Tracking weight change,insulin resistance,stress, and aerobic fitness over 4 years of college

Objective: To determine if weight gain is accompanied by development of insulin resistance (IR) during 4 years in college. Participants: Two cohorts of college students were enrolled in fall semesters 2009 and 2010 and tracked for 4 years. Methods: Following a 12-hour fast, subjects reported for measurement of body mass index (BMI), perceived stress (PSS), aerobic fitness, and blood glucose, insulin, and lipids. Results: In the first year, 33% of subjects were overweight or obese, and 20% were hyperinsulinemic. Year 4 had 29 remaining subjects with disproportionate attrition of overweight and obese individuals. Just over half the subjects gained weight (WI), whereas nearly 30% lost considerable amounts (WD). WD showed significant decline in fasting insulin, low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, and PSS from year 1. WI was primarily highly fit men who did not demonstrate increased IR. Conclusion: WI was not associated with IR over 4 years of college.     

Minority Stress,Emotion Regulation,and the Parenting of Sexual-Minority Youth

ABSTRACT

Despite increasing societal acceptance of sexual-minority individuals, there are still gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) adolescents who experience negative mental health outcomes. Minority stress theory posits that stigma-related stress associated with sexual-minority status drives increased risk among GLB individuals. Furthermore, recent evidence suggests that minority stress impacts emotion regulation (ER), identified as a particularly important risk factor for sexual-minority youth (SMY). Current research has identified some aspects of parenting contribute to GLB youth's mental health. We review the literature in these areas, and also integrate research from the broader developmental field on families and emotion socialization in order to identify the need for studies of parenting that go beyond existing data on parental acceptance and supportiveness of youth's sexual orientation. Limitations of the current literature and directions for future research are discussed, with specific focus on implications for interventions with SMY and their families.     

Integrative and Masking Emotion Work: Marital Outcomes Among Dual-Earner Couples

This study redresses a gap in the literature concerning the outcomes of emotion work by exploring how both integrative and masking emotion work relate to marital quality and marital conflict. Using data from a random sample of dual-earner couples in a northeastern city in an upper Midwestern state (n = 99 couples), this study explores the emotion-work performance of each partner. The findings show that men’s integrative emotion work is only significantly associated with men’s marital quality, whereas men’s masking emotion work significantly predicts their partner’s marital quality, men’s marital quality, and men’s marital conflict. Women’s integrative emotion work is significantly associated with women’s marital quality and their partner’s marital conflict, whereas women’s masking emotion work predicts women’s marital quality and marital conflict. Altogether, the findings suggest that considering both masking and integrative emotion work helps gain a fuller understanding of how emotion work shapes marital outcomes.     

Family Experiences of Competition and Adolescent Performance

The authors examined how mothers' and fathers' feelings of competition at home and work affect their relationships with their daughters and sons using time‐diary data from a national sample of 220 families. Multivariate analyses revealed 3 relationships between parents' feelings of competitiveness at work and home and feelings of competition experienced by their children at school and home: (a) parents' and adolescents' competitiveness varied across home, work, and school—with mothers and fathers reporting similar levels of competition at work but daughters feeling more competitive at school than sons; (b) parents' competition at work was associated with similar activities; however, daughters' and sons' competition at school varied by activities; and (c) mothers' competition was associated with strategies for college enrollment and varied by gender, most notably with respect to daughters' academic progress. The results suggest how parents' competitive disposition may motivate their children's academic performance, especially between working mothers and their daughters.     

Professional identity: How communication management practitioners identify with their industry

This paper explores the current status of professionalization of communication management practice which emerged from a content analysis of 360 responses to questions exploring the nature of practitioner identity (or dis-identity) with communication management. The results revealed that positive identification arose from an ability to influence, emulate the professional values of peers, and cohesion with the wider practitioner community. Conversely, dis-identification arose from the poor performance of colleagues, advice not being taken, and media ‘spin’.     

Skin lighteners, Black consumers and Jewish entrepreneurs in South Africa

This article considers the rise and decline of South Africa's lucrative and controversial skin-lighteners market through examination of the business history of the largest manufacturers, Abraham and Solomon Krok, and their evolving personas as millionaires and philanthropists. Such examination reveals how the country's skin-lighteners trade emerged as part of the broader growth of a black consumer market after the Second World War and how elements of that market became the target of anti-apartheid protests in subsequent decades. It also demonstrates how the Kroks' experiences as second-generation Jewish immigrants shaped their involvement in the trade and how, later, their self-identification as Jewish philanthropists informed their efforts to rehabilitate their reputations following South Africa's 1990 ban on all skin lighteners. Such efforts include the building of Johannesburg's highly acclaimed Apartheid Museum, modelled after the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This article explores the profound ironies that some South Africans see in the fact that a museum dedicated to commemorating those who suffered under and, ultimately, triumphed against state racism was financed by a family fortune generated through the sale of skin lighteners to black consumers.     

Theorizing the social: Émile Durkheim's theory of force and energy

This paper offers a new interpretation of Émile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) as the basis for reconsidering the Tarde–Durkheim debate of 1903 and the distinctions between a theory of social force and a theory of social assemblage. Resisting traditional interpretations of Durkheim's scientism, this essay traces how concepts of force and energy are centrally developed in Elementary Forms to draw new lines between epistemology to ontology for twentieth-century theory. I argue that Durkheim develops an ‘energetic epistemology’ that conceives of the human capacity for shared meaning as a product of invested energy in the form of continually enacted and evolving material practice, thought, and attention. According to Durkheim, when a member of a collective perceives a god or feels belief, he or she actually perceives the accumulated energy of on-going creation and maintenance of objects and ideas by members of a collective. Sacred objects, images, and ideas bear the trace of collective energy the more they are carefully crafted, maintained in spaces that are specially arranged, and written into behavioural codes. This reading of Durkheim allows us to consider him in a lineage of social constructivists and, particularly, in relation to Ludwik Fleck, who has been largely confined to different theoretical discussions when his contributions to sociology have been acknowledged at all. By reconsidering Durkheim, we have occasion to rethink his sociology and understand how he redrew the lines between thought and action, between epistemology and ontology, through the material framework of energy and force.