Suicidal behaviour in transition‐aged youth with out‐of‐home care experience: Reviewing risk,assessment, and intervention

The rates of suicidal behaviours in youth with out‐of‐home care experience, particularly those who are on the verge of emancipation, appear to be alarmingly high. The purpose of the current study is to highlight the rates of suicidal ideation and behaviour in these youth, illuminating the empirical risk factors that may increase their vulnerability. We offer a review of screening measures and suicide interventions that may hold promise for administrators, practitioners, and researchers who wish to provide comprehensive assessment for transition‐aged youth with out‐of‐home care experiences and effectively treat those who may be at the highest risk.     

Black and White Thinking? Understanding Negative Responses to Transracial Adoptive Families

Many view adoptive families as less legitimate than birth families. Because of dissimilar appearance and racism, transracial adoptive families may be particularly devalued. White American undergraduates (N = 167) were randomly assigned to view an adoptive family photograph of White parents holding either a Black or White infant. Viewing a transracial family elicited less favorable adoption attitudes and greater negative emotions than viewing a same-race family. Participants’ own racism amplified the effect of the transracial family on negative emotions. Results suggest that transracial adoptive families are devalued due to negative feelings elicited by both dissimilar appearance and individual racism.     

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.     

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.     

Jazz in Social Interaction: Personal Creativity,Collective Constraint,and Motivational Explanation in the Social Thought of Howard S. Becker

Although symbolic interactionist studies are often thought to abandon motivational explanation in favor of a focus on social process, the interactionist tradition has usefully employed two deterministic themes. One is inherent in the appreciation of the actor's inescapable sense of interactional significance for behavior that will be socially witnessed. A second deterministic theme appreciates external constraints on the individual's perception and generation of social acts. The former shapes all work in symbolic interactionism. The latter has been developed most consistently in the work of Howard S. Becker. Without addressing the matter as such, Becker has worked with a series of ideas about constraint on individual motivation, ideas that are harmonious with the interactionist's understanding of personal creativity in social action. His writings invite a reconsideration of the supposed antagonism between the appreciation of interactive process and the understanding of motivational constraint. Becker's work on motivation is also notable for outlining a theory of increasing constraints through the life cycle, constraints which, if appreciated by the actor, carry paradoxically liberating implications. The distinctive interplay of personal creativity and collective constraint in his thought is succinctly captured by the metaphor of jazz in social interaction.     

Early childhood and maternal antecedents to drug use.

In a longitudinal study, the substance use/abuse histories were obtained on a community sample of 640, (mean age of 24.9 years) randomly selected from the 8,000 Philadelphia black subjects who had been studied comprehensively from birth to seven years of age in the National Collaborative Perinatal Project (NCPP). Among other conclusions, it is postulated from some of the many significant associations found between early life variables and substance use/abuse in early adulthood, that an infant is at risk who has the following combination of characteristics and family situation: outgoing, responsive, assertive or impulsive, or willful, and who is in an unfavorable family environment, with a mother who is generally negative toward the infant, has a larger number of small children and has had more fetal deaths, in a generally poor social environment.     

Quality/Value Relationship for Imperfect Information in the Umbrella Problem

The so-called umbrella problem (or cost-loss ratio situation), in which an individual must decide whether to take an umbrella in the face of uncertainty concerning whether it will rain today, is sometimes used as a textbook example of decision making under uncertainty. This problem is extended to provide a simple demonstration of the way in which the economic value of imperfect information changes as its quality increases.