Attitudes Toward and Beliefs about Transgender Youth: A Cross-Cultural Comparison Between the United States and India

Using an internet-based survey, we examined attitudes toward transgender youth in the United States and India, two cultures with differences in conceptualizations of gender and treatment of transgender individuals in society, law, and religion. We found generally positive attitudes toward transgender youth in our U.S. (n = 218), but moderately negative ones in our Indian (n = 217), sample. Consistent with the literature on prejudice against transgender adults in many Western societies, general social conservatism in the form of religious beliefs and political ideology, gender-specific conservatism in the form of gender binary belief, and endorsement of environmental rather than biological causes of transgender identity were the best predictors of U.S. participants’ attitudes, although personal contact with gender and sexual minorities also played a role at the bivariate level. These findings suggest that the processes underlying prejudice against transgender youth are similar to those that foster adult-directed transphobia in that cultural context. In contrast, religion-based disapproval and environmental causal attributions were the best predictors of Indian respondents’ attitudes, whereas gender binary belief played only a minor role, and political conservatism and personal contact no role at all. Our regression analyses accounted for considerably more of the variability in U.S. than in Indian participants’ attitudes, highlighting the need for additional (qualitative) work to identify the factors that promote transprejudice in India. We discuss these findings in light of cross-cultural differences between the two countries in terms of our predictors and consider implications for efforts to reduce prejudice against transgender youth.     

Psychological Safety and Appreciation of Differences in Counselor Training Programs: Examining Religion,Spirituality, and Political Beliefs

This study focused on the extent to which religion, spirituality, and political beliefs predicted counseling students' perceptions of psychological safety and appreciation of differences in their programs. The authors used hierarchical regression models to analyze data from 264 students from 4 different institutions. Results indicated that student age, political conservatism, extrinsic religiosity, and intrinsic spirituality were significant predictors of perceived psychological safety and appreciation of differences. The authors discuss implications of these findings.     

Perfectionism and School Counselors: Differences in Stress,Coping, and Burnout

The authors examined perfectionism and its association with perceived stress, coping processes, and burnout in a sample of 298 practicing school counselors. Latent profile analysis based on measures of perfectionism supported a 3‐class model made up of adaptive perfectionists, maladaptive perfectionists, and nonperfectionists. Among these groups, the authors found significant differences in perceived stress, coping processes, and burnout. Implications for the school counseling profession are discussed.     

Beliefs about Sexual Assault in India and Britain are Explained by Attitudes Toward Women and Hostile Sexism

As many as one in five women worldwide will be sexually assaulted over the course of her lifetime (United Nations 2008), yet myths that downplay the prevalence and severity of sexual assault are still widely accepted. Are myths about sexual assault (rape myths) more likely to be accepted in cultures that endorse more traditional gender roles and attitudes toward women? To explore the relationships among rape myth acceptance, attitudes toward women, and hostile and benevolent sexism, data were collected from 112 Indian and 117 British adults, samples from two cultures differing widely in their gender role traditionalism. Analyses confirmed a cultural difference in rape myth acceptance, with the more traditional culture, India, accepting myths to a greater extent than the more egalitarian culture, Britain. Indian participants’ greater rape myth acceptance was explained by their more traditional gender role attitudes and hostile sexism. We discuss ways in which promoting gender egalitarianism may help to break down negative beliefs and reduce the stigma surrounding sexual assault, especially in India, for example through interventions which increase exposure to women in less traditional roles (e.g., those in positions of power).     

Compensating for an Inattentive Audience

The common ground that conversational partners share is thought to form the basic context for language use. According to the classic view, inferences about common ground, or mutual knowledge, are guided by beliefs about the physical, cognitive, and attentional states of one's communicative partners. Here, we provide a first test of the attention assumption for common ground, the proposal that common ground for a co‐present entity—such as an object or an utterance—can only be formed if a person has evidence that his or her partner has also attended to it. In three experiments, a participant speaker and two partners learned names for novel monster pictures as a group. The speaker was then asked to describe the monsters to each partner separately in a referential communication task. The critical manipulation was the (in)attentiveness of one partner at different points in the study. Analysis of the speaker's referring expressions revealed that speakers assumed their partner shared common ground for the monster names only when that partner exhibited engaged attention as the names were learned. These findings provide key and novel support for the classic proposal that formation of common ground critically depends on assumptions about the attentional state of one's conversational partner.     

Stress regulation and incision in borderline personality disorder-a pilot study modeling cutting behavior

Emotion dysregulation in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is characterized by high baseline negative intensity, high reactivity, and slow return to baseline. Patients with BPD often engage in self-injurious behavior because it leads to immediate relief of stress levels. We aimed to assess stress regulation as well as the influence of tissue damage on subjective (aversive tension) and objective (heart rate) stress correlates in BPD. In 14 unmedicated patients with BPD and 18 healthy controls, a stress induction was followed by an incision into the forearm conducted by an investigator. For aversive tension, we found elevated baseline levels as well as slower return to baseline in BPD. In controls, incision resulted in a short-term increase of aversive tension, whereas tension and heart rate decreased in the BPD group. Our preliminary results support the hypothesis that tissue damage may play a role in disturbed stress regulation in BPD.     

HIV-related stigma in African and Afro-Caribbean communities in the Netherlands: manifestations, consequences and coping

HIV-related stigma in African and Afro-Caribbean diaspora communities in the Netherlands was investigated. Interviews with HIV-positive and HIV-negative community members demonstrated that HIV-related stigma manifests as social distance, physical distance, words and silence. The psychological consequences of HIV-related stigma among those diagnosed with HIV reported were emotional pain, sadness, loneliness, anger, frustration and internalised stigma. The social consequences included decreased social network size, limited social support and social isolation, and resulted from not only enacted stigma but also self-imposed social withdrawal. Also, poor treatment adherence was a health-related consequence. People living with HIV employed both problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies to mitigate the negative consequences of stigma. Problem-focused coping strategies included selective disclosure, disengagement, affiliating with similar others, seeking social support and, to a lesser extent, activism. Emotion-focused strategies included distraction, positive reappraisal, religious coping, external attributions, disidentification and acceptance. HIV-related stigma clearly permeates African and Afro-Caribbean communities in the Netherlands, and should be targeted for intervention.     

Distress in spouses of Vietnam veterans: associations with communication about deployment experiences

Emerging literature shows a consistent pattern of relationship and psychological distress in spouses or partners of combat veterans with symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). One possible mechanism of partners' distress posited in clinical literature is that excessive discussion of traumatic events from deployment may have negative effects on partners. At the extreme, some partners are suggested to develop PTSD-like symptoms, or secondary traumatic stress. Despite these hypotheses, there have been few empirical tests of the effects of communicating about such events. In a sample of 465 combat veterans and their spouses who participated in the Family Interview Component of the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study, we explored how the extent of couples' deployment-related communication was associated with partner relationships and psychological distress, and whether such associations were moderated by the severity of veterans' PTSD symptoms. Results showed that Vietnam-specific communication correlated negatively with relationship distress, but the effect was negligible after controlling for overall communication in the relationship. On the other hand, Vietnam-specific communication did not correlate with psychological distress, but the association was significantly moderated by veterans' PTSD symptom severity. Specifically, communication about Vietnam was increasingly and positively associated with partners' psychological distress as veterans' symptoms of PTSD rose into the clinical range, but nonsignificantly and negatively associated with such distress as PTSD symptoms decreased below this level. The findings support previous clinical recommendations that couples' discussions of potentially traumatic events be approached cautiously, and they suggest a need to attend to the content of couples' communications when conducting dyadic interventions for PTSD.     

Colorless green ideas (can) prime furiously

That similar words can prime one another is not news. However, this phenomenon can be exploited to make inferences about the organization of conceptual representations. What types of similarity matter? Although there is evidence that similarity of function, shape, and even manner of manipulation is reflected in semantic memory, evidence for organization on the basis of color similarity is sparse. This lack of evidence is surprising: Intuition suggests that color is a prominent feature of many object concepts. The research reported here clarifies this puzzle and illustrates the dynamic nature of conceptual representations. Our research demonstrates color-based priming (e.g., "emerald" primes "cucumber") in participants who completed a Stroop color-naming task before a priming task. Notably, the size of the Stroop effect predicted the size of the priming effect. When the order of tasks was reversed, priming effects were eliminated. By demonstrating that both extrinsic and intrinsic factors can influence conceptual activation, our findings have implications for theories of semantic memory.     

Facial memory deficits in children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders

Prenatal exposure to alcohol may lead to a range of neurobehavioral effects, including impaired learning and memory. Although children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) exhibit both verbal and nonverbal memory impairments, their memory for faces has not been as thoroughly investigated and the extent literature provides inconsistent results. The aim of the current study was to determine whether difficulties in face memory exist in children with FASD and whether the difficulties are mediated by task demands. To address this, we used two measures of immediate and delayed facial recognition memory, the Children's Memory Scale (CMS) and Test of Memory and Learning (TOMAL). Compared to typically developing controls, children with FASD showed memory deficits on all tests and were more likely to perform in a clinically significant range. As well, children performed more poorly on the CMS compared to TOMAL, a finding consistent with the greater difficulty of the CMS task. Our results are consistent with our hypothesis that children with FASD show impairment in facial memory, particularly on demanding memory tasks.