Partner Violence, Social Support, and Distress Among Inner-City African American Women

This study examined the role of social support in the partner violence–psychological distress relation in a sample of African American women seeking medical care at a large, urban hospital (n = 138). Results from bivariate correlational analyses revealed that partner violence was related to lower perceived social support and greater psychological distress, and lower social support was related to more distress. Furthermore, findings based on path analysis indicated that low levels of social support helped account for battered women's increased distress. Findings point to the need for service providers to screen for partner violence in nontraditional sites, such as hospital emergency rooms, and to address the role of social support resources in preventive interventions with African American battered women.     

Syllable structure and sonority in language inventory and aphasic neologisms

Phonological theories have raised the notion of a universally preferred syllable type which is defined in terms of its sonority structure (e.g., ). Empirical evidence for this notion has been provided by distributional analyses of natural languages and of language acquisition data, and by aphasic speech error analyses. The present study investigates frequency distributions of syllable types in German, which allows for a rather complex syllable structure, and in neologistic utterances of a German speaking jargon aphasic. The findings suggest that the sonority structure of the patient's neologisms is generally in accordance with the notion of theoretically preferred syllables. Moreover, comparative analyses suggest that the predominance of the preferred syllable type is especially pronounced in the aphasic data. On the basis of these findings, the influence of sonority in impaired phonological lexical processing is discussed.     

Use your words!

"Use your words!" is a phrase admonishing preschoolers to divert their action-proneness to thought and language. Freud's injunction against acting out had a similar aim, placing control over drives in the domain of "inner language." The twenty-first-century psychoanalyst continues to employ models that depend on mentalization viewed from two angles-neural inhibition and social discourse. Psychoanalysts bolster their position by borrowing from the basic scientific work in each area. The recent focus on enactments, intersubjectivity, and social constructivism is reconsidered from an historical vantage point, as is the work that seeks to reconcile recent findings in neuroimaging and cognitive neuroscience. Freud's vision included a holistic hope that a comprehensive science of human beings might be achieved by understanding derived from biological inquiry and the artifacts of social and cultural narratives. The author's experience in both domains is recounted, and a new reconciliation of disparate approaches is offered in linguistic complementarity.     

Girls' and boys' developing interests in math and science: do parents matter?

Previous studies (for example, Bregman & Killen, 1999; Eccles, Wigfield, & Schiefele, 1998; Jacobs, 1991;Jacobs & Eccles, 2000) have demonstrated the important role that parents' attitudes play in shaping their children's later self-perceptions and achievement behaviors. Studies indicate that in the math and science arena, parents' perceptions of their children's abilities as well as their own values about math and science are related to their children's later self-perceptions and values for achieving in these domains. The previous work suggests that parents are conveying their attitudes and values about math to their children through their words and actions; however, little research has documented the ways in which parents' beliefs and specific behaviors might promote positive achievement attitudes and behaviors in their children. The goal of the study reported here was to document relations between parents' math and science--promotive behaviors and attitudes and their children's later activity choices, values, and achievement in these subjects.     

Pain coping and social support as predictors of long-term functional disability and pain in early rheumatoid arthritis

Pain-related avoidance factors and social resources, as assessed by pain coping and social support, are supposed to have lasting effects on functional disability and pain in chronic pain disorders. As a follow-up to a prospective study demonstrating short-term effects after one year (Behaviour Research and Therapy, 36, 179-193, 1998), the role of pain coping and social support at the time of diagnosis was investigated in relationship to the long-term course of functional disability and pain after three and five years in 78 patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), taking into account personality characteristics of neuroticism and extraversion, clinical status and use of medication. In line with findings at the one-year follow-up, results showed that more passive pain coping predicted functional disability at the three-year, but not the five-year follow-up. In addition, low levels of social support at the time of diagnosis consistently predicted both functional disability and pain at the three and five-year follow-ups. Results indicate that pain coping and social support, assessed very early in the disease process, can affect long-term functional disability and pain in RA, and suggest that early interventions focusing on pain-related avoidance factors and social resources for patients at risk may beneficially influence long-term outcomes in RA.     

Children's behavioral styles at age 3 are linked to their adult personality traits at age 26

We observed 1,000 3-year-old children who exhibited five temperament types: Undercontrolled, Inhibited, Confident, Reserved, and Well-adjusted. Twenty-three years later, we reexamined 96% of the children as adults, using multiple methods of comprehensive personality assessment, including both self- and informant-reports. These longitudinal data provide the longest and strongest evidence to date that children's early-emerging behavioral styles can foretell their characteristic behaviors, thoughts, and feelings as adults, pointing to the foundations of the human personality in the early years of life.