Alternatives to abstinence: the practice of (un)safe sex in prison

Correctional rules and regulations requiring sexual abstinence for prison inmates, coupled with unsupported beliefs about the risks of condom provision, keep most inmates in a dangerous muddle of criminalized sexual expression, covert efforts at erroneous myth-based safe sex practices, and high risk of sexual disease contraction and transmission. With the vast majority of inmates eventually released to re-enter communities across the US, these health concerns are not quarantined to the correctional environment, but rather contribute to what has been described as the hidden epidemic in public health . Using inmate voice from a large-scale national examination of inmate sexual behavior, the current study explores inmates’ attempts at ‘safe sex’ in an environment where sexual behavior, though prohibited, frequently occurs, and where no sex is the only accepted form of ‘safe’ sex. Inmates identify many approaches to safe sexual practice including barrier protection, partner selection, and risk reduction strategies. Unfortunately, many improvised, though innovative, inmate protection strategies reflect a very rudimentary understanding of safe sex for the purpose of reducing disease transmission and contraction, frequently exacerbating these risks. Policy implications include widespread condom provision and expanded inmate education and programming around sexual health and disease prevention.     

Business as Usual? Economic Responses to Political Tensions

Do political tensions harm economic relations? Theories claim that trade prevents war and political relations motivate trade, but less is known about whether smaller shifts in political relations impact economic exchange. Looking at two major economies, we show that negative events have not hurt U.S. or Japanese trade or investment flows. We then examine specific incidents of tensions in U.S.‐French and Sino‐Japanese relations over the past decade—two case pairs that allow us to compare varying levels of political tension given high existing economic interdependence and different alliance relations. Aggregate economic flows and high salience sectors like wine and autos are unaffected by the deterioration of political relations. In an era of globalization, actors lack incentives to link political and economic relations. We argue that sunk costs in existing trade and investment make governments, firms, and consumers unlikely to change their behavior in response to political disputes.     

Lifetime sexual victimization and poor risk perception: does emotion dysregulation account for the links?

The present study examined whether and which facets of emotion dysregulation serve an intervening role in the association between prior victimization and risk perception in an analogue sexual assault vignette. Participants were 714 university women who completed self-report measures of sexual victimization, emotion dysregulation, and a computer-administered written vignette of a college party scene that culminates in acquaintance rape. Approximately 42% of the sample reported lifetime sexual victimization during childhood, adolescence, or adulthood. Two individual aspects of emotion dysregulation, limited access to emotion regulation strategies and impulse control difficulties, mediated the association between lifetime victimization and leaving the scenario later. Findings suggest the importance of emotion dysregulation in predicting risk perception among victims and of improving victims' emotion regulation skills in revictimization risk reduction interventions.     

Rough-and-Tumble Play and the Development of Physical Aggression and Emotion Regulation: A Five-Year Follow-Up Study

This is a follow-up to a study demonstrating that rough-and-tumble play was related to physical aggression in the preschool years. Fathers reported on the frequency of father-child rough-and-tumble play interactions, and the degree to which fathers were dominant in the play dyad was observed and coded from play interactions. In this follow-up study, school-aged children’s physically aggressive behaviors and emotion regulation abilities were assessed with questionnaires 5 years later. Higher frequencies of father-child rough-and-tumble play in the preschool years were associated with more physical aggression and worse emotion regulation 5 years later for children whose fathers were less dominant, over and above the effects of physical aggression in the preschool years. Rough-and-tumble play was unrelated to these measures among children whose fathers were more dominant during play. This study shows that early rough-and-tumble play continues to be related to children’s psychosocial adjustment over time, and that the effect remains moderated by the quality of the father-child relationship during play.