Reducing STD/HIV Stigmatizing Attitudes Through Community Popular Opinion Leaders in Chinese Markets

Reducing STDs and HIV/AIDS incidence requires campaigns designed to change knowledge, attitudes, and practices of risky sexual behavior. In China, a significant obstacle to such changes is the stigma associated with these diseases. Thus 1 campaign intervention strategy is to train credible community leaders to discuss these issues in everyday social venues. This study tested the effectiveness of such an approach on reducing HIV/AIDS stigma, across 2 years, from a sample of over 4,500 market vendors, in 3 conditions. Results showed an increasing growth in market communication about intervention messages, and concomitant declines in stigmatizing attitudes, across time, with the greatest changes in community popular opinion leaders, significant changes in intervention nonopinion leaders, and little change in the control markets.     

Bidirectional Familial Influences in Dietary Behavior Test of a Model of Campaign Influences

Using both cross-sectional and longitudinal data spanning a decade, this article analyzes how dietary behavior of household children and adults (N = 576 households) was affected by the Stanford Five-City Project (FCP). Tests of a three-part, cumulative model of bidirectional influences within the family, which conceptualizes household members as sources of influence on each other and subject to influence by an external agent, were supported. Children and adults were influenced by both each other and the FCP campaign in changing and maintaining health behaviors. This article demonstrates that public health campaigns can be made more effective if they conceptualize both children and adults as potential sources of influence. The long-term effectiveness of such efforts can be enhanced by encouraging families, as opposed to individuals, to change health behaviors.     

Perceptual learning in maze discriminations

In Experiment 1, rats were trained on a discrimination between rubber- and sandpaper-covered arms of a maze after one group had been pre-exposed to these intra-maze cues. Pre-exposure facilitated subsequent discrimination learning, unless the discrimination was made easier by adding further discriminative stimuli, when it now significantly retarded learning. In Experiment 2, rats were trained on an extra-maze spatial discrimination, again after one group, but not another, had been pre-exposed to the extra-maze landmarks. Here too, pre-exposure facilitated subsequent discrimination learning, unless the discrimination was made substantially easier by arranging that the two arms between which rats had to choose were always separated by 135°. The results of both experiments can be explained by supposing that perceptual learning depends on the presence of features common to S+ and S-.     

Cumulative Article Index 2006–2013 (Volumes 59–73)

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -