How Do I Feel About Feelings? Emotion Socialization in Families of Depressed and Healthy Adolescents

Emotional and cognitive changes that occur during adolescence set the stage for the development of adaptive or maladaptive beliefs about emotions. Although research suggests that parents’ behaviors and beliefs about emotions relate to children’s emotional abilities, few studies have looked at parental socialization of children’s emotions, particularly in families with depressed adolescents. The present study examined associations between parent and adolescent meta-emotion philosophies (MEP), defined as thoughts, reactions, and feelings about their own emotions. Additionally, adolescent depressive status was tested as a moderator of relationships between parents’ and adolescents’ MEP. One hundred and 52 adolescents, aged 14–18 (65.8% female), and their parents (148 mothers, 106 fathers) participated in a study on emotion socialization in families of depressed and healthy adolescents. Depressed adolescents (n = 75) and matched healthy adolescents (n = 77) were recruited based on research criteria for mental health status. The sample was largely Caucasian (82%) and of middle socioeconomic class status. Results indicated that mothers’ and fathers’ MEP about their children’s emotions were associated with adolescents’ MEP, although parents’ MEP about their own emotions was unrelated to adolescents’ MEP. Fathers’ MEP about children’s emotions made unique contributions to adolescents’ MEP across both adolescent groups. Adolescents’ depressive status moderated the relationship between mothers’ and adolescents’ MEP such that mothers’ MEP was particularly relevant for depressed adolescents. The continued influence of parents in the emotional lives of adolescents is discussed as well as differences in emotion socialization in families with depressed and healthy adolescents.     

Self-neglect: adaptation of a clinical tool to the practice of the medical examiner

Self-neglect is the inability or unwillingness to provide for oneself the goods and services needed to live safely and independently. It is the most common allegation reported to Adult Protective Services agencies throughout the United States. Unfortunately, it seems that most medical examiners and their teams are not trained appropriately on self-neglect and forget to ask pertinent questions and document relevant observations. The most important aspect of self-neglect for the medical examiner is to recognize the diagnosis to avoid confusion with other forms of elder abuse, particularly neglect from a third party. In this context, a self-neglect scale could be a useful tool to assist the death investigation team. In the clinical field, a self-neglect severity scale was developed by the Consortium for Research in Elder Self-Neglect of Texas. It is here proposed that a self-neglect severity scale for medical examiners should be developed, to assist the investigative team in assessing these common cases. This scale is developed by modifying the clinical scale to adapt it to the particular needs of death investigation. This scale can help the medical examiner and his team in approaching these deaths in a systematic and comprehensive way.     

Field reliability of the SAVRY with juvenile probation officers: Implications for training

Two complimentary studies were conducted to investigate the inter-rater reliability and performance of juvenile justice personnel when conducting the Structured Assessment of Violence Risk for Youth (SAVRY). Study 1 reports the performance on four standardized vignettes of 408 juvenile probation officers (JPOs) and social workers rating the SAVRY as part of their training. JPOs had high agreement with the expert consensus on the SAVRY rating of overall risk and total scores, but those trained by a peer master trainer outperformed those trained by an expert. Study 2 examined the field reliability of the SAVRY on 80 young offender cases rated by a JPO and a trained research assistant. In the field, intra-class correlation coefficients were 'excellent' for SAVRY total and most domain scores, and were 'good' for overall risk ratings. Results suggest that the SAVRY and structured professional judgment can be used reliably in the field by juvenile justice personnel and is comparable to reliability indices reported in more lab-like research studies; however, replication is essential.     

Institutional Change and Embeddedness: Caste and Gender in Financial Cooperatives in Rural India

ABSTRACT

This article examines the interaction between institutional change and caste and gender embeddedness. It develops a framework for understanding how this interaction takes place. The article presents data on the results of an effort by a non-profit development organization, the Cooperative Development Foundation (CDF), to promote women's cooperatives, grounded in the ideas of mutual self-help and equitable access to services, in rural Andhra Pradesh in India. Using a simple theoretical framework that highlights the multi-level nature of institutional change, and the potential for interactions with embeddedness at one level to affect interactions at other levels, the article presents data showing how particular institutional rules of the cooperatives interacted with caste and gender to shape the overall governance and service delivery practices of these new organizations. In particular, after failed attempts to integrate existing, male-dominated cooperatives with women, the CDF created gender-segregated cooperatives. Data from the women's cooperatives show the creation of mixed-caste organizations, with boards of directors that were fairly representative of their membership, but with presidents that were more likely to be from the higher-castes. Access to financial services shows little caste bias, though lending is through caste-based peer groups. The data suggest that the interaction of embeddedness and institutional change is a process contingent on: a) the strategy taken by the development organization towards embeddedness; b) the nature of the institutional change itself relative to the existing social structure; and c) the effects the interactions between institutional change and embeddedness at different levels have on each other.     

People With HIV Now Live a Better Life

As a Un Volunteer,working with UnaiDS China,i have the opportunity to get involved in a wide range of areas.From working with community-based organizations,set up by people living with hiV to interacting with the mediaon topics related to hiV/aiDS to sup-porting campaigns to fight HIV/AIDS-related discrimination in the workplace,i get to do it all.     

Socialism,Economic Development and Planning in Mali, 1960–1968

This article looks at practices of pilferage and bribery among African migrant dock workers in Durban in the 1950s. Many of Durban's dockers regularly engaged in small-scale theft, usually food for personal consumption, but sometimes they also got their hands on bigger and more expensive items or sold the pilfered goods. Many also relied on their social networks to find jobs and did not shy away from bribing izinduna to make sure that they were hired on ships that contained the right goods. Such crimes, which were often not recognised as such by the workers, have often been seen as forms of primitive and individual resistance to proletarianisation. This article, however, argues that these were not just reactive and opportunistic acts, but part of a conscious strategy to combine dock labour with a small business, which allowed several workers to withdraw from the wage labour market altogether.     

Computerized craniofacial reconstruction using CT-derived implicit surface representations

In forensic craniofacial reconstruction, facial features of an unknown individual are estimated from an unidentified skull, based on a mixture of experimentally obtained guidelines on the relationship between soft tissues and the underlying skeleton. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of using full 3D cross-sectional CT images for establishing a reference database of densely sampled distances between the external surfaces of the skull and head for automated craniofacial reconstruction. For each CT image in the reference database, the hard tissue (skull) and soft tissue (head) volumes are automatically segmented and transformed into signed distance transform (sDT) images, representing for each voxel in this image the Euclidean distance to the closest point on the skull and head surface, respectively, distances being positive (negative) for voxels inside (outside) the skull/head. Multiple craniofacial reconstructions are obtained by first warping each reference skull sDT maps to the target skull sDT using a B-spline based free form deformation algorithm and subsequently applying these warps to the reference head sDT maps. A single reconstruction of the target head surface is defined as the zero level set of the arithmetic average of all warped reference head sDT maps, but other reconstructions are possible, biasing the result to subject specific attributes (age, BMI, gender). Both qualitative and quantitative tests (measuring the similarity between the 3D reconstructed and corresponding original head surface) on a small (N = 20) database are presented to proof the validity of the concept.