Social Responsibility,Substance Use,and Sexual Risk Behavior in Men Who Have Sex With Men

Considerable public health literature focuses on relationships between problematic human characteristics (e.g., psychopathology) and unhealthy behaviors. A recent movement termed positive psychology emphasizes the advantages of assessing relationships between human strengths (e.g., altruism) and beneficial health behaviors. The present study assessed social responsibility, an orientation to help or protect others even when there is nothing to be gained as an individual, and its relationship to HIV-relevant behaviors. In our sample of 350 men who have sex with men (MSM), social responsibility was negatively correlated with substance use and HIV risk behaviors. Men who had been tested for HIV and knew their HIV status—a behavior that helps men protect their partners but does not protect themselves from the virus—also scored higher in social responsibility. Interventions designed to reduce HIV risk behavior in MSM may benefit from efforts to promote human strengths.     

Discount rates and risky sexual behaviors among teenagers and young adults

This article examines the relationship between personal discount rates and sexual behaviors in a sample of teenagers and young adults. We find that higher discount rates (an indication of less willingness to forego current consumption for future consumption) are significantly associated with a range of sexual behaviors, including ever having sex, having sex before age 16 years, and past or current pregnancy. These associations are consistent with previous studies showing a link between discounting and other, non-sexual health behaviors. JEL Classification D80 · D90 · I10     

Traditional, Interpretive, and Reception Based Content Analyses: Improving the Ability of Content Analysis to Address Issues of Pragmatic and Theoretical Concern

This paper argues for a subtle but important shift in the way we view content analysis which allows for the introduction of two new variants on this methodology. Previously, content analysis has been seen as a method for quantifying the content of texts. This paper argues that we should view content analysis as a method for counting interpretations of content. Based on this reconceptualization, this paper suggests two new varieties of content analysis. Reception based content analysis allows researchers to quantify how different audiences will understand text. Interpretive content analysis is specially designed for latent content analysis, in which researchers go beyond quantifying the most straightforward denotative elements in a text. These new forms of content analysis are contrasted with traditional content analysis, and the appropriate conditions for their use are discussed.     

Order statistics from non-identical right-truncated Lomax random variables with applications

In this paper, we derive some recurrence relations for the single and the product moments of order statistics from n independent and non-identically distributed Lomax and right-truncated Lomax random variables. These recurrence relations are simple in nature and could be used systematically in order to compute all the single and product moments of all order statistics in a simple recursive manner. The results for order statistics from the multiple-outlier model (with a slippage of p observations) are deduced as special cases. We then apply these results by examining the robustness of censored BLUE's to the presence of multiple outliers. Received: November 30, 1998; revised version: March 8, 2000     

Commentary on Sue Grand's Paper

Grand's case study of a young, severely traumatized woman is analyzed through the point of view of the Real, the realm that resists any form of symbolization and encloses those experiences that cannot be spoken about. Grand moves gradually with her patient into the whirlpool of the Real. She lead her patient to step out of the terrors of her internal world by helping her to put her robotically lived existence into the symbolic world of the living.     

Maximum likelihood estimation of Laplace parameters based on general type-II censored examples

In this paper, we derive the maximum likelihood estimators of the parameters of a Laplace distribution based on general Type-II censored samples. The resulting explicit MLE's turn out to be simple linear functions of the order statistics. We then examine the asymptotic variance of the estimates by calculating the elements of the Fisher information matrix.     

Reinforcement,stereotypy, and rule discovery

The effects of reinforced pretraining on subsequent rule discovery were examined with college students as subjects. Levels of behavioral stereotypy observed during reinforced and non-contingent pretraining were compared. During pretraining subjects received reinforcement if they pressed two keys in a particular sequence. During the problem session pressing each key four times was a necessary condition for reinforcement, but each problem had additional different requirements for reinforcement. Subjects were asked to solve the problems by discovering the rule that determined whether or not they received reinforcement. Levels of stereotyped responding during pretraining were equivalent for contingently and non-contingently trained subjects. During the problem session contingently pretrained, non-contingently pretrained, and naive subjects required equal numbers of trials to solve problems and solved the same number of problems. The results suggest that behavioral stereotypy observed in this experimental preparation may be due to repeated exposure to the task. Differences between the results observed in this study and that of Schwartz (1982) and implications for the use of reinforcement procedures in applied settings are discussed.

     

Higher order moments of order statistics from INID symmetric random variables

In this paper we present analogues of Balakrishnan's (1989) relations that relate the triple and quadruple moments of order statistics from independent and nonidentically distributed (I.NI.D.) random variables from a symmetric distribution to those of the folded distribution. We then apply these results, along with the corresponding recurrence relations for the exponential distribution derived recently by Childs (2003), to study the robustness of the Winsorized variance.