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Pinpointing Patient Needs
Rachael Wandrey, with the support of her mentor, Katie E. Mosack, is studying the unique experiences and social support needs of a virtual community of lesbian breast cancer patients. She believes not only that lesbian women experience higher incidence of and mortality from breast cancer than their heterosexual counterparts, but that they also likely experience breast cancer differently from heterosexual women given the context of homophobia and heterosexism. Data were collected from the lesbian-specific discussion forum found on breastcancer.org.
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Fears and Beliefs About Pain and Dentistry Predict Treatment-Seeking Behavior
Health behaviors are complex, and individual differences appear to be explained by variation in a host of psychosocial variables. With regard to oral health, treatment-seeking behavior and associated health outcomes are related to fear, anxiety, pain perception, and cognitions about controllability and the value of dental health. Avoidance of dental care resulting from fear has major implications for oral and overall health. For instance, untreated oral disease may exacerbate cardiovascular disease and diabetes, among other systemic health concerns.
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Keeping Up With the Joneses
We examined the influence of friends’ and family members’ perfectionism on students’ life aspirations, as well as the role of life aspirations in students’ well-being and self-regulation across the year as they pursued three personal goals. In a longitudinal study of 340 students and their friends and family members, we found that participants’ friends’ other-oriented perfectionism and self-oriented perfectionism was significantly positively related to participants’ prioritization of extrinsic over intrinsic aspirations, while family members’ perfectionism was not related to participants’ aspirations.
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Let’s Skype! Video Chat Use Among Infants and Toddlers
Even though the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under two avoid all media exposure, there is evidence that many of these infants and toddlers are using electronic media regularly. Furthermore, while strong, nationally representative childhood media usage surveys exist (e.g., Common Sense Media’s 2013 survey), they do not address the use of video chat in early childhood. To remedy this lack of information, we conducted our own online survey, sent to 113 families with children between 6 and 24 months of age. We found that nearly 90% of these families use video chat with their infants, and 43% use it at least once a week.
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Updating the Glass Cliff
The Glass Cliff Phenomenon (GCP), in which women appear more likely to be promoted to leadership in times of crisis, is thought to be a function of stereotypic views of leadership. In this study, we systematically replicated Kottke and associates (2013), who had replicated Bruckmüller and Branscombe’s (2010) study, to determine whether people’s perceptions of leadership traits operate under the paradigms “think manager — think male” and “think crisis — think female.” Thus, we expected to find the existence of gender stereotyping of characteristics associated with the GCP based on respondents’ awareness of the context of the crisis.
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Buffering the Impact of Maternal Depression, Anxiety, and Stress on Neonatal Outcomes
Sophia E. Green, Emory University, presented her research on "Buffering the Impact of Maternal Depression, Anxiety, and Stress on Neonatal Outcomes" at the 2014 APS Annual Convention in San Francisco. Green received a 2014 APSSC RISE Research Award for this work.
