Associations of Social Desirability on Psychological Assessment Outcomes for Surgical Weight Loss Patients

Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings - Literature regarding mental health and quality of life (QOL) in bariatric patients has reported high occurrence of psychological disturbance and...     

Measurements, Morality, and the Politics of “Normal” Infant Growth

Although the birth and early life of an infant is similar throughout the world, meanings ascribed to infants differ according to cultural values and beliefs. This essay describes how scholars and healers have come to see the infant as distinct from other types of people, and what implications this distinction carries for how health care is practiced. The first portion of this essay explores how understanding of the infant, particularly the well-accepted notion of “normal” infant growth and development, came to prominence. Drawing from the history of medicine, philosophical thought and colonial practice, this essay demonstrates that the roots of thinking about the infant in terms of his growth are deep and well-defined in North American and European ideologies. The second portion of this essay describes the practical applications and political implications of beliefs about the “normal” infant. In the arena of applied health, policy makers measure infant growth in light of assumptions about the “normal.” A case study of indigenous populations in Irian Jaya, Indonesia, shows that these measurements are highly political. Here government health officials create and manipulate statistics to ensure that indigenous infant health is represented as being below “normal.” The “normal” infant can thus be understood as a subtle and effective construct which, in Irian Jaya, at the least, is used to assimilate indigenous people into the nation-state.     

Cognitive-Behavioral Erectile Dysfunction Treatment for Gay Men

The purpose of the present paper is to assist cognitive-behavioral therapists who are treating erectile dysfunction among gay men. Little information is available to cognitive-behavioral therapists about the psychological and social effects of erectile dysfunction in this population, or how to incorporate the concerns of gay men with erectile dysfunction into a case conceptualization and treatment plan. The present paper provides an overview of the extant research on erectile dysfunction and of its treatment among gay men. The application of clinical research on erectile dysfunction to treatment for gay men will be illustrated using two case examples.     

The implications of linking the dynamic performance and turnover literatures

This article examines how the literatures of dynamic performance and the performance-turnover relationship inform each other. The nonrandom performance turnover relationship suggests that dynamic performance studies may be biased by their elimination of participants who do not remain for the entire study period. The authors demonstrated that the performance slopes of those who leave an organization differ from the performance slopes of those who remain. This finding suggests that studies of the performance-turnover relationship need to consider employee performance trends when predicting turnover. Replicating and extending the research of D. A. Harrison, M. Virick, and S. William (1996), the authors found that performance changes from the previous month and performance trends measured over a longer time period explained variance in voluntary turnover beyond current performance. Finally, the authors showed that performance trends interacted with current performance in the prediction of voluntary turnover.     

Reduced discriminability following perceptual learning with odours

In this experiment, the effects of prior experience on odour perception and discrimination were explored. Participants repeatedly sniffed a mixture composed of two odours, AX, as well as smelling two further odours alone, B and Y. After this training phase, participants were asked to rate the similarity of the odours A and X, B and Y, and a non-exposed pair C and Z. A and X were judged as significantly more alike than the other pairs. Exactly the same pattern emerged on a second test, in which participants were asked to select the odd odour out of sets of three. It was consistently harder for participants to pick the odd odour when the stimuli were drawn from the AX pair (eg A versus AX versus AX). Not only do these findings demonstrate that prior experience can affect odour perception, a finding not predicted by theories of odour perception based solely upon the physiochemical properties of odours, they also suggest that experience can act to selectively decrease discriminability.