Is Ethnic Identity a Buffer? Exploring the Relations Between Racial Microaggressions and Depressive Symptoms Among Asian-American Individuals

ABSTRACT

This study explores the moderating role of ethnic identity in the relations between racial microaggressions and depressive symptoms. Using survey data from 353 Asian-American college students, we found that racial microaggressions significantly predicted depressive symptoms and accounted for 24% of the variance in a hierarchical multiple regression analysis. In addition, ethnic identity moderated the relations between racial microaggressions and depressive symptoms. Thus, ethnic identity buffers Asian-Americans against the negative mental health effects of racial microaggressions. Implications for research and practice in the field of social work are discussed.     

Predicting program success for adult offenders with serious mental illness in a court ordered diversion program

ABSTRACT

Individuals with mental illnesses are disproportionately involved with the criminal justice system and are now being diverted from jails to community-based supervision. This study examines secondary data from a state hospital, mental health diversion program. Logistic regression was used to examine risk factors that best predicted successful program completion. Results indicate that non-whites are more likely to complete. Participants in supervised housing, ever been re-hospitalized, diagnosed with a depressive or psychotic disorder or who had their probation revoked were less likely to complete. Findings indicate practitioners should provide a holistic and individually oriented treatment approach for success.     

School Based Vision Centers: striving to optimize learning

As the average age of the Canadian population continues to increase, and providing care at home to frail older adults becomes ever more prevalent, support for family and friend caregivers remains a key social policy issue. Economic support is an important consideration given the impact of caregiving on labour force participation. Yet the caregiving/paid work relationship is not always straightforward. While caregiving often restricts employment, limited attachment to employment may also influence the decision to provide care. Isabel's story, collected as part of a study of sibling views of fairness in sharing parent care as well as parent assets, provides a case study in how siblings give different priority to care work versus career work and what support needs arise including those related to sibling conflict over differing priorities. Isabel claims she sacrificed her career to care for her ailing mother while her siblings argue that through caregiving, Isabel was sheltered from the paid workforce.     

Statistical estimation errors of VaR under ARCH returns

In this paper we discuss some problems of existing methods for calculating the Value-at-Risk (VaR) in ARCH setting. It should be noted that the commonly used approaches often confuse the true innovations with the empirical residuals, i.e., estimation errors for unknown ARCH parameters are ignored. We adjust this by using the asymptotics of the residual empirical process, and propose a feasible VaR which, according to the spirit of VaR, keeps the assets away from a specified risk with high confidence level. Its meaningfulness in comparison with the usual VaR will be illustrated clearly by numerical studies.     

Recombinative Generalization of Tacts Through Matrix Training with Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Foss (Journal of Experimental Psychology, 76, 450–459, 1968a; Journal of Experimental Psychology, 77, 341–344, 1968b) compared overlap and non-overlap instruction to promote recombinative response generalization using a matrix training procedure. In the present study, we used a similar set of procedures to teach tacting of kitchen items and prepositions (i.e., relational autoclitics) to three females ages 13–20, diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. We taught some kitchen items/prepositions as tacts (e.g., “the strainer is to the right of the box”) according to a non-overlap instructional sequence. Subsequently, we taught more combinations in an overlap instructional sequence. Each training procedure was followed by probes of untrained relations. Two participants demonstrated recombinative generalization of untrained combinations following the first non-overlap phase, while the third participant demonstrated some response generalization of untrained relations after a few additional training sequences. All three participants demonstrated generalized tacting of object components while two participants showed generalized tacting of preposition components.     

Spillover Between Marital Quality and Job Satisfaction: Long‐Term Patterns and Gender Differences

We used data from a 12‐year panel survey of a nationally representative sample of married individuals (not couples) and structural equation modeling to investigate the process of spillover between marital quality (satisfaction and discord) and job satisfaction among married individuals. We considered three questions: whether job satisfaction and marital quality are related over the long term, whether influence flows primarily from work to family or if there is a pattern of mutual effects between job satisfaction and marital quality, and whether job satisfaction and marital quality are related in similar ways for married women and married men over the long term. We found that marital quality and job satisfaction are related over the long term and that marital quality is the more influential of these domains. We found evidence of both positive and negative spillover from marital quality to job satisfaction over the long term. Specifically, increases in marital satisfaction were significantly related to increases in job satisfaction, and increases in marital discord were significantly related to declines in job satisfaction. Finally, our results indicated that these processes operate similarly for married women and married men.     

The Eroticism of the Maternal: So What If Everything Is About the Mother?

The “erotic” bond between the mother and the infant is often idealized as the epitome of the preoedipal, prerepressive utopia in the blissful image of the naked and sacred mother-infant dyad. This article problematizes such a utopian image by identifying the core fantasy underlying that which is maternal. My discussion looks at the mother both as the object of erotic fantasy and the subject who is doing the fantasizing. This study brings together two seemingly disparate theoretical notions, Lacanian feminist psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray's argument about our culture's relationship with the mother and Japanese psychoanalyst Takeo Doi's study of amae. I argue that what Irigaray calls “desire of/for the mother” and what Doi attempted to explain using the everyday Japanese word, amae, a wish to “depend and presume upon another's love or bask in another's indulgence,” are both what is understood in the clinical psychoanalytic language as maternal erotic transference.     

THE MICRO-ETHICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

In this article I offer an unfashionably ideological critique. I argue that, in the USA, ideology now appears in the form of the narratives that capitalism tells itself about itself, in particular at sites of commodity consumption. I examine three everyday sites in which capitalism constructs an Imaginary version of itself as it exhorts contemporary consumers to consume ethically: during a visit to a Target Superstore; on an overnight stay in a hotel room; and while purchasing a bag of fair trade coffee. In these moments and at these sites, corporations instruct us in the ‘ethical’ use of their commodities, and obeying those instructions promotes us to the rank of ‘consumer activist’. This article attempts to explain how this ‘ethical consumption’ – a form of what I call ‘micro-ethics’ – has displaced more social, or ‘macro’, forms of ethical action. To make my case, I argue that globalized capitalism denies many of us the social coordinates, or handholds, that are necessary if we are to feel that we can act meaningfully within the Symbolic Order, or social reality itself. This ‘deworlding’ effect, as Alain Badiou calls it, encourages us to reject social forms of ethical and political life and to retreat to a careful policing of the Imaginary boundaries of our ‘inner selves’ instead. In other words, global capitalism logically produces, as its own ideological support and supplement, a micro-ethics that attends only to what the single person can do, and only within the realm of consumption. We participate in this fantasy version of ‘eco-capitalism’ that advertising, publicity and other discourses establish to the extent that we accept consumption as the ultimate horizon of our ability to intervene in problems of ecological depredation and the exploitation of labour in the First and Third Worlds.     

Clinical Home Visitation for Children With Externalizing Disorders: A Randomized Study

ABSTRACT

Clinical home visitation (CHV) was empirically tested in a randomized study to determine if it could reduce a child's externalizing behaviors while alleviating parental stress. Clinic-referred waitlisted young children (n = 33) with symptoms suggesting an externalizing disorder were randomly offered a CHV intervention composed of a developmentally guided dyadic-centered syllabus. Families were recruited to participate in an experimental (n = 21) or control group (n = 12). Mothers completed the Parenting Stress Index (PSI) and the Child Behavior Checklist. Results of paired-samples t-tests indicated that postintervention aggression scores were significantly different from the pretest scores for the entire sample. The Difficult Child domain was the only significant PSI subscale. The results did not support definitive conclusions about CHV as an effective intervention to reduce an externalizing disorder or to alleviate parenting stress. Future research should include larger numbers of children with externalizing disorders pooled from the clinic-referred and community samples. To address the complexities involved in treating externalizing disorders, CHV could be offered as part of a multimodal intervention (e.g., CHV combined with parent and family education).