Crime and violence in Brazil: Systematic review of time trends,prevalence rates and risk factors

Between 1980 and 2010 there were 1 million homicides in Brazil. Dramatic increases in homicide rates followed rises in inequality, more young men in the population, greater availability of firearms, and increased drug use. Nevertheless, disarmament legislation may have helped reduce homicide rates in recent years. Despite its very high rate of lethal violence, Brazil appears to have similar levels of general criminal victimization as several other Latin American and North American countries. Brazil has lower rates of drug use compared to other countries such as the United States, but the prevalence of youth drug use in Brazil has increased substantially in recent years. Since 1990, the growth of the Brazilian prison population has been enormous, resulting in the fourth largest prison population in the world. Through a systematic review of the literature, we identified 10 studies assessing the prevalence of self-reported offending in Brazil and 9 studies examining risk factors. Levels of self-reported offending seem quite high among school students in Brazil. Individual and family-level risk factors identified in Brazil are very similar to those found in high-income countries.     

Shameful secrets and shame-prone dispositions: How outcome expectations mediate the relation between shame and disclosure

Shame may be a deterrent to disclosing secrets to a counselor, and shame-proneness may be associated with generalized tendencies to avoid disclosure of distress. If so, the mechanism explaining these relations might be the expected outcomes about disclosure. College students in the United States (N?=?312) thought of a shameful secret of theirs, and they rated the degree of shame they felt about the secret, their willingness to disclose the secret to a potential counselor, and their expected support from a potential counselor (i.e. outcome expectation). Participants also completed dispositional measures of shame-proneness, generalized outcome expectations about disclosure, and disclosure tendencies. Mediation analyses revealed that participants’ experiences of shame regarding their secrets predicted lower anticipated support from the counselor which predicted lower willingness to disclose the secret. This effect largely replicated at the dispositional level, such that anticipated risks of disclosure mediated the relationship between shame-proneness and disclosure tendencies. These findings suggest that counselor efforts to promote healthy client disclosure could target the client’s outcome expectations about disclosure rather than the client’s degree of shame.     

Examining reproducibility in psychology: A hybrid method for combining a statistically significant original study and a replication

The unrealistically high rate of positive results within psychology has increased the attention to replication research. However, researchers who conduct a replication and want to statistically combine the results of their replication with a statistically significant original study encounter problems when using traditional meta-analysis techniques. The original study’s effect size is most probably overestimated because it is statistically significant, and this bias is not taken into consideration in traditional meta-analysis. We have developed a hybrid method that does take the statistical significance of an original study into account and enables (a) accurate effect size estimation, (b) estimation of a confidence interval, and (c) testing of the null hypothesis of no effect. We analytically approximate the performance of the hybrid method and describe its statistical properties. By applying the hybrid method to data from the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (Open Science Collaboration, 2015), we demonstrate that the conclusions based on the hybrid method are often in line with those of the replication, suggesting that many published psychological studies have smaller effect sizes than those reported in the original study, and that some effects may even be absent. We offer hands-on guidelines for how to statistically combine an original study and replication, and have developed a Web-based application (https://rvanaert.shinyapps.io/hybrid) for applying the hybrid method.     

DISORGANIZATION,FEAR AND ATTACHMENT: WORKING TOWARDS CLARIFICATION

In 1990, M. Main and J. Solomon introduced the procedures for coding a new “disorganized” infant attachment classification for the Ainsworth Strange Situation procedure (M.D.S. Ainsworth, M. Blehar, E. Waters, & S. Wall, 1978). This classification has received a high degree of interest, both from researchers and from child welfare and clinical practitioners. Disorganized attachment has primarily been understood through the lens of E. Hesse and M. Main's concept of “fright without solution,” taken to mean that an infant experiences a conflict between a desire to approach and flee from a frightening parent when confronted by the Strange Situation. Yet, looking back, it can be observed that the way Hesse and Main's texts were formulated and read has generated confusion; there have been repeated calls in recent years for renewed theory and clarification about the relationship between disorganization and fear. Responding to these calls, this article revisits the texts that introduced the idea of fright without solution, clarifying their claims through articulating more precisely the different meanings of the term fear. This clarified account will then be applied to consideration of pathways to infant disorganized behaviors.     

The Source and Robustness of Duties of Friendship

Abstract

Certain relationships generate associative duties that exhibit robustness across change. It seems insufficient for friendship, for example, if I am only disposed to fulfil duties of friendship towards you as things stand here and now. However, robustness is not required across all variations. Were you to become monstrously cruel towards me, we might expect that my duties of friendship towards you would not be robust across that kind of change. The question then is this: is there any principled way of distinguishing those variations across which robustness of the disposition to fulfil duties of friendship is required from those across which it isn’t? In this paper I propose a way of answering this question that invokes distinctions concerning how we value friends and friendships, and how persons and friendships possess value – distinctions that are central to the project of specifying not only the limits of robustness, but also the source of duties of friendship and associative duties more generally.     

Assessing the quality of life of HIV infected persons: Clinical and descriptive information from studies with the hopes

Abstract

We have recently developed and psychometrically evaluated an HIV-specific quality of life instrument. The new instrument is called the HIV Overview of Problems-Evaluation System (HOPES) which was adapted from an established cancer-specific quality of life instrument called the CARES. In this paper we review the psychometric properties of the HOPES, examine the quality of life impact of HIV infection in a cross-sectional evaluation of 318 patients using data from the HOPES and describe other work in progress or planned using the HOPES.