Suicide Protective Factors in Outpatient Substance Abuse Patients: Religious Faith and Family Support

The purpose of this study was to identify the protective roles of religious faith and family support in buffering against suicidal behavior in a sample of substance abuse outpatients seeking treatment. Data were collected from 112 clinical outpatients seeking treatment for substance abuse. We hypothesized that religious faith would be related to lower levels of suicidal behavior through a negative association with depressive symptoms. We expected this mediation effect would differ across varying levels of family support, providing support for a moderated mediation effect. The results indicate that religious faith exerts stronger direct and indirect effects on suicidal behavior at low levels of family support. Religious faith was significantly and negatively related to suicidal behavior only at low levels of family support. The findings suggest that in the absence of family support, religious faith may play a compensatory role in protecting against suicidal behavior.     

CHURCH UNDER LEVIATHAN

Political philosophers have long disagreed on the issue of whether churches should exercise restraint in the appeal to religious reasons in public discussion and political mobilization. Exclusivists defend the restraint, whereas inclusivists reject it. Both sides, however, assume the existence of a democratic government. In this essay, I discuss whether churches should exercise restraint in a non‐democratic, authoritarian society. I defend inclusivism and believe that churches should not restrain themselves, especially when doing so can promote democracy and prevent severe injustices. First, I argue that two exclusivist arguments which justify the restraint cannot be applied in an authoritarian society. Second, I defend inclusivism because religious reasons are effective in cultivating active citizens that strengthen the democratic movement. Finally, I use the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong as an example to show how inclusivism can enhance democratic movements under authoritarianism.     

Psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the diabetes empowerment scale

Metabolic control is central to positive clinical outcome in patients with diabetes. Empowerment has been linked to metabolic control in this clinical group. The current study sought to determine key psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the Diabetes Empowerment Scale (C-DES) and to explore the relationship of the C-DES sub-scales to metabolic control in 189 patients with a diagnosis of diabetes. Confirmatory factor analysis established that the five sub-scales of the C-DES offered a highly satisfactory fit to the data. Furthermore, C-DES sub-scales were found to have generally acceptable internal consistency and divergent reliability. However, convergent reliability of C-DES sub-scales could not be established against metabolic control. It is concluded that future research needs to address ambiguities in the relationship between empowerment and metabolic control in order to afford patients an evidenced-based treatment package to assure optimal metabolic control.     

The impact of AIDS/sex education by schools or family doctors on Hong Kong Chinese adolescents

Despite the rapid increases of HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in East Asia, the sex-related knowledge among Chinese adolescents is limited and the standard of sex education is both variable and inconsistent in Hong Kong. The aim of this study is to review the overall effectiveness of the school-based or doctor-based sexual health education currently provided for Hong Kong adolescents. In 1999 - 2000, a large survey on youth risk behaviours was carried out among 15 - 18-year-old students from 21 secondary schools. Of the 8,039 questionnaires, 377 students (4.7%) admitted sexual experience. Multiple logistic regression showed that students who had received school AIDS education were found to be less likely to have sexual intercourse in the past 3 months (odds ratio, OR 0.5; 95% confidence interval, CI 0.3 - 0.9) or use drugs or alcohol before the previous intercourse (OR 0.5; 95% CI 0.3 - 0.9). They were twice as likely to discuss emotional (95% CI 1.4 - 4.0) or puberty issues (95% CI 1.1 - 3.0). Although not statistically significant, sex education by family doctors showed a similar pattern. This result provides the strongest available evidence that school-based sex education programmes can modify sexual behaviour, which, in turn, reduces risk among Chinese students.     

Thinking within the box: The relational processing style elicited by counterfactual mind-sets

By comparing reality to what might have been, counterfactuals promote a relational processing style characterized by a tendency to consider relationships and associations among a set of stimuli. As such, counterfactual mind-sets were expected to improve performance on tasks involving the consideration of relationships and associations but to impair performance on tasks requiring novel ideas that are uninfluenced by salient associations. The authors conducted several experiments to test this hypothesis. In Experiments 1a and 1b, the authors determined that counterfactual mind-sets increase mental states and preferences for thinking styles consistent with relational thought. Experiment 2 demonstrated a facilitative effect of counterfactual mind-sets on an analytic task involving logical relationships; Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that counterfactual mind-sets structure thought and imagination around salient associations and therefore impaired performance on creative generation tasks. In Experiment 5, the authors demonstrated that the detrimental effect of counterfactual mind-sets is limited to creative tasks involving novel idea generation; in a creative association task involving the consideration of relationships between task stimuli, counterfactual mind-sets improved performance.     

Reexamining personal, social, and cultural influences on compliance behavior in the United States, Poland, and Hong Kong

Researchers have extended the literature on strategies of gaining compliance with a request to incorporate cultural variations into the analytic framework. In the present investigation, the authors sought to go beyond previous studies of the factors increasing compliance rates by reexamining how researchers conceptualize and measure personal, social, and cultural influences on compliance behavior in the United States, Poland, and Hong Kong. The authors found that different levels of compliance were affected by culture, principles of influence, and the individual's personal orientation of idiocentrism/allocentrism (I/A). In the present study, the authors extended previous cross-cultural work by decomposing the I/A into 2 separate individual difference variables: normative perceptions and evaluative perceptions. The interaction of person and situation on compliance showed the power of situational demands and the strength of different aspects of personal collectivism. Different patterns of compliance at the culture level revealed the importance of culture in shaping this behavioral tendency. Thus, the authors' integration of personal, social, and cultural influences provided an interactive model to help researchers explain compliance more comprehensively.     

Innovation across cultures: Connecting leadership,identification, and creative behavior in organizations

Innovation is considered essential for today's organizations to survive and thrive. Researchers have also stressed the importance of leadership as a driver of followers' innovative work behavior (FIB). Yet, despite a large amount of research, three areas remain understudied: (a) The relative importance of different forms of leadership for FIB; (b) the mechanisms through which leadership impacts FIB; and (c) the degree to which relationships between leadership and FIB are generalizable across cultures. To address these lacunae, we propose an integrated model connecting four types of positive leadership behaviors, two types of identification (as mediating variables), and FIB. We tested our model in a global data set comprising responses of N = 7,225 participants from 23 countries, grouped into nine cultural clusters. Our results indicate that perceived LMX quality was the strongest relative predictor of FIB. Furthermore, the relationships between both perceived LMX quality and identity leadership with FIB were mediated by social identification. The indirect effect of LMX on FIB via social identification was stable across clusters, whereas the indirect effects of the other forms of leadership on FIB via social identification were stronger in countries high versus low on collectivism. Power distance did not influence the relations.     

The relationship between masculine gender role stress and psychological adjustment: A question of construct validity?

Masculine gender role stress is a theoretical construct that describes the stress created in men when they feel they are not meeting society's expectations for masculinity, or when the situation forces men to act in feminine-typed ways. The stress produced by these feelings or actions are thought to be related to negative psychological outcomes for men, but should be unrelated to well-being for women. The present study investigated the validity of the masculine gender role stress construct, especially with regard to the assumption that masculine gender role stress is related to negative psychological outcomes for men more than for women. Participants were a group of mostly Caucasian undergraduates. Results indicated that masculine gender role stress was related to depression, hostility, and anxiety, but to the same degree for both men and women. These findings suggest that, if MGRS is a valid construct, then researchers need to explore other ways in which this type of stress can negatively affect men, but not women.     

Infantile handling and the facilitation of discrimination and reversal learning

One group of rats was removed from their home cage and received daily handling from Days 3-21, while the control group of litter mates remained in the cage and did not receive any treatment. On Day 22 all rats were weaned and they were housed in individual cages until they were 60 days old. After two pretraining days, subjects were given daily blocks of one free and three forced trials in the T-maze and were rewarded with food after making the correct response. Following 20 days of training and testing on black-white discrimination, subjects were given 10 days of reversal training with four daily trials. Results indicate that the handled animals showed faster running and a greater number of correct choices than the control rats during both the acquisition and reversal learning phases of the experiment.