The ‘recidivist tongue’: embracing an embodied language of trauma

This article analyses selected excerpts from the writing of Antjie Krog and Yvonne Vera in order to theorise strategies for overcoming the disjuncture between the mind and the body that tends to result from violence. Both authors repeatedly return to the bodies of their characters and they insist that psychic and physical pain and trauma reside in the bodies of survivors as much as in their psyches. Acknowledging this corporeal reality of violence circumvents any opportunity to deny the totality of the impact that violence has on the lives of survivors. This has implications for survivors as well as for those who read or hear about violence. By developing an embodied language of violence and trauma, these authors offer new and more comprehensive ways of dealing with traumatic violations. When survivors reclaim their bodies, they are also able to utilise their bodies’ capacity for healing and comfort. When readers, and society at large, are unable to deny the harm that violence does to bodies, they are compelled to recognise the reality of survivors’ suffering. The article illustrates that the body can speak and that we ignore its voice at our peril.     

VIOLENT AND VINDICTIVE WOMEN: A RE-ANALYSIS OF THE SOUTHERN SUBCULTURE OF VIOLENCE

In order to further develop an understanding of the Southern subculture of violence and its association with female-perpetrated homicide, new techniques must be developed that sufficiently operationalize Southern cultural influence. For this study, we created the Southern Subculture Index, a factor combining a county's population born in the South, Evangelical Christian, and of Scots-Irish ancestry. Specifically, we hypothesize that by using this index, the relationship between female-perpetrated homicide and Southern culture will be visible. Results from a negative binomial regression model confirm the veracity of a positive and significant effect of the Southern Subculture Index on female-perpetrated homicide.     

A Systematic Review of Strengths and Resilience Outcome Literature Relevant to Children and Adolescents

The concepts of strengths and resilience are essential for understanding and promoting positive development in children and adolescents. These concepts have been studied in the research literature for many years and more recently have been applied to child and adolescent assessment and intervention research. However, strength and resilience based intervention programs have not been evaluated rigorously for their use of empirical methodology. In this article, we systematically identified and reviewed all of the outcome studies over the last decade for strength and resilience based intervention programs to assess the extent to which these studies utilized controlled empirical methodology. The results of the review yielded 11 outcome studies that examined strength and resilience based practices. Using the Quality Assessment Tool for Quantitative Studies developed by the Effective Public Health Practice Project, we found three studies to be high quality, exhibiting high levels of experimentally controlled research. The remaining 8 studies we considered to be moderate to weak quality research. We concluded that these 11 studies provide preliminary support for the efficacy of strength and resilience based interventions. Our systematic review also highlights areas where methodology in future studies can be strengthened to provide more conclusive evidence of these approaches.     

Frailty in self-neglecting older adults: A secondary analysis

ABSTRACT

Self-neglect (SN) and frailty in older adults is associated with increased disability and mortality. Despite these commonalities, there have been no studies objectively assessing frailty in older adults who SN. This secondary analysis classified frailty in N = 37 older adults with Adult Protective Services validated SN using the Fried Frailty Phenotype (FFP) of weight loss, weakness, exhaustion, activity level, and walking speed. Overall, 3% were classified as robust, 62% as prefrail, and 35% as frail. Most (72%) were overweight/obese, with clinically significant decreases in activity level (60%) and walking speed (97%). Compared to the original FFP population, older adults who SN exhibit important differences in frailty phenotypes, and finding that the largest percentage of older adults who SN were prefrail may indicate a critical opportunity for intervening in this population to reduce future functional decline and mortality.     

TOWARD A SUSTAINABLE US HEALTH POLICY: LOCAL CONGRUITIES AND GLOBAL INCONGRUITIES

The United States health care system is congruous with the US economy and with prevailing local values: it is resource intensive, technology-focused, consumer-oriented, individualistic, and unequally available. However, the US health system is incongruous not only with other health care systems around the world, but also with the increasingly global nature of health care concerns. Indeed the US system, according to the World Bank, stands out as strikingly expensive and ineffective in its public health impact. The article first identifies several significant incongruities, and then argues that there is an increasing obligation for the US health system to become more ethically responsive in light of global concerns. Sustainable health should be sought as a significant goal of US health services. Health services need to be fully and accurately assessed for their environmental costs, which need to be made explicit. Actual, universal access to basic health care services needs to take priority over scarce high-tech therapies when resource allocations are made. Traditional health values such as individualism, autonomy and privacy must be placed within a context of global interdependence and responsibilities to community. Public health fundamentals such as adequate nutrition, clear water, and a biologically intact ecosystem must be emphasized. Innovations in health technology need to be made with attention to their potential international use and impact. Finally, a longer time horizon for planning is needed, taking into account environmentally caused health problems arising fifty years or more in the future.     

Considerations in Feedback Delivery: The Role of Accuracy and Type of Evaluation

Performance feedback remains a commonly implemented and successful intervention within organizational behavior management, but a comprehensive understanding of the components that influence the effectiveness of feedback tends to be lacking. The present study sought to contribute by analyzing the variables of accuracy (contingent on or independent of performance) and evaluation type (supportive or critical judgments) on performance using a simulated work environment. A total of 75 undergraduate students were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 experimental conditions: (a) contingent and supportive feedback, (b) contingent and critical feedback, (c) independent and supportive feedback, or (d) independent and critical feedback. Outcomes suggested that contingent feedback improved performance relative to independent feedback, however, no differences were found between supportive and critical types of feedback. The need for additional research into the functional and formal elements of effective feedback is also discussed.     

Unintended effects of poverty programmes on childbearing in less developed countries: Experimental evidence from Latin America

Because conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes (which make payments to poor households, conditional on their behaviour) potentially affect both household resource levels and parental preferences for quality vs. quantity of children, they may have unintended consequences for fertility. We use panel data from experimental CCT programmes in three Latin American countries to assess the unintended impact of these programmes on childbearing. Our findings, based on difference-in-difference models, show that the programme in Honduras, which inadvertently created large incentives for childbearing, may have raised fertility by between 2 and 4 percentage points. The CCT programmes in the two other countries, Mexico and Nicaragua, did not have the same unintended incentives for childbearing, and in these countries we found no net impact on fertility. Subsequent analysis examined several potential mechanisms by which fertility in Honduras may have been raised but was not able to identify a primary mechanism with the available data.     

The Palliative Function of System Justification: Concurrent Benefits Versus Longer-Term Costs to Wellbeing

We examined the extent to which system justification buffered the negative effect of retrospective experiences of active harm from general sources in society on life satisfaction during the same assessment period, and prospectively 1 year later. Results from a nationally representative sample indicated that the retrospective assessment of active harm and quality of life were uncorrelated for people who endorsed system justifying ideology (N = 6,518). Study 2 replicated the concurrent buffering effect of system justification on subjective wellbeing and demonstrated that the effect reversed over time. For people high in system justification beliefs, societal-level harm prospectively predicted lower life satisfaction 1 year later (N = 136 undergraduates). Perceiving the system as fair and legitimate in the face of harm from others in society has opposing short and longer-term effects on wellbeing. We argue that these opposing effects occur because although system justification trumps experiences of harm and buffers life satisfaction in the short-term; the resulting experience-belief conflict engenders a state of ideological dissonance that predicts negative psychological outcomes down the track.     

Sluts that Choose Vs Doormat Gypsies

The UK primetime series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (Channel 4, 2010, 2011, 2012) offered audiences the opportunity to be armchair matrimonial ethnographers, to reveal the courtship curiosities of “one of the most secretive communities in the UK.” In spite of claims to social realist documentary, however, we argue that this programme has clearer resonances with “sexposé” reality television, producing and circulating a moral, visual economy premised upon the cultural figuration of “the gypsy bride.” The gypsy girl and gypsy bride are marked as victims of male gypsy oppression, of “backwards” and repressive cultural practices, of age-inappropriate sexualisation and “excessive” consumerism, and is thus defined by her failure to be a good aspirational postfeminist subject. In this paper, we explore the intersecting discourses around gender, sexuality, class, and race operative within Gypsy Wedding and analyse online forums responding to the programme. We use psychosocial methodologies and theories of affect to argue that the gypsy bride becomes a figure of abjection, desired and despised, and that the (readily accepted) invitation to be appalled by her “oppression” reveals the strategic potency of postfeminist notions of empowerment and the racist, sexist, and classist agendas it can serve.