Maternal and Paternal Mental‐state Talk and Executive Function in Preschool Children

The present study examined the relationship between parents’ mental‐state talk and preschoolers’ executive function. Seventy‐two children participated in the present study, as well as their mothers and fathers. When children were enrolled in the second preschool year, mothers’ and fathers’ use of mental‐state references were assessed during a shared picture‐book reading task with the child. Later, four months before admission to the first grade, preschoolers’ executive function was measured. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that maternal, but not paternal, mental‐state talk was a significant predictor of children's executive function composite, even after accounting for child gender, age, verbal ability, and parental education. When looking at each of the EF components, maternal mental‐state talk proved to be a predictor of set‐shifting whereas no significant relations emerged with inhibitory control or working memory. These findings add to prior research on parenting quality and executive function in preschoolers.     

Latina and African‐American Girls in the Juvenile Justice System: Needs,Problems, and Solutions

This review focuses on Latina and African‐American girls in the juvenile justice system with a special emphasis on their mental health, substance abuse, and treatment needs. Like many young women in the juvenile justice system, Latina and African‐American girls often have histories of neglect, abuse, and trauma, which contribute to later mental health and substance abuse issues. Despite these histories, juvenile justice professionals sometimes rely on stereotypes rooted in cultural deficit thinking to explain Latina and African‐American girls' delinquency. Relying on gendered, racialized, and classed stereotypes and assumptions can result in decisions that negatively impact Latina and African‐American girls' access to mental health, substance abuse, and other types of treatment. Policy and practice implications for better addressing the needs of Latina and African‐American girls are discussed.     

„Einfach mal zuhören.” — Alltägliche Helferinnen im System Hochschule

Women traditionally work in public health and welfare, often without public notice and recognition. “To be feminine” is accepted as a most important resource of support especially if it is given in voluntary, additional work and without pay. The dominance of women as “natural helpers” is featured in professional help too. Non-academics (e.g. secretaries) at universities are important and powerful groups of natural helpers. They have lots of contact with people in need (e.g. students), because they work in functions with intense social communications. The results of extensive research at the Technische Universität Dresden demonstrated for the first time which important role non-academic women play as natural helpers for students with mental and/or social problems. The research has examined the interaction between helpers and students, the dimensions of problems and conditions, forms, extent and subjective reflections on help giving.     

The role of social work in the field of mental health: dual diagnoses as a challenge for social workers

This paper provides a discussion about the relevance of medical terminology within the social work context. The authors use the example of dual diagnoses to argue for less stigmatised attitudes toward people who become, in the process of help, labelled as people with dual diagnoses. It sets out that using medical terminology in the field of social work is more often a strategy to exclude people from the system of help than as a moment of providing adequate help. It is concluded that social workers do not need the knowledge about diagnoses – knowing the diagnosis is important only as information that illustrates users’ specific experience and perception of reality, the available resources and obstacles that people face in their everyday life. The planning of a social work intervention should be based on an operational definition of everyday life, e.g. how people live through the day, what are the important and valued roles they play in life, what are their wishes and needs.     

Female board appointments and firm valuation: short and long-term effects

The presence of women on boards of directors has become a high profile issue in recent years. Several studies, based largely on data from countries with Anglo-Saxon corporate governance systems, have investigated the influence of female board appointments on firm performance. This study focuses on the impact of female directors in Spain, where debate about this topic has been intense for two reasons: the recommendation in 2006 by Spain’s Unified Good Governance Code of positive discrimination in favour of female board appointments and the passing in 2007 of a Gender Equality Act by the Spanish parliament. Our paper analyses the short and long term effect of the appointment of female directors prior to these events. We use an event study to analyze the short term stock market reaction to the appointment of female directors and a multiple regression approach, using the system GMM estimation procedure, to assess the long term influence on firm value of female boardroom appointments. We find that the stock market reacts positively in the short term to the announcement of female board appointments, suggesting that investors on average believe that female directors add value. This belief appears to be confirmed by our regression results which show that female board appointments are positively associated with firm value over a sustained period. These results suggest that the legislative changes in Spain make economic sense as well as advancing the cause of women in Spanish boardrooms.     

Extreme value regression models: a useful reparameterization for the survival function

In this paper, we consider some aspects of accurate approximate inferences for the survival function at a specifed time t 0 , considering extreme value regression models using a modified form of reparameterization proposed by Guerrero and Johnson, and exploring a non-normality measure for likelihood functions and posterior densities introduced by Kass and Slate. We illustrate the proposed methodology, considering a lifetime data set with two treatments introduced by Lee.     

Factors affecting the sexual arousal value of pictures

This study examines factors that contribute to the sexual arousal value of pictures of a nude model. One male and one female model were photographed separately in an indoor setting. The following dimensions were factorially manipulated across pictures: male or female model, front or back view, standing or reclining position, semi‐nude or nude. Male and female subjects viewed slides of these pictures one at a time and rated the degree of sexual arousal value of each picture. Significant main effects of position, view, and clothing resulted, as well as a significant interaction of sex of subject x sex of model x position x clothing. These results suggest that with so many uncontrolled, extraneous factors in this type of research, studies in which global aspects of erotic stimuli are manipulated should be evaluated with caution. More systematic consideration of the micro‐variables that change from picture to picture is advisable to evaluate clearly what factors truly contribute to changes in sexual arousal value of erotic pictures.     

Visual Capacity,Out-of-home Activities and Emotional Well-being in Old Age: Basic Relations and Contextual Variation

This work examined the role of visual capacity in connection with psychological, social network related, and socio-structural predictors of out-of-home everyday functioning and emotional well-being. The results are based on a sample of 1519 community dwelling elderly (55–98 years; mean age 70.8 years), 757 of them were living in urban, and 762 were living in rural regions, half-and-half from East and West Germany. Structural equation modeling supported the hypothesis of robust relations among age, vision, intellectual functioning, out-of-home everyday functioning, and emotional well-being that are largely independent of the regional and societal macro context. In detail, vision mediated the effect of age on out-of-home activities of daily living (ADL/IADL) and leisure activities, while intellectual functioning mediated the effect of vision on out-of-home leisure activities. All effects on emotional well-being were mediated by out-of-home leisure activities. Enriching the micro level model with psycho-social variables (i.e., outdoor motivation and social resources) and an indication of the socio-economic situation (i.e., financial resources) revealed some contextual variations: At this meso level of analysis, social resources contributed less and outdoor motivation contributed more to out-of-home leisure activities in the urban than in the rural sample. Second, outdoor motivation was significantly related to social resources in the urban, but not in the rural sample. Third, financial resources contributed modestly but significantly to out-of-home leisure activities in the East German, but not in the West German urban and rural samples. It is concluded that visual capacity plays a substantial role in a robust micro level model able to predict everyday functioning and well-being. If additional resources adding to the prediction of these outcomes are also taken into consideration in a meso level analysis model, the whole variable interplay becomes more strongly affected by macro contextual variation.     

On Dutch windows

In The Netherlands, living room windows are big, left uncovered day and night, and elaborately decorated. This pattern, which is widespread in all urban and rural regions in this country, disappears abruptly as soon as the border into Germany is crossed where windows are generally smaller, consistently covered, and more sparsely decorated. Going south into Flanders, the disappearance of open and decorated windows is gradual but noticeable.The cognitive and sensory meaning of a single object in material culture, the Dutch window, is examined as a concrete articulation of the boundary between the public and private realms by thinking it with successive conceptual frames in sociology. Assuming that material objects are embodiments of ideas, the study focuses on (a) the norms for looking and for looking out of the windows, (b) the territorial boundary being established and, (c) the information game played through the windows in a context of the notion of privacy. Photographs of the cultural objects under consideration, i.e., Dutch windows, are presented throughout the text as reminders that the cultural and material realms are sensually linked. The study concludes that objects in material culture must be examined in terms of the active, purposive acts we accomplish by adapting the objects to our practical and expressive needs.The author thanks Frank Bovenkerk, Sjoerd Groenman, Jaber Gubrium, Sidney Homan, Joseph Vandiver, William and Helga Woodruff and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.An earlier version was presented in session a-125 of the XIth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnographical Sciences, held in Quebec in August, 1983.An important part of this research was completed while the author was Visiting Senior Lecturer at the State University at Utrecht, The Netherlands in 1978.