Stigma Management Among Gay/Bisexual Men with HIV/AIDS

People with HIV infection are subjected to prejudice, discrimination and hostility related to the stigmatization of AIDS. To manage the stigma of their disease, they mount complex coping strategies. This paper reports results from a qualitative study that examined gay/bisexual men's experiences of living with HIV infection. Unstructured interviews from a diverse sample of 139 men were analyzed to examine how men coped with AIDS-related stigma. We discerned a variety of stigma management strategies that could be arranged along a continuum from reactive to proactive based on the extent to which they implicitly accepted or challenged the social norms and values that underlie the stigmatization of HIV/AIDS. Reactive strategies to cope with stigma involve defensive attempts to avoid or mitigate the impact of stigma, but imply acceptance of the underlying social norms and values that construct the stigma. Examples of reactive strategies include hiding one's HIV status, presenting one's illness as a less stigmatizing one (e.g., cancer), or distancing one's self from more damaging aspects of AIDS-stigma (e.g., attributing infection to blood transfusion). Proactive strategies challenge the validity of the stigma and imply disavowal and resistance of the social norms and values that underlie the stigma. Examples of proactive strategies include engaging in public educational efforts that address misperceptions about HIV transmission and social activism to change the social and political conditions that affect PWA/HIV.     

Autism Spectrum Disorder: The Impact of Stressful and Traumatic Life Events and Implications for Clinical Practice

Research findings suggest that behavioral interventions are effective in improving educational outcomes and fostering skill development in people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, high rates of comorbidity between ASD and other psychological disorders, including depression and anxiety, indicate that standard behavioral approaches are not adequately addressing issues related to mental health in this population. Research emerging since the publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) is advancing our understanding of the nature of childhood stress and trauma in people with ASD and its subsequent impact on mental health and wellbeing. Mounting evidence for stress and trauma as a risk factor for comorbidity and the worsening of core ASD symptoms may intimate a shift in the way clinical social workers and other clinical practitioners conceptualize and approach work with this population to include trauma-focused assessment strategies and clinical interventions. Future directions for research to better understand the nature of childhood stress and trauma and improve mental health in this population are also discussed.     

The Psychoanalytic Social Worker/The Social Work Psychoanalyst: What Shall Be Our Message?

Many social workers experience a powerful bond with their profession and with the contributions of psychoanalysis. This paper explores these bonds and demonstrates the substantial overlap, and occasional divergence, which exists between these two important fields. It is especially gratifying to see the renewed emphasis on the treatment relationship in contemporary psychoanalytic writings because the relationship has always been central to social work practice. Finally, all psychoanalytic social workers are encouraged to invest themselves in transferring the legacy of their work to beginning social workers, social work students, and the generations of social workers that will follow them.     

Couples’ Communication About Financial Uncertainty Following the Great Recession and its Association with Stress,Mental Health and Divorce Proneness

Economic uncertainty is typically stressful and conflict-inducing for couples. The findings from the current study, however, suggest that economic uncertainty can also strengthen marriages. The sample included 82 Latino and Caucasian married couples. The couples engaged in a stressful conversation about their economic uncertainty in the wake of the Great Recession. Many of the couples were resilient and even grew from their experiences with the recession. The couples’ resilience and risk when talking about financial uncertainty and stress were revealed in four communicative pathways: unifying, thriving, pragmatic and at-risk. These communicative patterns predicted self-reported and physiological stress, mental health indices and divorce proneness. In general, unified/thriving couples had higher levels of psychological well-being and less self-reported stress, anxiety, and divorce proneness compared to pragmatic and at-risk couples.     

Stochastic superiority

This paper introduces a definition of stochastic superiority. One random variable is stochastically superior to another whenever it stochastically dominates the other after the risk in each random variable has been optimally reduced. Stochastic superiority is implied by stochastic dominance, but the reverse is not true. Stochastic superiority allows more pairs of random alternatives to be ranked, and efficient sets to be smaller. A very strong sufficient condition for stochastic superiority is demonstrated to also be necessary when preferences are risk averse. This condition provides a relatively easy way to conduct stochastic superiority tests. As an alternative to “almost stochastic dominance,” stochastic superiority also provides a natural solution to the “left tail problem” that arises often when comparing random alternatives.

     

The City: A Social Studies Class

Teaching for economic justice can be challenging for upper elementary and middle school teachers. Many teachers may feel uncomfortable with the subject matter and thus avoid addressing sensitive social issues related to economic/financial inequities. This article describes how selected songs and works of visual art, expressions of social protest and social commentary from past and present, can be used appropriately as starting points for introducing the concept of economic justice. By using principles and strategies of Discipline-Based Arts Education (DBAE) and employing works of art as organizing centers for instruction, potentially sensitive social issues are simultaneously personalized and depersonalized. Music and art provide a relatively safe and comfortable means for teachers to promote student awareness and sensitivity towards economic injustices. Two sample lesson plans, the first for upper elementary students and the second for middle school students, are provided and discussed.     

Latino Faces,Corporate Ties: Latino Advocacy Organizations and Their Board Membership

Although they have increased exponentially since the 1960s, social scientists know little about ethnic advocacy organizations. These nonprofits are important bridges between underresourced communities and mainstream funding organizations and their directors are established ethnic leaders. Sociologists study interlocking directorates—or shared board membership—to understand how organizations fit together within broader social networks. Network concepts, particularly the theory of institutional isomorphism, suggest that organizations are likely to be similar to the extent they are connected and operate within a common organizational field. We apply this logic to Latino advocacy organizations to examine the underlying source of cohesion across this ethnic field. We ask whether the organizations are tied by interlocking directorates of ethnic elites who sit on their boards of directors or if board members' common affiliation with other elite institutions creates the structural conditions that facilitate potential ideological or behavioral similarity. A social network analysis of five prominent Latino advocacy organizations reveals support for both hypotheses: Latino board members are both embedded in ethnic‐based networks and entrenched within elite organizational webs. This suggests that ethnic elites who sit on the boards of Latino advocacy organizations are also corporate elites, selected for the social capital they bring to these nonprofits.     

Measuring the Dynamics of Interactional Synchrony

Past research has revealed that natural social interactions contain interactional synchrony. The present study describes new methods for measuring interactional synchrony in natural interactions and evaluates whether the behavioral synchronization involved in social interactions is similar to dynamical synchronization found generically in nature. Two methodologies, a rater-coding method and a computational video image method, were used to provide time series representations of the movements of the co-actors as they enacted a series of jokes (i.e., knock?Cknock jokes). Cross-spectral and relative phase analyses of these time series revealed that speakers?? and listeners?? movements contained rhythms that were not only correlated in time but also exhibited phase synchronization. These results suggest that computational advances in video and time series analysis have greatly enhanced our ability to measure interactional synchrony in natural interactions. Moreover, the dynamical synchronization in these natural interactions is commensurate with that found in more stereotyped tasks, suggesting that similar organizational processes constrain bodily activity in natural social interactions and, hence, have implications for the understanding of joint action generally.