Potential for Suicide and Aggression in Delinquents at Juvenile Court in a Southern City

Because juvenile delinquents rarely communicate their wishes for suicide or homicide appropriately to busy caretakers, some means to identify those juveniles at greatest risk of acting out was sought. Psychological examiners in a Southern city individually questioned 263 Juvenile Court offenders about whether they wished to be dead, to kill themselves, or to kill others; and also about their existential experiences, thoughts and feelings. Taking the data associated with each wish, we used stepwise multiple logistic regression to pinpoint experiences, such as substance abuse, that were associated with a high likelihood of verbalizing a wish for destructive behavior. These results included sexual abuse as a risk factor and the presence of a mother or grandmother as a protective factor, and led to recommending education of caretakers and forming a screening test.     

Stress,Coping, and Suicide Risk in Psychiatric Inpatients

The present study investigated the relationship between interpersonal problems, coping styles, and suicide risk. Seventy-one adult psychiatric inpatients completed a suicide risk scale, a measure of interpersonal problems, and a coping scale designed to measure eight coping styles. Patients admitted with a history of suicidal attempts were compared with patients admitted for other reasons. Interpersonal problems were found to be significantly and positively related to suicide risk. The coping style of “suppression” (tendency to avoid threatening or uncomfortable situations) was found to be significantly and positively related to suicide risk [F(2, 68) = 4.54, p < .01]. Several other coping styles were found to be significantly related to suicide risk. These findings are congruent with a “two-stage model of countervailing forces” and have both research and clinical implications.     

Contingencies of Superstition: Self-Generated Rules and Responding During Second-Order Response-Independent Schedules

The Psychological Record - Experimental conditions explored the development of fallacious rules and assessed the rates and durations of superstitious responding by children under the influence of...     

“Snips and snails and puppy dog tails”: Gender of agent,recipient, and observer as determinants of perceptions of discipline

This study examined the role of gender of observer, parent, and child on judgments of the severity, appropriateness, and consequences of various forms of discipline. Young adults read stories describing a disciplinary encounter between parent and child and made required judgments. Consistent gender differences emerged. Females judged the discipline more harshly than males, rating it as more severe, more abusive, less appropriate, and more likely to result in emotional harm. Discipline of daughters was judged to be harsher than identical treatment of sons, particularly when the discipline was administered by the father. The implications of differential judgments are discussed.     

Age differences in overlapping-task performance: evidence for efficient parallel processing in older adults

Two psychological refractory period (PRP) experiments were conducted to examine overlapping processing in younger and older adults. A shape discrimination task (triangle or rectangle) for Task 1 (T1) and a lexical-decision task (word or nonword) for Task 2 (T2) were used. PRP effects, response time for T2 increasing as stimulus onset synchrony (SOA) decreased, were obtained for both age groups. The effect of word frequency on T2 was smaller at the short SOA than at the long SOA, reflecting slack effects, which were larger for older than younger adults in both experiments. These results suggest that older adults can perform lexical access of T2 in parallel with the processing of T1 at least as efficiently as younger adults.     

Poisoned Waters: Sexual Harassment and the College Climate

This study of 369 undergraduate students (59%female and 41% male, 4.7% African-American, 2%Latino/a-American, 3.6% International, and 88%White-American) found that both women and men weresexually harassed by faculty and other students with a similarlyhigh frequency. More subtle forms of sexually harassingbehaviors were experienced than were the more severebehaviors from both faculty and students. A greater tolerance for sexually harassing behaviors fromfaculty than peers was found. While more women than menused the label sexual harassment, few students of eithergender who experienced specific harassing behaviors said they had experiencedinappropriate behavior, and of those who said they hadexperienced inappropriate behavior, a very lowpercentage said they had experienced sexual harassment.It is hypothesized that the frequency of these behaviors is partlyresponsible for the lack of labeling.