Preliminary Validation of an Online DSM-Based Mental Health Referral Inventory

A brief online inventory was developed as a much needed corrective for the hundreds of unscientific tests that are used now by millions of people to self-diagnose mental health problems. The primary purpose of the new inventory is to refer people to mental health professionals for further evaluation when they are experiencing problems that might be diagnosable under DSM guidelines; it is not designed to diagnose, however. The inventory was found to be a valid and reliable measuring instrument based on analysis of data obtained from 3,403 subjects. The 54-item checklist looks for 18 common problems identified in the DSM-IV and takes from 5 to 10 min to complete. Test scores proved to be good predictors of a variety of self-reported criterion measures, including happiness, personal and professional success, history of hospitalization, history of therapy, current participation in therapy, employment, and level of education. Females were found to have slightly more mental health problems than males, but no differences in scores were found by race or ethnicity.     

Who gains from information asymmetry?

This article considers an asymmetric contest with incomplete information. There are two types of players: informed and uninformed. Each player has a different ability to translate effort into performance in terms of the contest success function. While one player’s type is known to both players, the other is private information and known only to the player himself. We compare the Bayesian Nash equilibrium outcome of a one-sided private information contest to the Nash equilibrium with no private information, in which both players know the type of the other player. We show conditions under which uncertainty increases the investment of the uninformed player and the rent dissipation of the contest, while decreasing the expected net payoff of the informed player. In addition, we consider conditions under which the informed player—before knowing his own type—prefers that the uninformed player knows his type. Moreover, we show conditions for the existence/non-existence of equilibrium in a two-stage contest in which the informed player declares his type (or does not declare) in the first stage and in the second stage the two players play according to the information available to them.     

Neural Correlates of Conflicting Social Influence on Adolescent Risk Taking

Adolescence is often characterized by heightened risk‐taking behaviors, which are shaped by social influence from parents and peers. However, little is understood about how adolescents make risky decisions under conflicting influence. The valuation system in the brain may elucidate how adolescents differentially integrate conflicting social information. Twenty‐eight adolescents (M_age = 12.7 years) completed a social influence task during a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan. Behaviorally, adolescents took more risks only when their parent endorsed risky decisions but not when their peers endorsed risky decisions. At the neural level, adolescents showed enhanced vmPFC–striatum functional connectivity when they made risky decisions that followed their parents’ risky decisions. Results suggest that parents’ decisions may guide youths’ risk‐taking behavior under conflicting influence.     

A kinder,gentler gentrification: racial identity,social mix and multiculturalism in Toronto’s Parkdale neighborhood

This paper intervenes on the contemporary Canadian discourse that equates bourgeois self-making practices of progressive urban subjects with moves towards genuine spatial justice. Emerging from a three-year project assessing gentrification Toronto’s Parkdale neighborhood, the author probes the dissonance between the triumphalist rhetoric circulated by an anti-gentrification elite and the lived realities of displacement and violence in poor, racialized and mad communities. Using ethnographic observation and analysis of extensive interview data, this paper suggests that the ideas of inclusive urban development often rely on the ejection of intolerable bodies from the sphere of urban life and the simultaneous exaltation of ‘enlightened’ middle-class subjects as the authors and protagonists of social change. Yearning for a better future, this paper functions as a cautionary tale, a warning that so long as race and gender remain secondary sites of investigation and action, work for urban emancipation will reinforce those systems of domination it hopes to oppose.     

Evaluating multidisciplinary child abuse and neglect teams: a research agenda

A review of child welfare research literature reveals used to investigate and intervene in child abuse and neglect cases, the field does not know enough about their structural variations, implementation processes, or effectiveness. Moreover, although articles advocating multidisciplinary teams enumerate their apparent strengths, they lack attention to the teams' possible weaknesses. The article discusses implications for future evaluation studies.     

Relationship standards and marital satisfaction in Chinese and American couples

Samples of urban community couples in Shanghai, China, and suburban U.S. couples were administered measures of relationship adjustment and personal standards regarding characteristics of couple relationships. There were few gender differences in adherence to relationship standards but many differences between Chinese and U.S. couples. Fewer cultural differences existed in degree of couple consensus on relationship standards, but both adherence to standards and couple consensus on standards were associated with partners' levels of marital adjustment. Implications of the findings for clinical assessment and intervention with distressed couples, in particular for Western therapists working with Chinese couples whose standards may conflict with goals and methods of couple therapy, are discussed.     

Interpersonal Helping Skills,by Eldon K. Marshall,P. David Kurtz,and Associates. Jossey-Bass Publishers,San Francisco, 1982. $35.00. 682 Pp.

Abstract

Courses in international or comparative social welfare have many benefits, but require a framework for systematic comparisons between countries. This article presents an institutional political process model for studying social welfare policy comparatively. The principal elements of the model include each country's societal values, government institutions (operationalized as the role of interest groups), policy goals, and system implementation (type of welfare system). The model is demonstrated through a comparison of the dissimilar social welfare systems of Sweden and the U.S.     

Response bias in opinion polls and American social welfare

Response bias and notably response falsification undercut the usefulness of opinion polls in characterizing collective American attitudes toward social welfare. The attitudes polled in surveys such as the General Social Survey (GSS) and the National Election Studies (NSS) appear to be customarily sensitive, often evidencing very large amounts of response falsification that obscure the degree of consensus for America's bifurcated social welfare system. Response bias and falsification greatly affect self-reports of family income, drinking and drug abuse, sex behavior, voting, and a large number of other attitudes central to the provision of social welfare. The problems of response bias may be intractable and attention might profitably return to traditional scholarship that attends to actual collective choices, e.g., legislation, as still imperfect but more reliable estimates of the national will.