Sex Roles, Interpersonal Control, and Depression: Who Can Get Their Way?

This study is one of a series of investigations examining the contribution of sex roles to the development of depression within a learned helplessness framework. Utilizing 143 pairs of undergraduate female participants, the present study explored subjects′ abilities to gain and maintain control in an interpersonal context. Interpersonal control was operationalized as successful persuasion in a two-person discussion task, wherein one participant had hidden instructions to be maximally persuasive in discussing a questionnaire about social behavior. The results indicated that less successful persuasion was associated with increases in depressed mood. Furthermore, women with high masculinity and low femininity were able to gain interpersonal control regardless of the sex role of their partner. The results also suggested that high femininity is associated both with giving up control in interpersonal tasks and with increases in depressed mood when one is faced with the task of exerting interpersonal control. The findings were interpreted in terms of the importance of sex role characteristics in learned helplessness and depression.     

Orientation-invariant transfer of training in the identification of rotated natural objects

The effects of stimulus orientation on naming were examined in two experiments in which subjects identified line drawings of natural objects following practice with the objects at the same or different orientations. Half the rotated objects were viewed in the orientation that matched the earlier presentations, and half were viewed at an orientation that mismatched the earlier presentations. Systematic effects of orientation on naming time were found during the early presentations. These effects were reduced during later presentations, and the size of this reduction did not depend on the orientation in which the object had been seen originally. The results are consistent with a dual-systems model of object identification in which initially large effects of disorientation are the result of a normalization process such as mental rotation, and in which attenuation of the effects is due to a shift from the normalization system to a feature/part-based     

AIDS prevention for intravenous drug users in the community: Street-based education and risk behavior

Conducted a study of behavior change associated with a street-based AIDS education project targeted to intravenous (IV) drug users in San Francisco. Two cross-sections were sampled from drug detoxification clinics and street locations in 1986 (n = 438) and 1987 (n = 623). Significant increases were reported in the percentage of IV drug users who used bleach to decontaminate syringes, who did not share needles in past year, and in condom use. A significant reduction in an index of the number of needle-sharing partners was reported. Respondents ranked treatment program as most important source of AIDS information prior to implementation of the program, and ranked outreach workers as most important after implementation. Findings suggest that this community-based outreach program had at least some impact on knowledge about AIDS and may have led to reductions in behaviors known to transmit HIV.     

Negatively biased recall in children with self-reported symptoms of depression

This study investigated differences in depressed and nondepressed children's recall of positively and negatively reinforced behavior. Twenty-six children with self-reported symptoms of depression in the fourth through sixth grades were compared with a matched sample of 26 nondepressed children to determine if there was a negative bias in depressed children's recall. Subjects first generated guesses of the most common associations to each of a series of 40 words. Later, when compared with their nondepressed peers, the children with depressive symptomology were less accurate in recalling which words they had answered correctly and remembered fewer of their own correct responses. They also did more poorly when asked to recall the correct answers that had been provided by the investigator. The two groups did not differ, however, in their recall of which items had been answered incorrectly or in their recall of their previous wrong responses. These results suggest that children with self-reported depressive symptomology do not remember negative experiences more than do nondepressed children; rather, they recall positive experiences less well. Selective forgetting of positively reinforced behavior could be a serious handicap for depressed children in school. It could also play an important role in the maintenance and perhaps even the etiology of depressive symptomatology in children.We wish to thank Bruce Compas for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

A review of patient outcomes in pharmacological studies from the psychiatric literature, 1966–1993

A literature search was conducted on studies of new drugs used with patients with schizophrenia reported by U.S. and non-U.S. researchers from 1966–1993, yielding 41 U.S., and a total of 24 other non-U.S. studies, among them 11 British studies. Results of the U.S. and non-U.S. studies were pooled separately and compared. Among several comparable conditions discussed, the lack of any data on suicides in the U.S. studies was observed. For a second statistical analysis of suicide rates ‘person-years’ were calculated to adjust for differing washout durations. The results obtained include findings that the percentage of patients relapsing in U.S. studies was slightly lower (37.9%) than in non-U.S. studies (46%); the percentage of patients dropping out in U.S. studies (10.5%) was higher than in non-U.S. studies (7.6%); known location of dropout patients in U.S. studies was 1.7%, compared to 2.6% in non-U.S. studies. The most interesting finding was that no suicides were reported in U.S. studies, compared to 0.6% of patients reported in British studies. Some U.S. studies used ‘challenge doses’, such as amphetamines or L-dopa; no non-U.S. studies reported their use. Compared to U.S. studies, those by non-U.S., and particularly British, researchers appeared to report adverse events in their studies. ‘Challenge’ drugs were not used; suicides were reported. It is estimated that the probability that no patients suicided who participated in the U.S. is small—one in 500.     

A DIALOGUE BETWEEN VIRTUE ETHICS AND CARE ETHICS

A dialogue between virtue and care ethics is formed as a step towards meeting Pellegrino's challenge to create a more comprehensive moral philosophy. It is also a dialogue between nursing and medicine since each practice draws on the Greek Virtue Tradition and the Judeo-Christian Tradition of care differently. In the Greek Virtue Tradition, the point of scrutiny lies in the inner character of the actor, whereas in the Judeo-Christian Tradition the focus is relational, i.e. how virtues are lived out in specific relationships, particularly unequal relationships where vulnerability of one of the members is an issue. In a care ethic relational qualities such as attunement rather than inner qualities are the point of scrutiny. A dialogue between these two traditions makes it possible to consider the relational virtues and skills of openness and responsiveness that are required for a respectful meeting of the other.     

Late Adolescents' Experiences With and Attitudes Toward Videogames1

A total of 229 late adolescents (a large majority 15 to 19 years of age) completed a questionnaire that assesses a broad range of videogame-relevant experiences, preferences, and attitudes. Videogame playing was found to be a more popular, and a more highly regarded, activity among males than females. Gender differences were also found in participants' ratings of their motivations for playing videogames, their evaluations of particular characteristics of videogames, and their selection of their “most favorite” videogame. The differences between frequent and infrequent videogame players appeared to be limited to differences in the extent to which videogame playing is pursued and evaluated as a positive leisure activity, rather than reflecting broad differences in interest or personality. Some relations were found between participants' self-reported personality characteristics (i.e., self-esteem, empathy, conscientiousness, and introversion) and their attitudes toward videogames.