Our Day Jobs: Politics and Pedagogy in Academia

This essay addresses the changing face of the university. It is based on my presidential address at the 2016 meetings of the Eastern Sociological Society.     

Patient-centered approach to building problem solving skills among older primary care patients: problems identified and resolved

This article describes problems identified by older primary care patients enrolled in Problem Solving Therapy (PST), and explores factors associated with successful problem resolution. PST patients received 1 to 8, 45-min sessions with a social worker. Patients identified problems in their lives and directed the focus of subsequent sessions as consistent with the steps of PST. The 107 patients identified 568 problems, 59% of which were resolved. Most commonly identified problems included health related issues such as need for exercise or weight loss activities, medical care and medical equipment needs, home and garden maintenance, and gathering information on their medical condition. Problems identified by patients were 2.2 times more likely to be solved than those identified by a health care professional. Using PST in primary care may facilitate patients in addressing key health and wellness issues.     

Maternal Meta-emotion Philosophy and Adolescent Depressive Symptomatology

The current study examined the relations between maternal meta‐emotion philosophy and adolescent depressive symptoms, as well as general adolescent adjustment and the quality of parent–child interaction. Consistent with previous findings on children in the preschool period and middle childhood, it was expected that an emotion coaching meta‐emotion philosophy would be associated with fewer depressive symptoms, higher levels of adjustment and lower frequencies and less reciprocity of aversive and dysphoric affect during mother–child interaction. Maternal meta‐emotion interviews, observations of mother–child interaction and assessments of adolescent adjustment were obtained. Results indicated that mothers of adolescents with high levels of depressive symptoms were less accepting and expressive of their own emotions than were mothers of adolescents with low levels of depressive symptoms. A mother's acceptance of her own emotion was associated with fewer depressive symptoms, higher self‐esteem and fewer externalizing problems in young adolescents. A mother's emotion coaching was associated with lower frequency and less likelihood of the reciprocity of aversive and dysphoric affect during mother–child interaction. Discussion highlights the role of maternal meta‐emotion philosophy in creating emotional closeness in families with high and low levels of depressive symptomatology.     

Broadcasting Holidays

For reasons unclear, sociology abandoned its proprietary rights in the study of mass communications and relegated it to the fringes of collective behavior on the one hand and critical studies on the other. Relatively recently, however, as interest in hegemonic processes becomes more popular and critical theory gains new prominence, there is a corresponding rise in attention to the integrative, if hegemonic, role of the media of mass communication. This paper explores that role, reflecting on television and its influence in the construction of holidays.     

Enhancing the mind? Memory medicine, dementia, and the aging brain

The study explores the relationship between the neurosciences, aging, anti-aging culture, memory medicine, and the hypercognitive society. The first part traces the discourses of mind from the Enlightenment to contemporary biosocial models where the aging brain has become a social laboratory for research, experimentation, and intervention. The second part explores the Cholinergic Hypothesis, the development of the cholinesterase inhibitors and their recent implementation in cases of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Critical questions are posed about how the mission to optimize aging has affected projects to enhance the mind.     

Aesthetic Capital: A Research Review on Beauty Perks and Penalties

The presence of aesthetically based cultural goods and their ever-increasing influence in modern society may pose a new conceptual opportunity to sociology. Specifically, how can the discipline forge an understanding of how value associated with beauty returns forms of individual wealth? A new term, i.e. aesthetic capital, might be an answer. Such a concept, we maintain, covers the privileges and wealth people receive from aesthetic traits, such as their face, hair, body, clothes, grooming habits and other markers of beauty. The purpose of our paper is to review the kinds of perks, and penalties, people receive from being deemed beautiful. Our review shows that visually appealing traits greatly impact our lives, in matters of modest importance (friend selection) to great importance (e.g. getting a job and career mobility). Thus, the promise of an aesthetic capital concept lies in enabling sociology to better understand inequality and the socially based forms of wealth available to individuals in modern society.     

A Stochastic Model for Assessing Chlamydia trachomatis Transmission Risk Using Longitudinal Observational Data

Bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis causes genital chlamydia infection. Yet little is known about the transmission efficiency of this organism. Ethical constraint against exposing healthy subjects to infected partners precludes the possibility of quantifying transmission risk through controlled experiments. This research proposes an alternative strategy that relies on observational data. Specifically, we present a stochastic model that treats longitudinally observed infection states in a group of young women as a Markov process. The proposed model explicitly accommodates the parameters of C. trachomatis transmission, including per-encounter sexually transmitted infection (STI) acquisition risks, with and without condom protection, and the probability of antibiotic treatment failure. The male-to-female transmission probability of C. trachomatis is then estimated by combining the per-encounter disease acquisition risk and the organism's prevalence in the male partner population. The proposed model is fitted in a Bayesian computational framework.