Religion and rights: Is there still room for Christianity at the table?

Drawing on recent discussions about issues relating to sexual and reproductive rights in the Jamaican print and broadcast media, this article highlights the interplay between Christianity, activism and rights talk. This interplay is being framed in the local print media as a debate between two dominating hegemonic forces: on the one hand, between more ‘conservative’ and ‘fundamentalist’ Christian theological beliefs and, on the other hand, those who subscribe to what may be characterised as more ‘liberal secular fundamentalist’ viewpoints. This polarisation ignores some conciliatory scenarios that exist within other segments of Caribbean societies, theology included, that provide beneficial approaches to rights talk and work. The endeavours of some Jamaican church folks have converged with those of progressive right defenders, or, where such endeavours predate contemporary rights activism or have no direct contact with it, they might at least be viewed as benign by those who espouse such activism.     

Relationships between locus of control,health value,and preventive health behaviors among women

This study examines the relationships between locus of control expectancies, rated health value, and reported participation in preventive health behaviors among a healthy sample of undergraduate women. The prediction that participation in preventive health behaviors would be a joint function of an internal health-related locus of control belief and holding health in high value was not supported. Instead, individuals who valued their health reported participating in a greater number of health-enhancing behaviors compared to those who valued their health less. Respondents' scores on a health value scale in combination with their rated health status proved to be better predictors of health behaviors than their locus of control beliefs. Limitations of locus of control research with young, healthy individuals are discussed and further investigation into the utility and validity of health value scales is recommended.     

Institutional Values of Managed Mental Health Care: Efficiency or Oppression?

The authors suggest that many managed mental health care (MMHC) practices have oppressive effects on members of cultural and ethnic minority groups. They examine the dissonance between institutional practices and cultural traditions that reflect insensitivity and forced conformity, particularly regarding time, pace, and intervention uniformity as applied to clients and commonly required in the MMHC industry. Los autores sugieren que muchas prácticas del cuidado administrado de la salud mental (MMHC, por sus siglas en inglés) tienen efectos opresivos sobre los miembros de grupos de minorías étnicas y culturales. Examinan también la disonancia entre prácticas institucionales y tradiciones culturales que reflejan insensibilidad y una conformidad forzada, sobre todo en lo referente a tiempo, ritmo y uniformidad de intervención tal y como se aplica a clientes y normalmente requeridos por la industria de MMHC.     

Automatic and conscious processing in retarded and nonretarded adolescents

Educable mentally retarded and nonretarded adolescents participated in incidental learning tasks that emphasized the utilization of processes that were consciously controlled but not deliberately aimed at memory (Experiment 1). Retarded individuals' performance on a standard recognition test was equivalent to that of nonretarded subjects following phonetic encoding and nonstrategic encoding, but was deficient following semantic encoding. Retarded subjects also demonstrated a lower level of performance on a rhyme recognition task. In Experiment 2, retarded subjects provided a pattern of responding identical to that of nonretarded subjects on a picture-word interference task designed to assess automatic processing. The two groups produced equivalent levels of semantic activation. It was argued that the results of the two experiments indicate deficient semantic processing on the part of retarded individuals relative to that of nonretarded individuals that cannot be accommodated by a structural-deficiency model, a developmental-lag model, or a hypothesis that predicts intelligence-related differences only when the task involves the use of deliberate mnemonic strategies.     

Spatial and relational frameworks for free recall in young and older adults

Previous studies have demonstrated that older adults can use visually distinctive cues to enhance their spatial memory performance and their recall of the identities of items located in space. Other research has shown that older adults can also use relational information to enhance recall. The relationship between relational and visuospatial support for memory across the adult lifespan is complex and has been little explored. In the present study, this relationship was examined in tasks that measured free recall for item sets possessing different degrees of visuospatial and relational support for recall. It was predicted that both types of support would enhance older adult recall relative to that of the young, and that the two types of support would synergize. The results were generally consistent with these predictions. These findings show that older adults can use relatively simple relational or visuospatial support systems to enhance free recall significantly. This research was supported by Grant AGI 1605, National Institute on Aging.     

Research activities of doctoral school psychologists

A survey was sent to doctoral school psychologists to determine their research productivity and topical interests. Approximately two thirds of 147 respondents indicated doing some research during 1974–1975. Studies dealing with topics of assessment and program evaluation were most prevalent. Only about one in five studies was actually published and most of these were in nonprestigious periodicals. Academic school psychologists were more likely to do research and publish than were applied school psychologists. Academic and applied psychologists did not differ in terms of numbers of unpublished written or oral research reports. The correspondence of these results with prior data on school psychology research was noted and suggestions to increase the circulation of research findings are presented.     

Coping as a mediator of emotion

There is widespread conviction among health care professionals that coping affects emotion. Yet theory and research have traditionally emphasized the effects of emotion on coping. The present research addresses this imbalance by evaluating the extent to which coping mediated emotions during stressful encounters in two Caucasian, community-residing samples. Subjects' recently experienced stressful encounters, the ways they coped with the demands of those encounters, and the emotions they experienced during two stages of those encounters were assessed repeatedly. The extent to which eight forms of coping mediated each of four sets of emotions was evaluated with a series of hierarchical regression analyses (of residuals). Coping was associated with changes in all four sets of emotions, with some forms of coping associated with increases in positive emotions and other forms associated with increases in negative emotions.     

Interpersonal mistreatment in the workplace: the interface and impact of general incivility and sexual harassment

This article examined the relationships and outcomes of behaviors falling at the interface of general and sexual forms of interpersonal mistreatment in the workplace. Data were collected with surveys of two different female populations (Ns = 833 and 1,425) working within a large public-sector organization. Findings revealed that general incivility and sexual harassment were related constructs, with gender harassment bridging the two. Moreover, these behaviors tended to co-occur in organizations, and employee well-being declined with the addition of each type of mistreatment to the workplace experience. This behavior type (or behavior combination) effect remained significant even after controlling for behavior frequency. The findings are interpreted from perspectives on sexual aggression, social power, and multiple victimization.     

Cumulating retrieval inhibition in semantic and lexical domains

In 3 experiments the authors examined changes in successive exemplar generation percentages within categories defined semantically (e.g., fruit-P, fruit-A, fruit-M) and by 1st letter (e.g., insect-C, sport-C, car-C), with a mixed control condition (e.g., fruit-P, insect-C, disease-M). Retrieval success declined across 12 successive items in both semantic and letter categories, with no change for the mixed condition. This retrieval inhibition is unrelated to taxonomic frequency of exemplars within either letter or semantic categorical structures. Furthermore, semantic retrieval inhibition appears to be long lasting, suggested by the decline in retrieval percentage across successive 12-item blocks in both the mixed and letter conditions. The authors suggest that different mechanisms underlie the inhibition found in the semantic (suppression) and letter (interference) conditions.