Citizen Involvement & Quality of Life: Exit, Voice and Loyalty in a Time of Direct Democracy

This paper explores the connection between quality of life and direct democracy. Using state level data for participation and quality of life, we find that those states with a high quality of life see higher participation in direct democracy than those with lower quality of life. However, the passage of direct democracy measures has the inverse relationship indicating the importance of maintaining the status quo for states with higher quality of life measurements.     

Response to “Masturbation: Scientific Evidence and Islam’s View”

Journal of Religion and Health -     

Mothers' Impact on Daughters' Cardiovascular Reactivity in a High‐Threat Context: An Immersive Virtual Environment Study

Applying Attachment Theory, research on confirmation, the Entropy Model of Uncertainty, and the Biopsychosocial Model of Challenge and Threat, this investigation examined the role of mothers' communication on adolescents' cardiovascular response to threat. An experimental design allowed for the manipulation of maternal response to daughters experiencing a rapidly approaching wildfire in an immersive virtual environment. Results revealed complexities in the relative benefits of maternal vocalic presence during high‐threat situation, with the mother's history of confirming feedback playing an important role in daughters' cardiovascular response. Implications for knowledge are addressed and methodological possibilities of using immersive virtual environments are noted.     

Abuse, health locus of control, and perceived health among HIV-positive women.

This study of 230 predominantly poor Hispanic and African American women aged 25 to 61 years living with HIV/AIDS in New York City revealed high levels of both sexual (39%) and physical (44%) trauma before the age of 16. Both types of early trauma were correlated with later trauma, and all forms of trauma were significantly associated with current perceived health. In multivariate analyses controlling for relevant covariates, the Powerful Others and Internal Control subscales of the Multidimensional Health Locus of Control Scales (K. A. Wallston, B. S. Wallston, & R. DeVellis, 1978) acted as independent predictors of perceived health rather than (as hypothesized) mediators of the association between trauma and perceived health. Findings underscore the importance of addressing trauma and perceptions of control over one's physical health in the provision of health services to HIV-positive women.     

Emotion regulation difficulties in anorexia nervosa: Relationship to self-perceived sensory sensitivity

Changes in sensation (e.g., prickly skin) are crucial constituents of emotional experience, and the intensity of perceived changes has been linked to emotional intensity and dysregulation. The current study examined the relationship between sensory sensitivity and emotion regulation among adults with anorexia nervosa (AN), a disorder characterised by disturbance in the experience of the body. Twenty-one individuals with AN, 20 individuals with AN who were weight–restored, and 23 typical controls completed self-report measures of sensory sensitivity and emotion regulation. AN participants reported heightened sensory sensitivity and greater difficulty regulating emotions relative to controls. Self-perceived sensory sensitivity was associated with greater emotion dysregulation. Weight-restored AN participants reported greater ability to regulate emotions than their currently underweight counterparts, despite heightened sensitivity. Findings suggest that hypersensitivity may be a persisting feature in AN, and that weight restoration may involve improved ability to cope with sensation.     

Child judgments of sentences varying in grammatical complexity

This study is another contribution to the development of a satisfactory child version of the linguistic task of judging grammaticality. With a nondifferentially reinforced forced-choice procedure, it was found that responses of 24 5- and 24 7-yr-old children did vary as a function of the grammatical complexity of stimulus sentences. The children judged sentence stimuli of two types (negatives and wh-word questions) each having three levels of grammatical complexity (two primitive and one well-formed). After each stimulus presentation, the subject pointed to the adult or the child in a photograph, depending on who was judged to have produced that utterance. Performance of the two age groups did not differ for the question stimuli, for which subjects pointed to the adult more frequently as the grammatical complexity of wh-word questions increased. In response to the negative sentences, the older group attributed more well-formed stimuli to the adult than primitive ones. While the younger group pointed to the adult more frequently for well-formed negatives than for the middle level negatives, they made more adult responses than expected to the least complex negatives. It was concluded that, with this procedure, 5- and 7-yr-olds demonstrate ability to distinguish grammatically well-formed from primitive sentences. Procedural improvements for future research may allow children this age and younger to demonstrate more adult-like discrimination between a variety of primitive and well-formed sentences.