William L. Gekoski

Age, gender, and the underutilization of mental health services: The influence of help-seeking attitudes

The objectives of this study were to explore age and gender differences in attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help, and to examine whether attitudes negatively influence intentions to seek help among older adults and men, whose mental health needs are underserved. To achieve these objectives 206 community-dwelling adults completed questionnaires measuring help-seeking attitudes, psychiatric symptomatology, prior help-seeking, and intentions to seek help. Older age and female gender were associated with more positive help-seeking attitudes in this sample, although age and gender interacted with marital status and education, and had varying influences on different attitude components. Age and gender also influenced intentions to seek professional psychological help. Women exhibited more favourable intentions to seek help from mental health professionals than men, likely due to their positive attitudes concerning psychological openness. Older adults exhibited more favourable intentions to seek help from primary care physicians than younger adults, a finding that was not explained by age differences in attitudes. Results from this study suggest that negative attitudes related to psychological openness might contribute to mens underutilization of mental health services. Help-seeking attitudes do not appear to be a barrier to seeking professional help among older adults, although their intentions to visit primary care physicians might be. These findings suggest the need for education to improve mens help-seeking attitudes and to enhance older adults’ willingness to seek specialty mental health services.

The Age Group Evaluation and Description (AGED) Inventory: A New Instrument for Assessing Stereotypes of and Attitudes toward Age Groups

The AGED Inventory was designed to overcome shortcomings identified in the Aging Semantic Differential, a frequently used measure of how age groups are perceived. The new instrument was developed to allow assessment both of age stereotypes and of attitudes toward age-specified targets. The Inventory was developed with data from 300 male and 300 female respondents. Two seven-item evaluative factors (the Goodness and Positiveness dimensions) resulted from a series of factor analyses used to reduce an initial set of thirty-five evaluative adjective pairs. Two seven-item descriptive factors (the Vitality and Maturity dimensions) resulted from a separate series of factor analyses used to reduce an initial set of fifty adjective pairs judged to differentiate age groups. Using confirmatory factor analyses and coefficients of congruence on data from an additional 800 respondents, the factor structures of the two evaluative factors and of the two descriptive factors were found to be replicable for young, middle-aged, and old targets assessed in either between or within subject designs. Its ease of administration, multi-dimensionality, flexibility of targets specification, and capability for assessing attitude and/or stereotype in a manner congruent with current conceptualizations of these constructs make the AGED Inventory useful in a variety of contexts.

Analgesia for experimentally induced pain: Multiple sessions of acupuncture compared to hypnosis in high- and low-susceptible subjects.

Repeated trials with cold-pressor pain were used to (a) determine whether the modest relation between hypnotic susceptibility and response to acupuncture analgesia obtained in previous experiments is enhanced over a series of treatments; (b) compare acupuncture and hypnotic analgesias; and (c) assess whether acupuncture analgesia increases with repeated treatments. Twenty high and 20 low hypnotically susceptible subjects participated on 5 different days. For half of each susceptibility group, Sessions 1-3 consisted of a baseline trial followed by an acupuncture analgesia trial. The remaining subjects had two no-treatment trials on each of these sessions. For all subjects Session 4 was a baseline followed by a hypnotic analgesia trial, and Session 5 was a repetition of the procedures followed in Sessions 1-3. Repeated exposures to acupuncture did not alter its analgesic effect in either susceptibility group; there were no instances of significant postacupuncture pain reduction. High susceptibles, but not low susceptibles, reported marked pain reduction after hypnotic analgesia. From these and previous findings it is concluded that the effect of acupuncture on experimentally induced pain is at best small and fragile.

Social desirability effects on measures of adjustment to university, independence from parents, and self-efficacy.

Results of regression analyses on data from 96 first-year undergraduates indicated that social desirability (Jackson and Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scales), particularly scores on the Jackson scale, is related strongly to scores on measures of adjustment (Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire), self-efficacy (Hale-Fibel Generalized Expectation for Success Scale), and independence (Psychological Separation Inventory) from mother, but not from father. In addition, both the Jackson and Marlowe-Crowne scales were correlated highly. Independence from parents and self-efficacy each continued to show a relationship with adjustment to university after social desirability effects were removed. Failure to remove the effect(s) of social desirability from the present measures is likely to lead to inflated estimates of their relation to each other or to other measures.

Gender differences in relating life events and well-being in elderly individuals

Two hundred and sixty-eight community-residing elderly participants completed measures of physical illness, psychiatric symptomatology, life satisfaction, and recent mood, and a modified version of the Rahe (1975) Recent Life Change Questionnaire on which they indicated how much adjustment each event experienced required and whether it was appraised as expected or unexpected, desirable or undesirable, and controllable or uncontrollable. The results suggest that: (1) scores that reflect how events were appraised accounted for more variance than total frequency scores; (2) optimal predictors differed for different outcome measures; and (3) there are substantial gender differences in the pattern of relationships of predictor to outcome variables. The first two findings are consistent with those reported for younger cohorts. The third finding has not been reported previously.

Language acquisition context and language organization in bilinguals

A distinction between compound and coordinate bilingualism has been employed to conceptualize linguistic organization in bilinguals. Compound bilinguals are those who acquired their languages in a joint context and therefore are presumed to store linguistic information interdependently. Coordinates include those who acquired their languages in separate contexts and therefore are presumed to maintain independent linguistic stores. To study the usefulness of this distinction, Spanish-English and English-Spanish, compound, and coordinate bilinguals were asked to give intra-and interlingual free and restricted word associations to equivalent English and Spanish stimuli for which the responses of monolingual speakers were not equivalent. As predicted, compound bilinguals gave significantly more equivalent responses and responded significantly faster than did coordinates. However, since these differences were only modest in size, they cannot be interpreted as supporting the usefulness of the compound-coordinate distinction. None of the predictions regarding the effect of proficiency on performance were supported. Differences as a function of native language, type of association task, and association conditions were obtained and are discussed.

Interactive and Categorical Grouping Strategies and the Syntagmatic-Paradigmatic Shift.

EMERSON, HARRIET F., and GEKOSKI, WILLIAM L. Interactive and Categorical Grouping Strategies and the Syntagmatic-Paradigmatic Shift. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1976, 47, 1116-1121. Picture-grouping and word-association tasks were used to evaluate the hypothesis that paradigmatic (same form class) word associates are not always categorical and may be a function of the childs understanding of interactive and categorical relations. Subjects were 61 females and 63 males aged 3-0 to 9-11. Capability in recognition and justification of interactive picture-grouping pairs occurred by age 6; for categorical pairs, capability reached an asymptote at 8, the age of the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift. On preference trials (interactive vs. categorical), interactive responses were preferred prior to age 6?. Both interactive and categorical responses were given after age 6%, reaching an asymptote in frequency after age 8. Comparison of responses concerning word-associate and picture-grouping preferences suggested that developmental changes in interactive versus categorical cognitive strategies may explain certain age changes in word association and classification behavior.

Development of Comprehension of Sentences with "Because" or "If".

Abstract The comprehension of sentences with “because” or “if” was investigated in children aged 2;9–11;11. Imitation, comprehension (choosing one of two picture sequences to go with a sentence), recognition (judging sentences with connective or structure differences as heard before or not), and synonymy (judging equivalence of meaning in sentences with different connectives or structures) tasks were administered, along with logical ordering, reversibility, and classification tasks. Above-chance responding in the comprehension task occurred by age 8, and in recognition and synonymy by age 10. Cognitive performance predicted 28.4% of the variance in the linguistic scores and cognitive success was concurrent with or preceded linguistic success. Comprehension of “because” and “if” appears to develop gradually, and is related to the development of certain operative rules.

Confounding as a problem in relating life events to health status in elderly individuals

Explored two types of confounding relevant to research relating major life events to physical illness in elderly individuals: (a) contamination of life events lists by health-related and subjective items; and (b) failure to control for illness existing prior to the life event assessment period. Community-residing elderly individuals (M = 70.4 years) completed two measures of health status in each of two waves of testing. During the second wave, participants also completed a life events list. Independent judges categorized the life events as health-related or not and further categorized non-health-related events as subjective or objective. Results indicated that life events-illness correlations were influenced by the presence of confounded items and that when illness present prior to the life event assessment period was controlled the relationship between confounded life events and illness decreased. These results underscore the importance of assessing possible sources of confounding when conducting life event illness research with elderly individuals.

Women's Views of Institutional Versus Community-Based Long-Term Care

Young, middle-age, and old women (N = 434) read factual descriptions of institutional and community-based care, and then made long-term care choices for elderly female targets with varying degrees of functional impairment, cognitive impairment, and informal support. Respondents also indicated what they would prefer in the targets situation. Results indicated that (1) community care was more positively perceived than institutional care, (2) only one-third had negative feelings about institutional care, (3) the greater the level of impairment the more likely institutional care was the preferred alternative, and (4) the less informal support a woman had the more likely that institutional care was the preferred care alternative. It was concluded that womens views of institutional care are not strongly negative, and that the availability of informal support is an even stronger predictor of long-term care choice for others or for the imagined self than is level of impairment. The implications of these findings for public policy are discussed.