Pathways maintaining physical health problems from childhood to young adulthood: The role of stress and mood

Objective: Poor physical health in childhood is associated with a variety of negative health-related outcomes in adulthood. Psychosocial pathways contributing to the maintenance of physical health problems from childhood to young adulthood remain largely unexamined, despite evidence that factors such as negative mood and stress impact physical health.

Design: The current study tested the direct and indirect effects of ongoing health, chronic stress, health-related chronic stress, and depressive symptoms at age 20 on the link between health problems in childhood and young adulthood (age 21) in a longitudinal sample (n = 384).

Main Outcome Measures: The hypotheses were tested using a multiple mediation path analysis framework; the primary outcome measure was a composite index of health status markers in young adulthood.

Results: The proposed model provided an adequate fit for the data, with significant total indirect effects of the four mediators and significant specific indirect effects of health-related chronic stress and depressive symptoms in maintaining health problems from childhood into young adulthood.

Conclusions: Health problems are maintained from early childhood into young adulthood in part through psychosocial mechanisms. Depressive symptoms and health-related chronic stress have significant, unique effects on the relationship between health problems in early childhood and young adulthood.     

Ear-catching? Real-world distractibility scores predict susceptibility to auditory attentional capture

Although many of the everyday distractions that we encounter are auditory, most research on distractor processing to date has focused on the visual domain. A common measure of everyday distractibility is the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ; Broadbent, Cooper, FitzGerald, & Parkes British Journal of Clinical Psychology 21: 1–16, 1982), which has previously been successfully linked with performance on controlled visual-attention tasks (e.g., Forster & Lavie Psychological Science 18: 377–381, 2007; Kanai, Dong, Bahrami, & Rees Journal of Neuroscience 31: 6620–6626, 2011; Tipper & Baylis Personality and Individual Differences 8: 667–675, 1987), such that high scorers tend to display greater distractor interference than do low scorers. We examined whether the same relationship would hold in hearing. Participants performed an auditory attentional-capture task, by responding to a target sound while ignoring an irrelevant singleton distractor (presented on half of the trials). We found that CFQ score successfully predicted distractor interference, since participants who reported being more distractible in everyday life produced more errors in the presence of the irrelevant singleton than did low scorers on the CFQ. This finding is the first to demonstrate a relationship between auditory distractor interference and everyday distractibility, and it confirms that performance on this type of laboratory-based attentional-capture task can successfully be related to behavior outside the laboratory.     

Giving voice to the dual-career couple

Changes in the nature of careers, and also of families, mean new challenges for the increasing number of dual-career couples in society. Each couple faces multiple concerns, including two individual careers, a shared relationship and the interdependence among all of these elements. This paper contributes to the counselling literature by reporting two case studies in which a new methodological approach was adopted, intended to make a couple's concerns explicit and provide a platform for further action. Using the holistic model of the intelligent career, a facilitated process was used to elicit first subjective, then inter-subjective career data, enabling the partners to make sense of their individual careers within a context of their shared relationship. The preliminary results suggest the methodology may provide a novel and useful way to give 'voice' to—and in turn facilitate action by—the dual-career couple.     

Victim Blaming in Young, Middle-Aged, and Older Adults: Variations on the Severity Effect

It has been long known that people blame victims for the bad things that happen to them, and that people blame victims more when the victims experience severe difficulties than when they experience minor difficulties, even if the victims were not particularly irresponsible. Little previous research has examined victim blaming in middle-age and older adults. One hundred and forty-five adults in 3 age groups (18–34, 35–59, and 60–84) read 4 scenarios (2 accidents, 1 crime, and 1 fire) imbedded in other scenarios. The scenarios were varied so that the victim is either very irresponsible or not very irresponsible, and the outcome is mild or severe. The oldest group of participants blamed the victims more than the other groups. However, in contrast to the typical severity effect, the oldest group blamed the very irresponsible victim more when the outcome was mild than they did when the outcome was severe.     

Cognitive influences on health symptoms from acute chemical exposure.

Symptom reports, perceived adverse health effects, and public health concerns are increasingly precipitated by the perception of chemical odors. This study examined the interaction between health cognitions, odor perception, and symptom reports. A group of 180 healthy men and women were exposed to 1 of 3 ambient odors, normatively rated as healthful (methyl salicylate, or wintergreen), harmful (butanol or alcohol), and ambiguous (isobomyl acetate, or balsam), after receiving 1 of 3 odorant characterizations (harmful, healthful, and neutral). Individuals given a harmful bias reported significantly more health symptoms following exposure and more intense odor and irritation during exposure than did those given a neutral or healthful bias. The overall pattern of results suggests that many of the health-related effects of exposure to odorants are mediated not by a direct agency of odors but by cognitive variables, such as mental models of the relationship between environmental odors and health.     

Management Consulting: Planning,Entry, Performance

The counseling profession has much in common with that of organizational consulting. The authors provide an overview of consulting practices that those in counseling might find useful should they decide to investigate the promise of organizational consulting. Included are aspects of market research, gauging competition, and target markets. They also consider promotion, networking, and elements of consulting performance. Last, they provide an extensive overview of relevant associations and materials of potential value to the prospective consultant.