Having “The Talk”: Individual,Family, and Partner Factors on Unprotected Sex among Female Adolescent Offenders

This study assessed the influence of individual age and substance use, family support and communication, and partner support and communication on the frequency of unprotected sex among incarcerated adolescent females. Subjects (n = 273) completed a survey on psychosocial correlates and risk behaviors for sexually transmitted infections (STI). Communication with male partners and sex while under the influence have a significant impact on condom use. Findings highlight the necessity of providing assertive communication skills training and increasing self-efficacy as STI/HIV prevention components for adolescent females thus empowering their decision-making processes.     

Without Thinking: Impulsive Aggression and Criminal Responsibility

In the U.S. the decision to impose criminal responsibility rests on an assumption about the defendant's decision to engage in proscribed conduct. We punish only those who we believe had the capacity to make a choice. In an increasingly violent world, the criminal law and the assumptions upon which it rests are relentlessly tested. A new generation of neuro-imaging technologies offers to provide insights into structural and functional abnormalities in the brain that may limit the autonomy of many dangerous offenders and unravel the fabric of the criminal justice system. How will the results of these technologies be received by the courts—are they relevant to existing formulations of the prima facie case, the insanity defense, or mitigation of sentence; will changes in the science or the law be required to accommodate this knowledge? The new generation of technologies may appropriately play a role in assessing culpable mental states only if they are also reliable. This short article takes on these and a host of other related questions at the intersection between science, law, and science fiction. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Gender Differences in the Importance of Work and Family Roles: Implications for Work–Family Conflict

In this study we explored between- and within-gender differences in the importance of life roles and their implications for work–family conflict. In earlier research (Cinamon & Rich, 2002) we found 3 profiles of workers who differ in attributions of importance to work and family roles: persons who assigned high importance to both the work role and the family role (“Dual” profile); participants who ascribed high importance to the work role and low importance to the family role (“Work” profile); and participants who attributed high importance to the family role and low importance to the work role (“Family” profile). We used these profiles to clarify the relationship between gender and work–family conflict. Participants were 126 married men and 87 married women who were employed in computer or law firms. Significant between- and within-gender differences were found in the distribution of participants to profiles. Men were equally distributed throughout the profiles, whereas women were underrepresented in the Work category. More women than men fit the Family profile, and more men than women fit the Work profile. No gender differences were found for the Dual profile. Women reported higher parenting and work values than men did. Between-gender differences in work–family conflict were apparent, as were within-gender differences across profiles. Results demonstrate the value of examining both between- and within-gender variation in studies of gender and work–family conflict.     

Not all narrative shifts function equally

Readers of narratives keep track of narrative events and the information associated with these events. Does some of this associated information help structure the processing of and memory for the narrative? In three experiments, we examined the role of basic event building blocks (character, time, and location) in event indexing during text comprehension. These three experiments dealt with perceived coherence, perceived cohesion, and on-line processing, respectively. The results indicated that characters are more likely to serve as event indexes. Although the findings with respect to indexing were similar in all three experiments, interesting differences emerged as a function of the level of text comprehension examined (coherence, cohesion, or on-line processing).     

Parenting Disruptive Preschoolers: Experiences of Mothers and Fathers

This study examined parental functioning and interactions with young children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), with emphasis on differences between mothers and fathers in their responses to their child and in their unique contributions to the prediction of child disruptive behavior. Participants were 53 3- to 6-year olds with ODD who presented for treatment with two parents. Mothers reported more severe disruptive behavior and higher parenting stress than fathers. During parent-child interactions, mothers showed more responsiveness than fathers, even though children were more compliant during interactions with fathers. Regression analyses showed that fathers' parent-related stress was predictive of both mothers' and father's reports of disruptive child behavior; mothers' marital satisfaction was predictive of behavioral observations of child compliance with both mothers and fathers. This study revealed several important differences in the experiences of mothers versus fathers of disruptive children and indicates the importance of including the father in the child's assessment and treatment.     

Informed Decision-Making in the Context of Prenatal Chromosomal Microarray

The introduction of chromosomal microarray (CMA) into the prenatal setting has involved considerable deliberation due to the wide range of possible outcomes (e.g., copy number variants of uncertain clinical significance). Such issues are typically discussed in pre-test counseling for pregnant women to support informed decision-making regarding prenatal testing options. This research study aimed to assess the level of informed decision-making with respect to prenatal CMA and the factor(s) influencing decision-making to accept CMA for the selected prenatal testing procedure (i.e., chorionic villus sampling or amniocentesis). We employed a questionnaire that was adapted from a three-dimensional measure previously used to assess informed decision-making with respect to prenatal screening for Down syndrome and neural tube defects. This measure classifies an informed decision as one that is knowledgeable, value-consistent, and deliberated. Our questionnaire also included an optional open-ended question, soliciting factors that may have influenced the participants’ decision to accept prenatal CMA; these responses were analyzed qualitatively. Data analysis on 106 participants indicated that 49% made an informed decision (i.e., meeting all three criteria of knowledgeable, deliberated, and value-consistent). Analysis of 59 responses to the open-ended question showed that “the more information the better” emerged as the dominant factor influencing both informed and uninformed participants’ decisions to accept prenatal CMA. Despite learning about the key issues in pre-test genetic counseling, our study classified a significant portion of women as making uninformed decisions due to insufficient knowledge, lack of deliberation, value-inconsistency, or a combination of these three measures. Future efforts should focus on developing educational approaches and counseling strategies to effectively increase the rate of informed decision-making among women offered prenatal CMA.     

Re-enchanting the body: overcoming the melancholy of anatomy

I argue here that Weberian disenchantment is manifest in the triumph of instrumental reason and the expansion of analytic enquiry, which now dominates not simply those sciences upon which medicine depends, but medical practice itself. I suggest ways that analytic enquiry, also referred to here as anatomical reasoning, are part of a particular ideology—a way of seeing, speaking about, and inhabiting the world—that often fails to serve the health of patients because it is incapable of “seeing” them in the moral sense described by Iris Murdoch and others. I use the work of James Elkins and Wendell Berry to call for the recovery of a way of seeing the human body as both other and more than an object of scientific enquiry and social control.