The self and mental health: self-salience and the emergence of internalizing and externalizing problems

How do schemas about self-salience--the importance of the self versus the collective in social relations--affect mental health? We propose that self-salience shapes the likelihood of experiencing internalizing or externalizing problems. Schemas that privilege others over the self increase the risk of internalizing symptoms, including depressive symptoms and anxiety, whereas those that privilege the self over others predispose individuals to externalizing behaviors of antisocial behavior and substance abuse. Furthermore, we propose that these schemas contribute to the gender differences that exist in these problems. We test these predictions with data from adolescents, the stage at which these problems and the gender differences in them arise. Results show that self-salience underlies both internalizing and externalizing problems. In addition, schemas about self-salience help explain the gender differences found in mental health problems.     

Optimal Planning Quantities for Product Transition

The replacement of an existing product with a new one presents many challenges. In particular, uncertainties in a new product introduction often lead to extreme cases of demand and supply mismatches. This paper addresses inventory planning decisions for product upgrades when there is no replenishment opportunity during the transition period. We allow product substitution: when a company runs out of the old product, a customer may be offered the new product as a substitute. We show that the optimal substitution decision is a time‐varying threshold policy and establish the optimal planning policy. Further, we determine the optimal delay in a new product introduction, given the initial inventory of the old product.     

The costs of sharing: wives' employment and husbands' mental health.

Although there is general concern about the psychological effects of gender stratification, we know relatively little about the particular aspects of inequality that affect men and women's mental health. This paper proposes that inequalities in power and demands associated with gender are particularly consequential for well-being. Previous analyses on married women support this perspective: wives' employment is positive for women's well-being to the extent that it increases their income relative to husbands and decreases their domestic demands, particularly through husbands sharing in domestic labor. The present analysis extends the test of this perspective to men by examining the effects of wives' employment on husbands' psychological well-being. Results show that insofar as it decreases husbands' relative income and increases their share of domestic labor, women's employment is negative for husbands' mental health.     

Probabilistic Models for Risk Assessment

Recent concern with the potential for stray carbon fibers to damage electronic equipment and cause economic losses has led to the development of advanced risk-assessment methods. Risk assessment often requires the synthesis of risk profiles which represent the probability distribution of total annual losses due to a certain set of events or activities. A number of alternative probabilistic models are presented which the authors have used to develop such profiles. Examples are given of applications of these methods to assessment of risk due to conductive fibers released from aircraft or automobile fires. These assessments usually involve a two-stage approach: estimation of losses for several subclassifications of the overall process, and synthesis of the results into an aggregate risk profile. The methodology presented is capable of treating a wide variety of situations involving sequences of random physical events.     

Factors contributing to the subjective quality of life of the chronic mentally ill.

Although the deinstitutionalization of the seriously mentally ill has been severely criticized, the success of some model community programs shows that community care can enhance patients' quality of life. We lack specific knowledge, however, about the components that make these programs effective, and why. A theoretical framework for identifying these critical components is proposed. Services can enhance life satisfaction by increasing individuals' actual power through economic resources or status, thus enhancing their perceptions of mastery. An internal evaluation of a model program provides support for this hypothesis. One hundred and fifty-seven patients were interviewed about services, quality of life, and perceptions of mastery. Results show that services providing economic resources and an empowerment approach to service delivery are significantly related to overall quality of life. Furthermore, perceptions of mastery account for the impact of these components on life satisfaction. These findings suggest interventions that can be adopted by a wide range of mental health programs for the improvement of the quality of life of the chronic mentally ill.     

Women and mental health: the interaction of job and family conditions.

Current research on the effects of wives' employment on their well-being focuses on the determinants of those effects. Most studies have used a gender model that concentrates on family conditions as mediators. In contrast, studies of the effects of employment on men typically use a job model and focus on work rather than family conditions as determinants. To understand fully the impact of employment on women, these models should be combined. We predict that certain work and family conditions interact, specifically, that the degree of control at work moderates the effects of demands in the family. Using two data sets on community mental health, we have found some support for this hypothesis.     

The effects of women's employment: personal control and sex differences in mental health

Married women have been found consistently to have higher rates of anxious and depressive symptoms than married men. Power explanations for this difference predict that employment for women, which is associated with greater power in the family, would reduce women's symptoms to approximate men's more closely. Results on the effects of women's employment, however, are inconsistent. One explanation for this inconsistency concerns role overload, or the greater demands experienced by women with employment. This paper proposes that overload creates greater symptoms for the same reason as low power; that is, through lowering individuals' sense of personal control. Thus employment for women is not consistently positive because it often trades one source of low control for another. We test a personal control explanation for the effects of women's employment, using community surveys of mental health. Results indicate that issues of personal control underlie the effects of both high demands and low power on sex differences in anxious and depressive symptoms.     

The Child Outside the Door: Primal Scene,Caesura, and the Primary Trauma of Race

ABSTRACT

We are supposedly a “postracial” America, yet we cannot contain our own excess, cannot keep the unmetabolized beta elements of our racial history out of the bedroom or let race stay in the bedroom so the mature genital couple can do what it pleases. Not only do we surveil, police, and monitor race’s own primal scene but also we continuously break and enter into its most intimate chambers, guns drawn, tanks crashing in, in order to prevent the primal scene from ever taking place. This article explores the idea of race in America as denied its own primal scene and the ways in which, contrary to the importance to Bion (1991) of preventing “someone who KNOWS from filling the empty space” (p. 578), we cannot allow race to hold open its own empty space, find its own manifestations of O. I draw from the work of Wilfred Bion, Fred Moten, Jean Laplanche, and others to attempt to theorize the complexities of “postracial” America’s relationship with race vis-à-vis the primal scene.     

Book Review: Liberating Method: Feminism and Social Research. By Marjorie DeVault. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999. 275 pages,ISBN: 1566396980

Qualitative Sociology -