Effects of gender in social control of smoking cessation.

This study of 93 men and 117 women smokers during an ongoing quit attempt examined the roles of gender and social network influences on quitting. For men, social influences appeared to positively affect their ability to reduce their smoking but were less effective for women. Specifically, increased reports of a spouse or partner's influence, and family and friends' influence, were associated with greater reductions in men's smoking 2 days and 4 months post quit date, respectively. In contrast, for women, greater reports of spouse or partner influence and of family and friends' influence were associated with smaller reductions in smoking. Sex differences in social control strategies and perceived autonomy supportiveness of those strategies are discussed as possible explanations for these results.     

The accuracy of risk assessment instruments in the prediction of impulsive versus predatory aggression

Actuarial violence risk assessments, many of which include the construct of psychopathy, have been shown to be superior to clinical judgment in the prediction of long-term risk of community violence and recidivism. While these instruments initially appeared to provide similarly accurate judgments of risk of institutional aggression, recent research has indicated that such assessments may be less robust in this setting. One explanation may lie in the types of aggression most frequently observed in each setting. Impulsive (or reactive/affective) is the type of physical aggression most commonly exhibited in psychiatric facilities. This research examines the relationship between risk assessments and aggression in an inpatient forensic setting, with such aggression categorized as impulsive, predatory or psychotic aggression. Consistent with previous research, impulsive aggression was the most frequent type observed (58%). Anger (as measured by the Novaco Anger Scale) and clinical issues (as measured by the HCR-20) were most associated with impulsive aggression, with AUC values of .73 and .71 respectively. In contrast, anger and psychopathy (as measured by the PCL-R) were more associated with predatory aggression, with AUC values of .95 and .84 respectively. Psychotic symptoms were highly associated with psychotically motivated aggression (AUC = .90). These results suggest that traditional violence risk assessments may have limited utility in predicting aggression in an institutional setting and that psychiatric symptoms and heightened affect are more relevant. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Do We Need Grounding?

Many have been tempted to invoke a primitive notion of grounding to describe the way in which some features of reality give rise to others. Jessica Wilson argues that such a notion is unnecessary to describe the structure of the world: that we can make do with specific dependence relations such as the part–whole relation or the determinate–determinable relation, together with a notion of absolute fundamentality. In this paper I argue that such resources are inadequate to describe the particular ways in which some parts of reality give rise to others, and thus that we do in fact need grounding.     

Stress, psychosocial resources, and depressive symptomatology during pregnancy in low-income, inner-city women.

The authors examined the prospective influence of stress, self-esteem, and social support on the postpartum depressive symptoms of 191 inner-city women (139 European Americans and 52 African Americans) over 3 waves of data collection. Depressive symptomatology was measured by multiple indicators, including self-report and clinical scales. Women became less depressed as they move from prenatal to postpartum stages and adjusted to their pregnancy and its consequences. LISREL and regression analyses indicated that stress was related to increased depression, whereas greater income and social support were related to decreased depression. Self-esteem was related to lower depression at the prenatal and postpartum periods but not to change in depression from the prenatal to the postpartum period. The results also indicated that self-esteem and social support did not have additional stress-buffering effects over and above their direct effects on depression. Finally, African American women did not differ from European American women terms of depression or in terms of how they were impacted by stress or psychosocial resources.