“No,You're Playing the Race Card”: Testing the Effects of Anti-Black,Anti-Latino,and Anti-Immigrant Appeals in the Post-Obama Era

Despite a sizable literature on racial priming, scholars have failed to account for the shifting nature of racial appeals. First, theories of racial priming have not yet been widely applied to increasingly common anti-immigrant and anti-Latino political appeals. Second, theories of racial priming have not adequately accounted for both an increasingly racialized political climate and increased tolerance for explicit anti-minority appeals. In two survey experiments fielded both before Trump's rise and after his presidential victory, we find the Implicit-Explicit (IE) model always fails for anti-black appeals, sometimes fails for anti-immigrant appeals, but consistently holds for anti-Latino appeals. While we find the null effects of implicit versus explicit anti-black and anti-immigrant appeals are partly driven by tolerance for the explicit appeals, we also find evidence that white Americans are adept at recognizing the racial content of appeals featuring widely used, congruent issue-group pairs. Our findings shed light on conditions under which the IE model does and does not hold in the current political era.     

Suicidality,Self‐Harm,and Body Dissatisfaction in Transgender Adolescents and Emerging Adults with Gender Dysphoria

Prevalence of suicide attempts, self‐injurious behaviors, and associated psychosocial factors were examined in a clinical sample of transgender (TG) adolescents and emerging adults (n = 96). Twenty‐seven (30.3%) TG youth reported a history of at least one suicide attempt and 40 (41.8%) reported a history of self‐injurious behaviors. There was a higher frequency of suicide attempts in TG youth with a desire for weight change, and more female‐to‐male youth reported a history of suicide attempts and self‐harm behaviors than male‐to‐female youth. Findings indicate that this population is at a high risk for psychiatric comorbidities and life‐threatening behaviors.     

Assessing Motivations for Suicide Attempts: Development and Psychometric Properties of the Inventory of Motivations for Suicide Attempts

This study describes the psychometric properties of the Inventory of Motivations for Suicide Attempts (IMSA). The IMSA was designed to comprehensively assess motivations for suicide emphasized by major theories of suicidality. The IMSA was administered to two samples of recent suicide attempters, undergraduates (n = 66) and outpatients (n = 53). The IMSA exhibited a reliable two‐factor structure in which one factor represented Intrapersonal motivations related to ending emotional pain, and the second represented Interpersonal motivations related to communication or help‐seeking. Convergent validity and divergent validity of IMSA scales were supported by expected patterns of correlations with another measure of suicide motivations. In addition, the IMSA scales displayed clinical utility, in which greater endorsement of intrapersonal motivations was associated with greater intent to die, whereas greater endorsement of interpersonal motivations was associated with less lethal intent and greater likelihood of rescue. Findings suggest the IMSA can be of use for both research and clinical purposes when a comprehensive assessment of suicide motivations is desired.     

The Recovery of Correlation Between Latent Abilities Using Compensatory and Noncompensatory Multidimensional IRT Models

This research examined correlation estimates between latent abilities when using the two-dimensional and three-dimensional compensatory and noncompensatory item response theory models. Simulation study results showed that the recovery of the latent correlation was best when the test contained 100% of simple structure items for all models and conditions. When a test measured weakly discriminated dimensions, it became harder to recover the latent correlation. Results also showed that increasing the sample size, test length, or using simpler models (i.e., two-parameter logistic rather than three-parameter logistic, compensatory rather than noncompensatory) could improve the recovery of latent correlation.     

The anatomy of object processing: the role of anteromedial temporal cortex.

How objects are represented and processed in the brain remains a key issue in cognitive neuroscience. We have developed a conceptual structure account in which category-specific semantic deficits emerge due to differences in the structure and content of concepts rather than from explicit divisions of conceptual knowledge in separate stores. The primary claim is that concepts associated with particular categories (e.g., animals, tools) differ in the number and type of properties and the extent to which these properties are correlated with each other. In this review, we describe recent neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies in which we have extended our theoretical account by incorporating recent claims about the neuroanatomical basis of feature integration and differentiation that arise from research into hierarchical object processing streams in nonhuman primates and humans. A clear picture has emerged in which the human perirhinal cortex and neighbouring anteromedial temporal structures appear to provide the neural infrastructure for making fine-grained discriminations among objects, suggesting that damage within the perirhinal cortex may underlie the emergence of category-specific semantic deficits in brain-damaged patients.     

Suicide Risk Among Wounded U.S. Service Members

The association between suicide and combat injuries sustained during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was examined. A retrospective population‐based cohort design was conducted using official military records to identify combat injuries (October 7, 2001, to December 31, 2007). Those who were injured during combat had higher crude suicide rates than those who deployed and were not injured (incidence rate ratio [IRR] = 1.50; confidence interval [CI] = 1.06, 2.12), or never deployed (IRR = 1.46; CI = 1.04, 2.06). After adjusting for demographics, these findings were no longer statistically significant. Although our data did not support an elevated suicide risk among wounded service members, additional research is needed to examine the impact of injury severity.