Applying Primary Prevention Precepts to Campus Substance Abuse Programs

The authors identify five primary prevention programming precepts dealing with perspective, targets, methods, intentionality, and ethic. They describe how the United States Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE) sponsored University of Cincinnati substance abuse prevention project was developed by following these precepts. They hope that this information will aid others in their development of primary prevention programs in college substance abuse (i.e., alcohol and other drug abuse) or in other areas.     

PARTICIPATIVE EDUCATION FOR CHILDREN: AN EFFECTIVE APPROACH TO INCREASE SAFETY BELT USE

Vehicle license plate numbers and the shoulder belt use of front-seat occupants were recorded unobtrusively when parents delivered and picked up their children at a Montessori school during 5-day baseline, intervention, and follow-up phases. Practicing and presenting a 15-min safety belt skit increased the safety belt use of those 6 kindergarten children who were not consistent belt users 82% above their preintervention baseline belt use mean of 47%. The belt use of these children's parents (who watched the skit) increased to 56% above their baseline mean of 36%. Also, mean safety belt use of 11 primary school children who watched the skit increased to 70% above their baseline of 28%. Mean safety belt use of the older children's parents (who didn't watch the skit) remained at approximately 31% for each phase, regardless of whether children were vehicle occupants. The follow-up observations, taken 3 months after the intervention, revealed 60% belt use for the kindergartners, 48% for the primary school children, and 71% for the kindergartners' parents when the children were vehicle occupants but only 30% when the parents were driving alone.     

KNOWING WHEN TO SAY WHEN: A SIMPLE ASSESSMENT OF ALCOHOL IMPAIRMENT

The use of writing samples as indices of alcohol impairment was explored. Students at a campus fraternity party wrote a sentence and their signatures before and after consuming alcohol (in beer and mixed drinks). Later, undergraduate and graduate students attempted to discriminate between pre- and postparty handwriting samples. The average percentage of correct discriminations of entrance and exit writing samples was 83.7% for sentences and 67.5% for signatures, and the percentage of correct discriminations increased directly with the blood alcohol concentration of the partier who gave the writing sample. When a partier's blood alcohol concentration reached 0.15, all of the judges accurately discriminated 90% or more of the sentences, and 25 of the 28 judges correctly discriminated at least 80% of the signatures. All of the judges correctly discriminated at least 90% of the 18 sentences written by partiers with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.12 or more. Implications of these findings for reducing the risk of driving while intoxicated are discussed, as well as directions for follow-up research.     

A single-subject approach to evaluating vehicle safety belt reminders: Back to basics

A single-subject ABA reversal design was applied to evaluate the effectiveness of a limited 8-s safety belt reminder system and two modified reminder systems (a delayed and second reminder) to increase the safety belt use of 13 drivers. The research was conducted with a specially equipped research vehicle that permitted the manipulation of different safety belt reminder stimuli and the unobtrusive recording of a driver's belt use. For 2 subjects, the limited 8-s reminder increased safety belt use. For another 2 subjects, the second reminder markedly increased belt use. Some subjects were uninfluenced by the reminder systems presented; others always buckled up during both baseline and intervention conditions. The approach and results are discussed with regard to the application of behavior analysis methodologies (e.g., cumulative records) and principles (e.g., schedules of reinforcement) to advance the utility and investigation of safety belt reminder systems.     

Fuzzy-trace theory and framing effects in choice: Gist extraction,truncation, and conversion

In the first section of this paper, we analyze classic framing effects according to principles of fuzzy-trace theory. The key principle of the theory is that reasoning prefers to operate on simple gist, as opposed to exact details. Then, we introduce new data in three experiments designed to test this fuzzy-processing assumption. In the first experiment, framing effects were conserved when numerical information was omitted from standard problems, arguing against a critical role for numerical processing. In the second experiment, evidence is presented that some subjects simplified framing problems by mentally truncating linguistically redundant complements in gambles. Experimentally deleting parts of gambles mimiced such effects, and choices varied depending on the information that remained explicit. In the third experiment, truncation effects were also demonstrated for mixed-frame problems, in which one option is positive and the other is negative. The data disconfirmed a ‘halo’ hypothesis that subjects merely selected the positive option over the negative one. Instead, choices were accounted for by conversion, that is, transforming problems into uniformly positive representations to avoid the complexity of negation. In all three experiments, choices could be explained as a consequence of radically simplifying decision information.     

Who Will Volunteer? Religiosity, Everyday Racism, and Social Participation Among African American Men

This study explores the relative importance of everyday racism, empathic concern, communalism, and religiosity as predictors of pro-social involvement (i.e., volunteerism and membership in political/social justice organizations) among a sample of African American men (N = 151). Church involvement emerged as a positive predictor of the likelihood that these men were involved in volunteer work as well as the number of hours that men dedicated to volunteer work. Communalism positively predicted the amount of time (in hours per year) that men were involved in volunteer work. Subjective religiosity and the stress of everyday racism were associated with a greater likelihood of being a member of a political–social justice organization. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Bullying and Victimization: Cause for Concern for both Families and Schools

This study examines the roles of family variables (authoritarian and authoritative parenting, family disharmony) and school variables (liking school, perceived control of bullying and school hassles) in discriminating non-bully/non-victims, victims and bullies. Participants were parents and their children aged 9–12 years (N = 610). Data were analyzed using ANOVA and discriminant function analysis (DFA). Two significant functions emerged, both of which appeared important in discriminating children according to their bullying status. Together they allowed for the correct classification of 76% of the non-bully/non-victims, 57% of victims, and 61% of bullies. The main conclusion is that family and school systems working together may provide the most effective means of intervention for bullying problems. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

When fast logic meets slow belief: Evidence for a parallel-processing model of belief bias

Two experiments pitted the default-interventionist account of belief bias against a parallel-processing model. According to the former, belief bias occurs because a fast, belief-based evaluation of the conclusion pre-empts a working-memory demanding logical analysis. In contrast, according to the latter both belief-based and logic-based responding occur in parallel. Participants were given deductive reasoning problems of variable complexity and instructed to decide whether the conclusion was valid on half the trials or to decide whether the conclusion was believable on the other half. When belief and logic conflict, the default-interventionist view predicts that it should take less time to respond on the basis of belief than logic, and that the believability of a conclusion should interfere with judgments of validity, but not the reverse. The parallel-processing view predicts that beliefs should interfere with logic judgments only if the processing required to evaluate the logical structure exceeds that required to evaluate the knowledge necessary to make a belief-based judgment, and vice versa otherwise. Consistent with this latter view, for the simplest reasoning problems (modus ponens), judgments of belief resulted in lower accuracy than judgments of validity, and believability interfered more with judgments of validity than the converse. For problems of moderate complexity (modus tollens and single-model syllogisms), the interference was symmetrical, in that validity interfered with belief judgments to the same degree that believability interfered with validity judgments. For the most complex (three-term multiple-model syllogisms), conclusion believability interfered more with judgments of validity than vice versa, in spite of the significant interference from conclusion validity on judgments of belief.     

The Problematization of Sexuality among Women Living with HIV and a New Feminist Approach for Understanding and Enhancing Women’s Sexual Lives

In the context of HIV, women’s sexual rights and sexual autonomy are important but frequently overlooked and violated. Guided by community voices, feminist theories, and qualitative empirical research, we reviewed two decades of global quantitative research on sexuality among women living with HIV. In the 32 studies we found, conducted in 25 countries and composed mostly of cis-gender heterosexual women, sexuality was narrowly constructed as sexual behaviours involving risk (namely, penetration) and physiological dysfunctions relating to HIV illness, with far less attention given to the fullness of sexual lives in context, including more positive and rewarding experiences such as satisfaction and pleasure. Findings suggest that women experience declines in sexual activity, function, satisfaction, and pleasure following HIV diagnosis, at least for some period. The extent of such declines, however, is varied, with numerous contextual forces shaping women’s sexual well-being. Clinical markers of HIV (e.g., viral load, CD4 cell count) poorly predicted sexual outcomes, interrupting widely held assumptions about sexuality for women with HIV. Instead, the effects of HIV-related stigma intersecting with inequities related to trauma, violence, intimate relations, substance use, poverty, aging, and other social and cultural conditions primarily influenced the ways in which women experienced and enacted their sexuality. However, studies framed through a medical lens tended to pathologize outcomes as individual “problems,” whereas others driven by a public health agenda remained primarily preoccupied with protecting the public from HIV. In light of these findings, we present a new feminist approach for research, policy, and practice toward understanding and enhancing women’s sexual lives—one that affirms sexual diversity; engages deeply with society, politics, and history; and is grounded in women’s sexual rights.