Narcissistic leadership

Narcissism—a personality trait encompassing grandiosity, arrogance, self-absorption, entitlement, fragile self-esteem, and hostility—is an attribute of many powerful leaders. Narcissistic leaders have grandiose belief systems and leadership styles, and are generally motivated by their needs for power and admiration rather than empathetic concern for the constituents and institutions they lead. However, narcissists also possess the charisma and grand vision that are vital to effective leadership. We review and critically assess the theoretical and research literature on narcissistic leaders in order to understand the potential positive and negative consequences of their leadership, the trajectories of their leadership, and the relationship of narcissism to established models of leadership. We conclude that the study of narcissistic leaders is inherently limited in scope, and propose a new definition of narcissistic leadership in order to reframe the discussion and better incorporate the topic of narcissism into the field of leadership studies.     

Increasing the Accuracy of EpiPen Administration With a Brief Behavioral Skills Training Package in a School for Autism

Behavioral staff at a school for children with autism investigated the effects of a brief behavioral skills training procedure to promote the appropriate administration of the EpiPen in an emergency situation by school staff. A 10-item task analysis was created outlining the steps required to use the EpiPen effectively and safely and was validated by the school’s registered nurse. Following a pretest in which members of both groups completed a minimal number of steps, the experimental group was trained via instructions, modeling, praise, feedback, and role playing to correctly use the EpiPen whereas the control group received no such training. Posttest scores indicated that the brief intervention was an effective means of teaching appropriate administration of the EpiPen with school staff.     

Body Image,Body Satisfaction,and Unsafe Anal Intercourse Among Men Who Have Sex With Men

Using survey results from the 1998 Twin Cities Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Pride Festival (N = 535), we explored associations between body image and unsafe anal intercourse (UAI) among men who have sex with men (MSM), and evaluated whether body satisfaction mediated this association. MSM who reported underweight body image had lower odds than those who reported average weight of UAI (AOR = 0.33; 95% CI = 0.13, 0.85); body satisfaction was not found to mediate this association. 13.3% of men who reported overweight/obese body image had engaged in UAI compared with 21.6% of those who reported average weight and 8.2% of those who reported underweight (p < .05). Compared with MSM in exclusive relationships, MSM in non exclusive relationships had increased odds of UAI (AOR = 5.78; 95% CI = 2.96, 11.29) as did men who were not partnered (AOR = 3.20; 95% CI = 1.72, 5.93). These findings highlight the importance of including body image in sexual behavior models of MSM to better understand body image's role in influencing sexual risk and sexually transmitted infections (STI)/human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) transmission.     

Gender attitudes,sexual violence,and HIV/AIDS risks among men and women in Cape Town,South Africa

This study examined gender attitudes and sexual violence‐supportive beliefs (rape myths) in a sample of South African men and women at risk for HIV transmission. Over 40% of women and 16% of men had been sexually assaulted, and more than one in five men openly admitted to having perpetrated sexual assault. Traditional attitudes toward women's social and gender roles, as well as rape myths, were endorsed by a significant minority of both men and women. Multivariate analyses showed that for men, sexual assault history and rape myth acceptance, along with alcohol and other drug use history, were significantly related to cumulative risks for HIV infection. In contrast, although we found that women were at substantial risk for sexually transmitted infection (STI), including HIV, women's risks were only related to lower levels of education and alcohol use history. We speculate that women's risks for STI/HIV are the product of partner characteristics and male‐dominated relationships, suggesting the critical importance of intervening with men to reduce women's risks for sexual assault and STI/HIV.     

Comment on Cross,Fine, Jones,and Walsh (2012): We Are Now on the Same Page

Role conflict has been an issue in the intervention of child abuse cases since the beginning of the alliance drawn between the legal and mental health professions. In child abuse cases, clearly defined roles will prevent an attack on the process, thereby providing successful interventions to protect children. The child advocacy center concept is one of the best ways to meld the two professional functions into a cohesive approach to those interventions.     

Teaching Sociological Theory for a New Century: Contending with the Time Crunch

Despite being a decade into the 21st century, sociological theory continues to be taught at the undergraduate and graduate level in nearly every program in the United States as if it were still 1970. 40 years ago, it made sense to dichotomize theory into two courses—“classical” and “contemporary”—because the latter of the two only covered theory from about the 1930s to the “present.” Today a literal and figurative time crunch has emerged that makes teaching theory difficult and at times, arbitrary based on the professor’s training, mentor, ideological/epistemological biases, and structural factors like textbook choice and number of academic weeks allotted per course. That is, we spend a large amount of time debating who should be in or out, and not enough time preparing our students for the application of theory towards the ultimate goal: knowledge about the social world. Students, then, leave confused at how one uses theory, what theory actually is, and, often times, disengaged from theory because of the density with which some theories approach the social world. In the paper below, the time crunch and its tendency to produce a “lost generation” of theorists is examined. After elucidating how the time crunch constrains sociology, four possible solutions are presented. This list of solutions is neither definitive nor exhaustive, and is meant to generate a rich discussion about the direction the discipline should head in the new century.     

The relationship between indicators of sexual compulsivity and high risk sexual practices among men and women receiving services from a sexually transmitted infection clinic

Sexual compulsivity, defined by sexual preoccupation and lack of sexual impulse control, is related to high‐risk sexual behaviors. However, little is known about the prevalence and predictors of sexual compulsivity in people at high risk for contracting sexually transmitted infections (STIs). In the current study, patients receiving diagnostic and treatment services (85% African American) at an urban STI clinic completed measures of demographic characteristics, sexual compulsivity, substance use, and sexual behaviors. Measures were administered to 492 men and 193 women using confidential procedures and audio computer‐assisted interviewing technology. Results showed that men and women receiving STI clinic services frequently endorsed multiple indicators of sexual compulsivity. In this mostly African American sample, individuals with scores above the 80th percentile on the sexual compulsivity scale (translating to over one standard deviation above the mean) had more sex partners, engaged in higher rates of sexual risk behaviors with casual or one‐time sex partners, and were nearly four times as likely to have been recently diagnosed with multiple STIs than were individuals who scored below the 80th percentile. Although sexual compulsivity scores were associated with alcohol and other drug use, associations between sexual compulsivity and sexual risks were not accounted for by substance abuse. Findings suggest an urgent need for interventions to help men and women with sexual preoccupations and poor sexual impulse control to reduce their risks for sexually transmitted infections.     

Characterizing the Performance of the Conway‐Maxwell Poisson Generalized Linear Model

Count data are pervasive in many areas of risk analysis; deaths, adverse health outcomes, infrastructure system failures, and traffic accidents are all recorded as count events, for example. Risk analysts often wish to estimate the probability distribution for the number of discrete events as part of doing a risk assessment. Traditional count data regression models of the type often used in risk assessment for this problem suffer from limitations due to the assumed variance structure. A more flexible model based on the Conway‐Maxwell Poisson (COM‐Poisson) distribution was recently proposed, a model that has the potential to overcome the limitations of the traditional model. However, the statistical performance of this new model has not yet been fully characterized. This article assesses the performance of a maximum likelihood estimation method for fitting the COM‐Poisson generalized linear model (GLM). The objectives of this article are to (1) characterize the parameter estimation accuracy of the MLE implementation of the COM‐Poisson GLM, and (2) estimate the prediction accuracy of the COM‐Poisson GLM using simulated data sets. The results of the study indicate that the COM‐Poisson GLM is flexible enough to model under‐, equi‐, and overdispersed data sets with different sample mean values. The results also show that the COM‐Poisson GLM yields accurate parameter estimates. The COM‐Poisson GLM provides a promising and flexible approach for performing count data regression.