Correlates of physical activity in a national sample of girls and boys in grades 4 through 12.

Psychological, biological, social, and physical environmental variables were examined for their association with physical activity of young people. A national sample of 1,504 parents and children in Grades 4-12 were interviewed by telephone. Twenty-two potential determinants were assessed along with an 11-item child physical activity index (alpha = .76). Hierarchical multiple regressions were conducted separately for 6 age-sex subgroups. Percentage of variance explained ranged from 18% for boys in Grades 4-6 to 59% for girls in Grades 10-12. Three variables had strong and consistent associations with the child physical activity index that generalized across subgroups: use of afternoon time for sports and physical activity, enjoyment of physical education, and family support for physical activity. These 3 variables should be targeted for change to promote physical activity in all groups of young people.     

Recognising faces: effects of lighting direction, inversion, and brightness reversal.

When information about three-dimensional shape obtained from shading and shadows is ambiguous, the visual system favours an interpretation of surface geometry which is consistent with illumination from above. If pictures of top-lit faces are rotated the resulting stimulus is both figurally inverted and illuminated from below. In this study the question of whether the effects of figural inversion and lighting orientation on face recognition are independent or interactive is addressed. Although there was a clear inversion effect for faces illuminated from the front and above, the inversion effect was found to be reduced or eliminated for faces illuminated from below. A strong inversion effect for photographic negatives was also found but in this case the effect was not dependent on the direction of illumination. These findings are interpreted as evidence to suggest that lighting faces from below disrupts the formation of surface-based representations of facial shape.     

Ethical Issues in Marital and Sexual Counselling

RELATE's marital and sexual counselling generates ethical issues relating to the welfare of client couples and to the policy and public profile of the organisation itself. These issues are interactive and create a unique context within which volunteer counsellors work. Clients' private lives and relationships remain the prime focus of that work, but special attention is paid to the private aspects of relationships which impinge on the realities and the obligations of social living.     

The labours of Hercules: some good reasons why social workers should not try to be different, and practice family therapy

Family therapy, despite being an approach to problems in a social context, has, for the most part, been developed and refined in medical settings (Adams, 1979). Family therapy propounds a methodology based on social rather than medical techniques of intervention. It is logical to suggest that workers based in socially-orientated agencies, rather than medical settings, could be predicted to be better placed to utilize and develop this particular approach to human problems. How can it be explained that the main bulk of the innovations are still coming from practitioners who have trained primarily in medical approaches and settings? This article looks at some of the reasons why family therapy practice and development is not flourishing in Social Services Departments as it is in, for example, hospitals and clinics. The authors do not offer any positive conclusions at this stage, but will show, in a later publication, what has been achieved in some Social Services Departments, and how practice has been established despite the organizational and operational constraints implicit in the introduction of a family, or systems orientated method, to an agency traditionally and statutorily focused upon the individual.     

Reactions to Patients who Complain of Pain: Effects of Ambiguous Diagnosis1

Reactions to patients who complain of pain were explored in an experimental study in which nursing students viewed a videotape of a “hospital patient”. The medical diagnosis and the physical attractiveness of the patient were systematically varied. Results indicated that an ambiguous diagnosis itself led to a negative impression of the patient, rather than leading to the use of nonrnedically relevant information (physical attractiveness) to form an impression. Patients with an ambiguous diagnosis were rated less favorably on trait adjectives, and their pain was seen as less genuine.     

Measuring medical students' reluctance to prescribe opioids for cancer pain

Among 644 senior medical students a 14-item scale which was internally consistent indicated no change over the 6 years of testing in intent to reserve opioids for terminally ill.