Attempted suicide in youth: Its relationship to school achievement,educational goals,and socioeconomic status

Twenty-six suicide attempters, 9 to 18 years of age, were compared with 725 nonattempters on measures of school achievement, educational goals, socioeconomic status, and depression. As has been found in studies using clinical samples, suicide attempters in our communitybased sample had significantly lower school achievement than nonattempters. The relationship between attempted suicide and low school achievement seemed to be explained by the effects of depression. Lower-SES youth tended to be more likely to attempt suicide than higher-SES youths. However, SES appeared to have little effect on the relationship between attempted suicide and school achievement. Results also suggest that children of mothers with low educational goals for them may be more at risk for attempted suicide than youths whose mothers have higher educational goals for their children.This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, Grant No. MH36971.     

The Role of Parental Depressive Symptoms in Predicting Dysfunctional Discipline Among Parents at High-Risk for Child Maltreatment

Parental depressive symptoms are an important public health concern because they have been linked, in numerous previous studies, to negative parenting behaviors including dysfunctional discipline and child abuse and neglect. Taking this into consideration, parental depressive symptoms warrant particular attention among families with child maltreatment allegations—a group at high risk of dysfunctional discipline and future physical abuse. The current study sought to examine relations between parental depressive symptoms and dysfunctional discipline in an ethnically diverse sample of 234 families who were referred for psychological services due to concerns of child maltreatment. Referrals were made by school, medical, or child welfare personnel. 59.8 % of children were male and the average age was 7.05 years. Results indicated that parental depressive symptoms were significantly correlated with dysfunctional discipline including laxness, over-reactivity, and hostility. However, all three relations lost statistical significance after controlling for parental stress. The findings of this study suggest that well-documented relations between parental depression and negative parenting behavior may be driven by elevated parental stress rather than reflecting risks uniquely associated with depressive pathology.     

Antagonism of behavioral effects of bromocriptine by prolactin in female cats

The effects of the dopaminergic agonist bromocriptine (BC) and exogenously administered prolactin (PRL) on the spontaneous behavior of female cats were investigated. The objective was to test whether BC-induced behavioral effects may be antagonized by PRL. BC (6 mg/kg ip) administration induced abnormal behaviors such as limb flicks, abortive grooms, head/body shakes, and hallucinatory-like behavior/escape as well as excessive grooming. PRL (5 mg/kg ip) administration induced biphasic changes in grooming. The first change was an increase in grooming frequency averaging 256% of baseline control values and lasting for 1 h. This change was followed by reductions in grooming of 75 and 82.5% below baseline during Hours 2 and 3 postinjection, respectively. Combined BC and PRL treatment antagonized the frequency of BC-induced motor effects such as limb flicks, abortive grooms, and head/body shakes. Limb flicks occurred nine times more often 2 h after BC alone than after BC and PRL. The combined treatment also antagonized the excessive grooming observed after separate administrations of BC and PRL. The observed interactions between PRL and BC behavioral effects support the notion that PRL may be an important modulator of dopamine-dependent motor behavior in female cats.     

Effect of playing violent video games cooperatively or competitively on subsequent cooperative behavior

Research on video games has yielded consistent findings that violent video games increase aggression and decrease prosocial behavior. However, these studies typically examined single-player games. Of interest is the effect of cooperative play in a violent video game on subsequent cooperative or competitive behavior. Participants played Halo II (a first-person shooter game) cooperatively or competitively and then completed a modified prisoner's dilemma task to assess competitive and cooperative behavior. Compared with the competitive play conditions, players in the cooperative condition engaged in more tit-for-tat behaviors-a pattern of behavior that typically precedes cooperative behavior. The social context of game play influenced subsequent behavior more than the content of the game that was played.     

Transgender individuals' workplace experiences: the applicability of sexual minority measures and models

The present study explored whether 3 existing measures of workplace constructs germane to the experiences of sexual minority people could be modified to improve their applicability with transgender individuals. To this end, the Workplace Heterosexist Experiences Questionnaire (WHEQ; C. R. Waldo, 1999); the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Climate Inventory (LGBTCI; B. J. Liddle, D. A. Luzzo, A. L. Hauenstein, & K. Schuck, 2004); and the Workplace Sexual Identity Management Measure (WSIMM; M. Z. Anderson, J. M. Croteau, Y. B. Chung, & T. M. DiStefano, 2001) were modified to explicitly address the experiences of transgender individuals. Data from a sample of 263 transgender individuals were used to evaluate the psychometric properties of the modified measures. Analyses of the structures of the modified measures (Transgender Forms [TF]) suggested an alternative 2-factor structure for the WHEQ-TF, but provided support for the previously observed unidimensional structure for the LGBTCI-TF, and a slightly modified 3-factor structure for the WSIMM-TF. Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficients for scale or subscale items across the 3 measures were acceptable. Criterion-related validity was evident in theoretically consistent patterns of correlations between scores on the 3 modified measures and scores on indicators of job satisfaction and outness. These data provide preliminary support for transgender-specific versions of measures of 3 key constructs in the sexual minority vocational behavior research.     

Reducing Escape without Escape Extinction: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Escape-Based Interventions

Individuals with disabilities may engage in challenging behavior to escape aversive stimuli, like academic tasks or non-preferred foods. Interventions to reduce these behaviors often employ escape extinction; that is, the implementer withholds escape following challenging behavior. Escape extinction can increase risk of injury, restrict autonomy, and worsen the learner–implementer relationship. To mitigate collateral effects, interventions can use strategies without escape extinction (i.e., escape-based); that is, implementers can provide escape contingent on challenging behavior during intervention, in conjunction with other intervention components. However, no comprehensive syntheses of these interventions have been conducted. We identified 39 articles that included escape-based interventions, which contained 273 single-case designs. Escape-based interventions were associated with lower levels of challenging behavior and higher levels of adaptive behavior than baseline conditions. Most comparisons between escape-based and escape extinction interventions showed no functional relation, indicating that escape extinction may not add substantial benefit to intervention efficacy.

     

The Other Self: Psychopathology and Literature

The figure of the "double" or the other self is an important topic in the history of literature. Many centuries before Jean Paul Richter coined the term, "doppelg?nger," at the beginning of the Romantic Movement in the year 1796, it is possible to find the figure of the double in myths and legends. The issue of the double emphaszses the contradictory character of the human being and invokes a sinister dimension of the psychological world, what has been called in German as "umheimlich." However, does multiciplicity always involve pathology? Related to this figure in literary history, a new perspective from clinical psychology called "dialogical self" defines the self as a multi-voice reality. Along the same line, postmodernist psychology considers the self a discursive construction. From these perspectives, the "self" is situated a long way away from the classical essential conception of the self. In this paper, we review briefly some important landmarks of the figure of the double in the literature, and we compare the coincidences of the "double" experiencies described in literature with the experiences of our patients. Finally, we discuss how this literary tradition can help us to understand new psychological perspectives.     

Are Citizens “Receiving the Treatment”? Assessing a Key Link in Contextual Theories of Public Opinion and Political Behavior

The theorization and empirical exploration of contextual effects is a long‐standing feature of public opinion and political behavior research. At present, however, there is little to no evidence that citizens actually perceive the local contextual factors theorized to influence their attitudes and behaviors. In this article, we focus on two of the most prevalent contextual factors appearing in theories—racial/ethnic and economic context—to investigate whether citizens' perceptions of their local ethnic and economic contexts map onto variation in the actual ethnic composition and economic health of these environments. Using national survey data combined with Census data, and focusing on the popular topics of immigration and unemployment, we find that objective measures of the size of the immigrant population and unemployment rate in respondents' county and zip code strongly predict perceived levels of local immigration and assessments of the health of one's local job market. In addition to demonstrating that citizens are “receiving the treatment,” we show that perceptions of one's context overwhelmingly mediate the effect of these objective contextual factors on relevant economic and immigration attitudes. The results from our analyses provide scholars with unprecedented evidence that a key perceptual process presumed in various contextual theories of political attitudes and behavior is, in fact, valid.     

The Theory of Male Reference Group Identity Dependence: Roles of Social Desirability, Masculinity Ideology, and Collective Identity

Data from 118 college men from the southeastern United States (U.S.) were analyzed using zero-order and partial correlations to test male reference group identity dependence theory’s propositions regarding the relations of male reference group identity attitudes (i.e., no reference group, reference group dependent, reference group nondependent similarity, and reference group nondependent diversity) with traditional masculinity ideology and dimensions of men’s gender-based collective identity (i.e., affirmative evaluation of collective identity, importance of collective identity). Male reference group identity attitudes yielded theoretically-consistent relations with the affirmative evaluation and importance of collective identity. Specifically, the no reference group attitudes were correlated negatively whereas nondependent diversity attitudes were correlated positively with affirmative evaluation; the group dependent attitudes were correlated positively with importance of collective identity; and the nondependent similarity attitudes were correlated positively with both affirmative evaluation of collective identity and the importance of collective identity. This pattern reveals the differential salience of collective identity dimensions in male reference group identity attitudes, suggesting that group dependent attitudes reflect importance of collective identity without an evaluation valence, nondependent diversity attitudes reflect affirmative evaluation whereas the no reference group attitudes reflect nonaffirmative evaluation of collective identity, and nondependent similarity attitudes involve both affirmative evaluation and importance of collective identity. Additional findings added to prior data suggesting reevaluation of the posited role of traditional masculinity ideology in male reference group identity theory. The pattern of findings was not changed by controlling for self-deceptive enhancement and impression management dimensions of social desirability.