Search

Approximately 2 weeks after September 11th, adolescents from a national sample of households who were indirectly exposed to the terrorist attacks through the media completed a Web-based survey that assessed event-related acute stress symptoms. One year later, these adolescents (N = 142) and a randomly selected parent from their household completed a second survey. On average, adolescents reported mild to moderate acute stress symptoms shortly after the attacks and few trauma-related symptoms, low psychological distress and functional impairment, and moderate levels of positive affect 1 year later. After adjusting for acute stress symptoms reported after the attacks, greater parent-adolescent conflict was positively associated with adolescents’ trauma symptoms, distress, and functional impairment at 1 year. Higher levels of adolescent positive affect at 1 year were associated with greater parental positive affect, greater parental support, and higher levels of parenting self-efficacy. Parents may play an important role in adolescents ' responses to stressful national events.

There is a long history of institutional and interpersonal stigma, violence, and oppression of sexual and gender minority (SGM) individuals in the United States and around the world. Structural and sociocultural factors have served to promote and justify criminalization, discrimination, and violence targeting SGM groups. This commentary provides a brief chronological summary of laws and policies that served to pathologize, oppress, and justify violence and discrimination; the evolution of academic study and understanding; activism aimed at changing laws, questioning pathologizing assumptions and practices, and protecting human rights; current challenges; and recommendations for policy, research, and practice. This commentary pays particular attention to the roles the Global Alliance for Behavioral Health and Social Justice and its journal, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, have played to advocate for full recognition of the human rights of SGM individuals. Public Policy Relevance Statement: There is a long history of institutional and interpersonal stigma, violence, and oppression of sexual and gender minority (SGM) people. This commentary provides recommendations for promoting the rights and well-being of SGM individuals, with a particular focus on the Global Alliance and the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. In particular, the commentary recommends strategies for countering anti-SGM propaganda, creating safe and supportive environments for SGM people, and accessing high-quality, culturally, and context appropriate services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the role of parent-adolescent relationships in mediating the association between family-related negative life events and adolescent depressive symptoms and problem behaviors among 1,696 eleventh graders from the United States (n = 201), China (n = 502), Korea (n = 497), and Czech Republic (n = 496). Results indicated that perceived parental involvement and parent-adolescent conflict mediated the link between family-related life events and adolescent depressed mood. The path from family-related life events to adolescent problem behaviors was mediated by perceived parental involvement, parent-adolescent conflict, and perceived parental sanctions of adolescent misconduct. With the exception of minor cross-cultural differences in the magnitude of associations among variables, this study revealed considerable similarity in the association of family factors with adolescent internalizing and externalizing symptomatology. The findings contribute to the growing literature on culture-general developmental processes.

This study examined risk and protection for adolescent problem behavior and depressive symptomatology in an average-risk sample of 11th graders. Using a socioecological perspective, we aggregated risk factors for adolescent problem behavior and depressed mood by 3 social contexts: i.e., family and peer contexts, and a context comprising the most important nonparental adult ("VIP") in respondents' lives. Protective factors associated with these 3 contexts were also included in the analyses. We tested separate models (including outcome-specific risk and protective factors) for predicting problem behaviors and depressive symptoms; the models demonstrated divergent validity. Risk and protective factors accounted for 49% of the variance in problem behavior and 49% in depressive symptoms. Tests of interactions between risk-aggregates and protective factors yielded several significant cross-context buffering effects in the problem behavior model, but none in the depressive symptoms model. Parents' and VIP's perceived sanctions buffered adolescents against high risk for problem behavior emanating from the peer context. Additionally, perceived peers' sanctions buffered youths against risk emanating from each of the 3 contexts.

This study contributes to the emerging subdiscipline of geography, defined as vegetal geography, expanding beyond Critical Plant Studies’ focus on place-based interactions with and adaptations to human systems and ecologies. In this sense, vegetal geography covers political and cultural ecologies and psychogeography of events, highlighted by the recent pandemic, the ongoing threat of anthropogenic climate change, and the re-emergence of global diseases in recent years amid unrestrained consumerism and human niche constructions. These so-called Anthropocene proliferations tend to ramify the relation of place to organic entanglement with the non-organic, human with the nonhuman, which implicates species trade-offs, uncanny alliances, and affinities, via a series of differential synthesis, borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, amid increasing climate anomalies. In the process, they engender emergent ecologies where vegetal life, a key Deleuzean concept, provides a critical pivot to interspecies relations in times of crisis and emergency.