Management of chest injuries--a 5 year retrospective survey

Human genome diversity studies analyse genetic variation among individuals and between populations in order to understand the origins and evolution of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens). The availability of thousands of DNA polymorphisms (genetic markers) brings analytic power to these studies. Human genome diversity studies have clearly shown that the large part of genetic variability is due to differences among individuals within populations rather than to differences between populations, effectively discrediting a genetic basis of the concept of 'race'. Evidence from paleontology, archaeology and genetic diversity studies is quite consistent with an African origin of modern humans more than 100,000 years ago. The evidence favors migrations out of African as the source of the original peopling of Asia, Australia, Europe and Oceania. An international program for the scientific analysis of human genome diversity and of human evolution has been developed. The Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) aims to collect and preserve biologic samples from hundreds of populations throughout the world, make DNA from these samples available to scientists and distribute to the scientific community the results of DNA typing with hundreds of genetic markers.     

"Interpreting in the dark": Race and ethnicity in psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

Discusses the impact of race and ethnicity on the psychotherapeutic process of 3 patients in psychoanalytic psychotherapy with an African-American therapist. Race and ethnicity remain topics that engender anxiety in social and clinical discourse. Psychoanalytic literature on race has been hampered by incomplete conceptualizations and overgeneralizations that often limit its clinical utility. Clinical examples are used to explore the way in which attention directed at racial issues provides a framework for the treatment alliance and illuminates key transferences and resistances. Discussion of racial issues is most fruitful when racial themes are situated in bodily and social contexts and when the meaning that race has in the therapy dyad is negotiated by patient and therapist, apart from idealized or socially correct conceptualizations from outside of the treatment situation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Race and health: basic questions, emerging directions

PURPOSE: This paper examines the scientific consensus on the conceptualization of race, identifies why health researchers should analyze racial differences in morbidity and mortality and provides guidelines for future health research that includes race. METHODS: Examines scientific dictionaries and reviews the social science, public health and medical literature on the role of race in health. RESULTS: First, this paper reviews the evidence suggesting that race is more of a social category than a biological one. Variation in genotypic characteristics exists, but race does not capture it. Second, since racial categories have historically represented and continue to reflect the creation of social, economic, and political disadvantage that is consequential for well-being, it is important to continue to study racial differences in health. Finally, the paper outlines directions for a more deliberate and thoughtful examination of the role of race in health. CONCLUSIONS: Race is typically used in a mechanical and uncritical manner as a proxy for unmeasured biological, socioeconomic, and/or sociocultural factors. Future research should explore how clearly delineated environmental demands combine with genetic susceptibilities as well as with specified behavioral and physiological responses to increase the risk of illness for groups differentially exposed to psychosocial adversity.     

Science, ethnicity, and bias: Where have we gone wrong?

The quality, quantity, and funding of ethnic minority research have been inadequate. One factor that has contributed to this inadequacy is the practice of scientific psychology. Although principles of psychological science involve internal and external validity, in practice psychology emphasizes internal validity in research studies. Because many psychological principles and measures have not been cross-validated with different populations, those conducting ethnic minority research often have a more difficult time demonstrating rigorous internal validity. Thus, psychology's overemphasis of internal as opposed to external validity has differentially hindered the development of ethnic minority research. To develop stronger research knowledge on ethnic minority groups, it is important that (a) all research studies address external validity issues and explicitly specify the populations to which the findings are applicable; (b) different research approaches, including the use of qualitative and ethnographic methods, be appreciated; and (c) the psychological meaning of ethnicity or race be examined in ethnic comparisons. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Beyond the pleistocene: Using phylogeny and constraint to inform the evolutionary psychology of human mating.

Evolutionary psychologists explore the adaptive function of traits and behaviors that characterize modern Homo sapiens. However, evolutionary psychologists have yet to incorporate the phylogenetic relationship between modern Homo sapiens and humans’ hominid and pongid relatives (both living and extinct) into their theorizing. By considering the specific timing of evolutionary events and the role of evolutionary constraint, researchers using the phylogenetic approach can generate new predictions regarding mating phenomena and derive new explanations for existing evolutionary psychological findings. Especially useful is the concept of the adaptive workaround—an adaptation that manages the maladaptive elements of a pre-existing evolutionary constraint. The current review organizes 7 features of human mating into their phylogenetic context and presents evidence that 2 adaptive workarounds played a critical role as Homo sapiens’s mating psychology evolved. These adaptive workarounds function in part to mute or refocus the effects of older, previously evolved adaptations and highlight the layered nature of humans’ mating psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Race, evolution, and behaviour: A life history perspective.

Reviews the book, Race, evolution, and behaviour: A life history perspective (2nd special abridged edition) by J. Philippe Rushton (2000). In 1995, Philippe Rushton wrote Race, evolution and behavior, which summarized his ideas about race and racial differences. Rushton assumes that the major racial groupings of humankind represent a deep biological and evolutionary reality, and that there are important racial differences caused by evolutionary differences in reproductive strategies. Rushton claims that Blacks are less intelligent, more sexually precocious and promiscuous, less involved in parenting, and more likely to engage in criminal behaviour than "Mongoloids." "Caucasoids" fall between the two other groups in all those characteristics. The book caused considerable controversy. Rushton has defended abridgements of his book as simply providing briefer, more accessible editions of it. Most of the scientific claims made by Rushton, in either the 1995 book or its subsequent revisions, have been roundly criticized, but Rushton continues to present these same claims as if the criticisms did not exist. In many cases, Rushton's review of the evidence is highly selective. Although space precludes examining all of Rushton's claims about racial differences, Rushton hardly provides a balanced scientific account of the evidence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The leishmaniases as model zoonoses

Of the 374 species of parasite recorded as naturally infecting Homo sapiens, all but some 40 are zoonotic. A classification of human parasites is proposed, based on the role of H. sapiens in the maintenance of suprapopulations. Categories range from 1, for which man is irrelevant to the persistence of the species, to 4, which includes the small number of host-specific forms. The classification is illustrated by various species of Leishmania, and these are used to illustrate various host-parasite systems. The 'Wells effect' is proposed, to describe the protection of host populations by their parasites.     

Is research into ethnicity and health racist, unsound, or important science?

Much historical research on race, intelligence, and health was racist, unethical, and ineffective. The concepts of race and ethnicity are difficult to define but continue to be applied to the study of the health of immigrant and ethnic minority groups in the hope of advancing understanding of causes of disease. While a morass of associations has been generated, race and ethnicity in health research have seldom given fundamental new understanding of disease. Most such research is "black box epidemiology." Researchers have not overcome the many conceptual and technical problems of research into ethnicity and health. By emphasising the negative aspects of the health of ethnic minority groups, research may have damaged their social standing and deflected attention from their health priorities. Unless researchers recognise the difficulties with research into ethnicity and health and correct its weaknesses, 20th century research in this subject may suffer the same ignominious fate as that of race science in the 19th century.     

The Origins of Modernity: Was Autonomous Speech the Critical Factor?

Although Homo sapiens emerged in Africa some 170,000 years ago, the origins of "modern" behavior, as expressed in technology and art, are attributed to people who migrated out of Africa around 50,000 years ago, creating what has been called a human revolution in Europe and Asia. There is recent evidence that a mutation of the FOXP2 gene (forkhead box P2), important for the development of articulate speech, occurred some time within the past 100,000 years. This event may have allowed speech to become fully autonomous, so that language no longer depended on a visuomanual component. The consequent freeing of the hands and development of pedagogy may have led to the technological advances that allowed H. sapiens to dominate and eventually replace all other hominids. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Integrating feminism and multiculturalism: Scientific fact or science fiction?

How can contemporary psychologists become more multiculturally competent? Should practitioners focus primarily on race/ethnicity or should they attempt to integrate feminist principles and other aspects of identity and social location into their quest for multicultural competence? Competent clinical practice requires a complexity paradigm that encompasses the intersectionalities of class, gender, race/ethnicity, and other aspects that define an individual's subjective experience. This article points out the fact that multicultural theorists, for the most part, have underplayed gender and feminism, as feminist theorists have deemphasized race/ethnicity and class. The author provides several clinical examples that illustrate how integrating multiculturalism and feminism can improve clinical practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Experimental investigations of species-specific behavior.

"I have come to question the logical defensibility of any concept of a comparative psychology. My doubts stem in part from the conviction that Homo sapiens is, in some ways, a truly unique species." A highly developed learning capacity is a distinctive characteristic of the human species. 2 desiderata seem obvious to build a "comparative science of behavior": (a) behavior selected for examination should be "natural" to the species and (b) the kinds of behavior chosen for analysis should be as widely distributed as possible, phylogenetically speaking. Major headings are: Species-Specific Behavior, Plan of Attack, Determinants of Behavior (Historical Determinants, Indirect Environmental Determinants, Direct Environmental Determinants, Organismic Determinants), and Conclusions. The proposed "broadening of our orientation would facilitate and encourage rich interspecific comparisons and thus give rise to a truly comparative body of knowledge pertaining to behavior." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Generational status: A Canadian response to the editors' consortium statement with regard to race/ethnicity.

In response to the American Editors' Consortium Statement (1996) with regard to a minimal classification scheme for describing race/ethnicity, the present study investigated a potential supplementary scheme. Having reviewed the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological concerns about the Consortium's scheme, data from 1,071 Canadian university students (mean age 19.23 yrs) were examined with regard to demographics, relationships with parents, and psychological well-being. Ss revealed 94 countries of origin, 69 languages spoken at home, identification with 203 cultural or ethnic groups, and an idiosyncratic use of the term "visible minority". The supplementary classification scheme proposed is based on immigrant Generational Status-Canadian (GS-C) . The data were analyzed according to both the race/ethnicity and GS-C schemes. Results indicate that GS-C differentiated meaningful significant differences on 10 nondemographic variables. Race/ethnicity confounded with GS-C and, when the confound was addressed, only produced 1 significant difference. According to data, the GS-C seems to be the more meaningful way of summarizing the demographic data from a racially/ethnically/culturally diverse population. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inter-Regional Comparisons on the Quaternary Large Mammalian Faunas between China and Sub-Saharan Africa

The current and dominant theory about the origin of modern humans is the out-of-Africa hypothesis, which asserts that populations of Homo sapiens left Africa 100,000 years ago and replaced indigenous populations of humans in Eurasia. Many scholars equated the out-of-Africa dispersal of humans with paleoenvironmental changes. However, until now, few have paid special attention to the faunal data and whether or not faunal patterns are supportive of the popular theory. Recent comparative study of the Chinese fauna shows that the communication of faunas between Africa and East Asia could have occurred during the Neogene, but it was very limited during the Pleistocene. In the Chinese Quaternary fauna, only 16% of the genera are also present in the sub-Saharan African fauna. There is also no element among the dominant taxa of the Chinese Quaternary fauna which can be related to the African fauna. There is no reliable proof for the existence of Hippopotamus and Giraffa, as well as Panthera leo, during the Quaternary in China. Two controversial taxa are Acinonyx and Crocuta, about which there is still argument concerning their species identification in Eurasia. It is possible that both of the genera have co-specific taxa in Africa and Eurasia. Although the two genera are confined to Africa today, they did have a long evolutionary history in China. For the Out of Africa hypothesis for Homo sapiens, the implications of the limited faunal interchanges between China and Africa are not completely clear yet.     

Sphenoid shortening and the evolution of modern human cranial shape

Crania of 'anatomically modern' Homo sapiens from the Holocene and Upper Pleistocene epochs differ from those of other Homo taxa, including Neanderthals, by only a few features. These include a globular braincase, a vertical forehead, a dimunitive browridge, a canine fossa and a pronounced chin. Humans are also unique among mammals in lacking facial projection: the face of the adult H. sapiens lies almost entirely beneath the anterior cranial fossa, whereas the face in all other adult mammals, including Neanderthals, projects to some extent in front of the braincase. Here I use radiographs and computed tomography to show that many of these unique human features stem partly from a single, ontogenetically early reduction in the length of the sphenoid, the central bone of the cranial base from which the face grows forward. Sphenoid reduction, through its effects on facial projection and cranial shape, may account for the apparently rapid evolution of modern human cranial form, and suggests that Neanderthals and other archaic Homo should be excluded from H. sapiens.     

Intelligence, Race, and Genetics.

In this article, the authors argue that the overwhelming portion of the literature on intelligence, race, and genetics is based on folk taxonomies rather than scientific analysis. They suggest that because theorists of intelligence disagree as to what it is, any consideration of its relationships to other constructs must be tentative at best. They further argue that race is a social construction with no scientific definition. Thus, studies of the relationship between race and other constructs may serve social ends but cannot serve scientific ends. No gene has yet been conclusively linked to intelligence, so attempts to provide a compelling genetic link of race to intelligence are not feasible at this time. The authors also show that heritability, a behaviorgenetic concept, is inadequate in regard to providing such a link. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pride, prejudice, and ambivalence: Toward a unified theory of race and ethnicity.

For more than a century, hundreds of psychologists have studied race and ethnicity. Yet this scholarship, like American culture at large, has been ambivalent, viewing race and ethnicity both as sources of pride, meaning, and motivation as well as sources of prejudice, discrimination, and inequality. Underlying this ambivalence is widespread confusion about what race and ethnicity are and why they matter. To address this ambivalence and confusion, as well as to deepen the American conversation about race and ethnicity, the article first examines the field's unclear definitions and faulty assumptions. It then offers an integrated definition of race and ethnicity--dynamic sets of historically derived and institutionalized ideas and practices--while noting that race, although often used interchangeably with ethnicity, indexes an asymmetry of power and privilege between groups. Further, it shows how psychology's model of people as fundamentally independent, self-determining entities impedes the field's--and the nation's--understanding of how race and ethnicity influence experience and how the still-prevalent belief that race and ethnicity are biological categories hinders a more complete understanding of these phenomena. Five first propositions of a unified theory of race and ethnicity are offered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The philosophy of science as proclaimed and science as practiced: "Identity" or "dualism?"

Examines the challenge to the classical view that science is empirical and objective in essence, that the confirmation or disconfirmation of scientific knowledge-claims are independent of subjective factors within the individual investigator. Many philosophers of science have concluded that scientific practice seldom conforms to this ideal. Thus a "dualism" exists between classical proclamations in the philosophy of science and scientific practice. T. S. Kuhn's concept of "paradigm," M. Polanyi's of "tacit knowing," and P. K. Feyerabend's proposal that potentially refuting facts are eliminated by commitment to a theoretical position share the assertion that scientist's subjective premises and presuppositions play a significant role at all levels of endeavor. (37 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rediscovering differential psychology?

Comments on the original article, "Many forms of culture," by A. B. Cohen (see record 2009-04471-003). Cohen offered an eye-opening review of how culture means much more than ethnicity within a nation or differences between nations. After developing a much-expanded definition of culture, he concluded, “I have lamented the fact that psychology has focused on some important cultural differences, but not others” (Cohen, 2009, p. 202), and he went on to explain how deeply this expanded definition can impact our psychological research. Without naming it, Cohen (2009) apparently rediscovered the now-forgotten concept of “differential psychology,” which actually surpasses his own expanded definition of culture. Anastasi (1937) defined differential psychology simply as “the scientific study of differences between groups” (p. 59). One look at her book’s table of contents shows that this definition goes far beyond race and ethnicity, to include all sorts of group differences based on gender, social class, education, religion, age, and family. These all qualify as cultural differences under Cohen’s (2009) expanded definition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of health beliefs on screening mammography utilization among a diverse sample of older women

Screening mammography is particularly effective in detecting breast cancer in elderly women. Yet, although half of all breast cancers are diagnosed in older women, statistics show that women aged 65 and over tend to underutilize screening mammography. Prior research has used the constructs of the Health Belief Model to explore attitudes and beliefs relative to breast cancer screening. Prior studies have also identified health beliefs and concerns relative to screening mammography and race/ethnicity as some of the patient-related predictors of screening mammography utilization among younger women. This study uses the theoretical framework of the Health Belief Model to explore the effects of these variables on utilization in a multiracial, multiethnic, random sample of 1011 women, aged 65 and over. Race/ethnicity, belief that mammograms detect cancer, ease the mind, and provide accurate results; concern over the radiation, pain, and cost associated with receiving a mammogram; and other independent variables were tested as predictors of screening mammography utilization. Regression analysis identified that the belief that having a mammogram eases recipients minds was the most significant predictor of screening mammography utilization. None of the other health beliefs or health concerns were significant predictors. Race/ethnicity had no direct effects on utilization nor was it a confounder in the relationship between health beliefs, concerns and utilization. These results indicate that, along with emphasizing the importance of mammograms in early detection of breast cancer, stressing the reassurance that mammography brings recipients may be an effective health education strategy for elderly women of different racial/ethnic backgrounds.