The future of refugee flows and policies

"The number of forced migrants...is estimated today to exceed 40 million [worldwide]. The changed international climate of the 1990s...has shifted the focus from the asylum and resettlement countries to the countries of origin: there is today a greater willingness to intervene in other countries' affairs either to avert the creation of new flows of focused migrants or to assist internally displaced populations, and there is the expectation of large-scale voluntary returns of refugees in asylum. This article discusses these and other policy issues concerning forced migration in this new international environment."     

Assessing right to die attitudes: a conceptually guided measurement model

This article discusses the current status of research regarding the assessment of attitudes toward euthanasia and other right to die constructs with a focus on conceptual and methodological issues hindering advancement in this area. Two models are presented: a conceptual model for differentiating the various right to die constructs, and a measurement model to guide scale development and refinement. The conceptual model defines the right to die constructs as a function of locus of decision and locus of action. Health status and age are hypothesized as important factors that in some instances are defining attributes in right to die constructs and in other instances are factors influencing people's attitudes toward the right to die. The measurement model considers the importance of construct specificity, individual characteristics, and conviction in the assessment of right to die attributes. An extant euthanasia attitude scale is presented and evaluated in terms of the models to demonstrate how they may be useful for advancing attitude research in this important area.     

Evaluating a private foundation's health program

Public policy decisions in health are increasingly difficult and expensive. Although there will never be enough information available, private foundations can help to bridge the most important gaps in knowledge. Larger foundations may also wish to respond to those who doubt the value of foundation activities. This article reviews the experiences over the past eight years of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in employing evaluation and related social research procedures in the planning and implementation of a major philanthropic effort to improve the health and medical care of Americans. Discussed are the still evolving Foundation evaluation framework, the unanticipated problems in undertaking specific evaluations, and the substantive findings of some of the studies.     

Internalized Other Interviewing in Relational Therapy: Three Discursive Approaches to Understanding its Use and Outcomes

For over 20 years, family therapist Karl Tomm has been engaging families and couples with a therapeutic intervention he calls Internalized Other Interviewing (IOI). The IOI (cf. Emmerson‐Whyte, 2010; Hurley, 2006) entails interviewing clients, from the personal experiences of partners and family members as an internalized other. The IOI is based on the idea that through dialogues over time, one can internalize a sense of one's conversational partner responsiveness in reliably anticipated ways. Anyone who has thought in a conversation with a family member or partner, “Oh there s/he goes again,” or anticipates next words before they leave the other's mouth, has a sense of what we are calling an internalized other. For Tomm, the internalized anticipations partners and family members may have offers entry points into new dialogues with therapeutic potential—particularly, when their actual dialogues get stuck in dispreferred patterns.     

Cigarette Smoking and All-Cause and Cause-Specific Adult Mortality in the United States

This study illuminates the association between cigarette smoking and adult mortality in the contemporary United States. Recent studies have estimated smoking-attributable mortality using indirect approaches or with sample data that are not nationally representative and that lack key confounders. We use the 1990–2011 National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality Files to estimate relative risks of all-cause and cause-specific mortality for current and former smokers compared with never smokers. We examine causes of death established as attributable to smoking as well as additional causes that appear to be linked to smoking but have not yet been declared by the U.S. Surgeon General to be caused by smoking. Mortality risk is substantially elevated among smokers for established causes and moderately elevated for additional causes. We also decompose the mortality disadvantage among smokers by cause of death and estimate the number of smoking-attributable deaths for the U.S. adult population ages 35+, net of sociodemographic and behavioral confounders. The elevated risks translate to 481,887 excess deaths per year among current and former smokers compared with never smokers, 14 % to 15 % of which are due to the additional causes. The additional causes of death contribute to the health burden of smoking and should be considered in future studies of smoking-attributable mortality. This study demonstrates that smoking-attributable mortality must remain a top population health priority in the United States and makes several contributions to further underscore the human costs of this tragedy that has ravaged American society for more than a century.     

Expressing Gambling-Related Cognitive Biases in Motor Behaviour: Rolling Dice to Win Prizes

Cognitive perspectives on gambling propose that biased thinking plays a significant role in sustaining gambling participation and, in vulnerable individuals, gambling problems. One prominent set of cognitive biases include illusions of control involving beliefs that it is possible to influence random gaming events. Sociologists have reported that (some) gamblers believe that it is possible to throw dice in different ways to achieve gaming outcomes (e.g., ‘dice-setting’ in craps). However, experimental demonstrations of these phenomena are lacking. Here, we asked regular gamblers to roll a computer-simulated, but fair, 6 sided die for monetary prizes. Gamblers allowed the die to roll for longer when attempting to win higher value bets, and when attempting to hit high winning numbers. This behaviour was exaggerated in gamblers motivated to keep gambling following the experience of almost-winning in gambling games. These results suggest that gambling cognitive biases find expression in the motor behaviour of rolling dice for monetary prizes, possibly reflecting embodied substrates.     

Nationwide Newspaper Coverage of Detainee Rights at Guantanamo Bay: A Community Structure Approach

A community structure analysis compared community characteristics and coverage of detainee rights and Guantanamo Bay in leading newspapers in 28 major cities nationwide, sampling all relevant 250+ word articles from September 12, 2001, to September 11, 2012. The resulting 359 articles were coded for “prominence” and “direction,” then combined into a “Media Vector” score for each newspaper (range = .6034 to ?.2500). About four out of five (82%) newspapers supported detainee rights. Stakeholder and buffer clusters were important. Pearson correlations revealed that stakeholders (the proportions and concerns of which are expected to be reflected in media coverage) were significant, with percentage of Mainline Protestant (r = .550, p = .001) linked to favorable media coverage of detainee rights and percentage of age 65 and older (r = ?.321, p = .048) linked to unfavorable coverage. The buffer hypothesis (associating higher proportions of privileged groups with coverage receptive to human rights claims) was also confirmed, with percentage of college educated correlating with favorable coverage (r = .409, p = .015). Regression analysis yielded two significant variables—percentage Mainline Protestant, 33%, and percentage professional/technical occupational status (another “buffer” measure), 27%, totaling 59.9%, both linked to favorable coverage. Unexpectedly, the Midwest displayed more media support for detainee rights than any other region of the United States.     

Mothers' interoceptive knowledge predicts children's emotion regulation and social skills in middle childhood

Interoception, often defined as the perception of internal physiological changes, is implicated in many adult social affective processes, but its effects remain understudied in the context of parental socialization of children's emotions. We hypothesized that what parents know about the interoceptive concomitants of emotions, or interoceptive knowledge (e.g., “my heart races when excited”), may be especially relevant in emotion socialization and in supporting children's working models of emotions and the social world. We developed a measure of mothers' interoceptive knowledge about their own emotions and examined its relation to children's social affective outcomes relative to other socialization factors, including self‐reported parental behaviors, emotion beliefs, and knowledge of emotion‐relevant situations and non‐verbal expressions. To assess these, mothers (N = 201) completed structured interviews and questionnaires. A few months later, third‐grade teachers rated children's social skills and emotion regulation observed in the classroom. Results indicated that mothers' interoceptive knowledge about their own emotions was associated with children's social affective skills (emotion regulation, social initiative, cooperation, self‐control), even after controlling for child gender and ethnicity, family income, maternal stress, and the above maternal socialization factors. Overall, findings suggest that mothers' interoceptive knowledge may provide an additional, unique pathway by which children acquire social affective competence.