward-based learning

Convergent evidence highlights the differential contributions of various regions of the prefrontal cortex in the service of cognitive control, but little is understood about how the brain determines and communicates the need to recruit cognitive control, and how such signals instigate the implementation of appropriate performance adjustments. Here we review recent progress from cognitive neuroscience in examining some of the main constituent processes of cognitive control as involved in dynamic decision making: goal-directed action selection, response activation and inhibition, performance monitoring, and reward-based learning. Medial frontal cortex is found to be involved in performance monitoring: evaluating outcome vis-a-vis expectancy, and detecting performance errors or conflicting response tendencies. Lateral and orbitofrontal divisions of prefrontal cortex are involved in subsequently implementing appropriate adjustments.     

Context-processing deficits in schizophrenia: diagnostic specificity, 4-week course,and relationships to clinical symptoms

Previous research on schizophrenia suggests that context-processing disturbances are one of the core cognitive deficits present in schizophia. However, it is not clear whether such deficits are specific to schizophrenia as compared with other psychotic disorders. To address this question, the authors administered a version of the AX Continuous Performance Test designed to assess context processing in a sample of healthy controls, patients with schizophrenia, and patients with other psychotic disorders. Participants were tested at index (when medication naive and experiencing their first contact with psychiatric services) and 4 weeks later, following medication treatment. At index, patients with schizophrenia and the psychotic comparison group demonstrated similar impairments in context processing. However, context-processing deficits improved in the psychotic comparison group at 4 weeks but did not improve in patients with schizophrenia.     

Individual differences in the responses of naïve rhesus monkeys to snakes

The authors demonstrated individual differences in inhibited behavior and withdrawal responses of laboratory-born rhesus monkeys when initially exposed to a snake. Most monkeys displayed a small significant increase in their behavioral inhibition in the presence of a snake. A few monkeys had marked responses, and some actively withdrew. Although the responses of the most extreme laboratory-born monkeys were comparable to feral-born monkeys, the responses of the laboratory-born monkeys rapidly habituated. The individual differences in the responses of na?ve monkeys likely reflect a continuum from orienting to wariness to fear. A neurobiological model is presented that addresses potential mechanisms underlying these individual differences, their relation to fear, and how they may predispose to phobia development.     

Context-processing deficits in schizophrenia: converging evidence from three theoretically motivated cognitive tasks

To test the hypothesis that the ability to actively represent and maintain context information in a central function of working memory and that a disturbance in this function contributes to cognitive deficits in schizophrenia, the authors modified 3 tasks--the AX version of the Continuous Performance Test, Stroop, and a lexical disambiguation task--and administered them to patients with schizophrenia as well as to depressed and healthy controls. The results suggest an accentuation of deficits in patients with schizophrenia in context-sensitive conditions and cross-task correlations of performance in these conditions. However, the results do not definitively eliminate the possibility of a generalized deficit. The significance of these findings is discussed with regard to the specificity of deficits in schizophrenia and the hypothesis concerning the neural and cognitive mechanisms that underlie these deficits.     

Prospective analysis of early lapse to drinking and smoking among individuals in concurrent alcohol and tobacco treatment

The aims of the current study were to examine, prospectively, (a) dynamic changes in affective state, self-efficacy, and urge in the hours before initial smoking and drinking lapses among individuals in concurrent alcohol and smoking treatment, and (b) the extent to which self-efficacy, urge to use, and/or the use of one substance predicted lapse to the other substance. Ninety-six men and women recruited for a clinical trial of concurrent alcohol and tobacco treatment were eligible for inclusion. Only data from those who experienced an initial lapse to drinking (n=29) or smoking (n=32) were included. Two outpatient substance abuse clinics provided concurrent alcohol and smoking treatment on a weekly basis for three months. Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) methods were employed over a 28-day monitoring period to assess antecedents to first drink, and a 14-day monitoring period was examined for initial smoking lapses. Baseline and EMA measures of positive and negative affect, alcohol/smoking urge, alcohol/smoking abstinence self-efficacy, nicotine withdrawal, and quantity/frequency of alcohol and tobacco use were examined as lapse predictors. Analyses of EMA ratings controlled for the corresponding baseline measure. Smoking lapse among individuals in concurrent alcohol and tobacco treatment was foreshadowed by higher urges to smoke, lower positive mood, and lower confidence to resist smoking. Drinking lapse was preceded by lower confidence to resist smoking, but only among individuals who reported recent smoking. Concurrent alcohol and smoking treatment should focus on the enhancement of abstinence self-efficacy, positive mood, and the curbing of urges in order to offset lapse risk.