The demand of blood products in the US is expected to rise over the years. Adolescents represent a potential population of eligible donors and it is fundamental to better understand what influences blood donation among this category of population. Such investigation has not been conducted in the Appalachian region. To elucidate the question, a voluntary and anonymous questionnaire was administered to high school students from five counties of South Central Appalachia. A sample of 568 adolescents were asked to provide demographic characteristics, blood donation status and to rate various motivating factors. The association between blood donation and motivating factors were analyzed using logistic regression. Caucasians were the most represented ethnicity in the study population with 94.52%. From the total respondents, 37.85% reported being blood donors with an average age of 17.29 years. Among the donors, 51.66% were females and 55.45% came from low socio-economic class families. Emergency involving someone they care about and personal story of someone whose life was saved by blood donation were the top rated motivating factors by the donors with respective frequencies of 76.74% and 72.09%. Adjusting for the gender, age and socio-economic status, donating blood with friends increased the likelihood of blood donation by 53.2% (95% confidence interval: 1.01 – 2.31). These finding suggest that strategies focused on promoting group donation such as during school events may increase the rate of blood donation.

Nonmedical use of prescription stimuluants (NMUS) can cause adverse outcomes for college students including academic impediments, such as a lowered GPA, and polyuse of illicit substances (Garcia et al., 2021; Holt & McCarthy, 2019; Norman & Ford, 2018). The current study investigated the demographics, academics, stress, and polysubstance use between students who endorsed NMUS and those who did not in an undergraduate college population sample at a large public university in the Southeast. The sample consisted of 429 undergraduate students who completed online measures of demographics, perceived stress, stressful life events, and substance use. Overall, 3.4% of the sample reported NMUS within the past two weeks. Chi-square analyses suggested that the two groups did not differ in gender, ethnicity, and year in school. A significant difference between groups was found for race (p = .002). Students who self-identified as White were more likely to report NMUS as compared to students self-identifying as another race. No significant difference between groups was found for credit hours or GPA. Additionally, no significant differences were observed between groups regarding stress and stressful life events. Concerning overall substance use, approximately 70% of the sample endorsed no drug use. Notably, students who endorsed NMUS were more likely to report some use of another non-stimulant type of drug, suggesting that NMUS may occur in the context of polyuse for some students.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Coping flexibility, the ability to match coping strategy choice to the demands of a situation, has been found to diminish the effects of daily stress. Despite the importance of high levels of coping flexibility, little research has explored factors that can predict one’s ability to demonstrate coping flexibility. One promising avenue for such research is the role of sleep. This research aims to explore the importance of sleep as a predictor of daily coping flexibility across two studies. Study one consists of one hundred and fifty college student participants who were recruited in the Spring 2021 semester at the College of William & Mary and asked to complete 14 days of diaries. For each entry, participants were asked about the most stressful event they experienced that day and were asked to complete a sleep quality indicator and the Coping Flexibility Questionnaire. Study two consists of eighty-seven participants who were recruited in the Fall 2021 semester at the College of William & Mary. Participants were asked to wear a Phillips Respironics Actiwatch band that uses an accelerometer to measure sleep for one week. Participants were asked to wear their band continuously and complete self-report daily diaries assessing their sleep and coping flexibility. In study one, we did not find a significant relationship between self-report sleep quality and coping flexibility. In study two, we again did not find a significant relationship between self-report sleep quality and coping flexibility. Additionally, in study two, we did not find significant relationships between actigraphy measures (i.e., onset latency or awake periods) and coping flexibility. In exploratory analyses examining whether sleep quality predicted delayed coping flexibility, we found that awake periods predicted coping flexibility a day later than initially hypothesized, such that as awake periods increased, coping flexibility decreased. Overall, our studies fail to demonstrate self-reported sleep quality, onset latency, or awake periods as a predictor of next-day strategy-situation fit coping flexibility, but does explore potential delayed effects.

With increased face mask usage globally following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to understand factors that influence mask wearing behavior. One factor that may influence mask wearing behavior is the degree to which they potentially impair emotion recognition. Previous research that has suggested that there may be cultural differences in facial regions that people in Japan and the United States attend to when inferring a target’s emotional state, whereby Japanese are more likely to look to the eyes and Americans are more likely to look at the mouth (Yuki et al., 2006 & Jack et al., 2012). Based on this prior research, we predicted that facial coverings concealing the mouth region would serve to impair emotion recognition, whereas in Japan facial coverings that conceal the eye region would serve to impair emotion recognition more so than for Americans. In Study 1, we examine whether people in Japan and the United States expect that they would have difficulty understanding others’ emotional expressions when the target wore a facial mask, or sunglasses. The results showed that Japanese participants reported higher mask wearing willingness and mask wearing norms compared to Americans. Additionally, results indicated that Americans reported higher perceived difficulty in emotion recognition when targets are wearing a face mask, while Japanese reported the reverse effect. In Study 2, we examined actual recognition rates, and found that while there were only small country differences in the degree to which mask-wearing impaired emotion recognition, Japanese emotion recognition was more impaired by sunglasses. We discuss implications and directions for future research.

<p> Older adults with persistent pain experience reduced physical functioning, increased disability, and higher rates of depression. Previous research suggests that different types of positive and negative expectancies (e.g., optimism and hopelessness) may be associated with the severity of these pain-related outcomes. Moreover, different types of expectancies may interact with perceived control to predict these outcomes. However, it is unclear whether different types of expectancies are uniquely predictive of changes in pain-related outcomes over time in older adults and whether perceived control moderates these relationships. The primary aims of the current study were to 1) examine how the shared and unique aspects of optimism and hopelessness differentially predict changes in pain-related outcomes (i.e., pain severity, pain interference, disability, and depressive symptoms) in older adults experiencing persistent pain over a 10-year and 2-year timeframe and 2) examine whether perceptions of control over one’s health moderate these relationships. The present study sampled older adults with persistent pain who participated in a nationally representative, longitudinal study (i.e., The Health and Retirement Study) at three timepoints across a 10-year period. First, confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) were conducted to determine appropriate modeling of expectancy variables. Second, mixed latent and measured variable path analyses were created to examine the unique relationships between expectancy variables and changes in pain-related outcomes over both a 10- year and 2-year period. Finally, mixed latent and measured variable path analyses and PROCESS were used to test perceived control as moderator of the relationships between expectancy variables and changes in pain-related outcomes over time. CFA results suggested that measures of optimism and hopelessness were best understood in terms of their valence, as positive (i.e., optimism) or negative (i.e., pessimism and hopelessness) expectations. Results from path analyses suggested that only negative, not positive, expectancies were significantly associated with worsening pain severity, pain interference, disability, and depressive symptoms across both 10-year and 2-year periods. Moderation analyses demonstrated inconsistent results and difficulties with replication. However, post-hoc path analyses found that perceptions of control over one’s health independently predicted some changes in pain-related outcomes over time, even when controlling for expectancies. Altogether, the current findings expand our knowledge of the associations between expectancies and pain by suggesting that negative expectancies are 10 predictive of changes in mental and physical pain-related outcomes across years of time. The current study also suggests that positive and negative expectancies may be related, but distinct factors in older adults with persistent pain and that health-related perceived control may be predictive of changes in pain over time. The current discussion reviews these extensions of our current knowledge in greater detail, discusses the potential mechanisms driving these relationships through a theoretical lens, and identifies the implications of this work. </p>

No / Mainstream health psychology supports neoliberal notions of health promotion in which self-management is central. The emphasis is on models that explain behaviour as individually driven and cognitively motivated, with health beliefs framed as the favoured mechanisms to target in order to bring about change to improve health. Utilising understandings exemplified in critical health psychology, we take a more socially situated approach, focusing on practicing health, the rhetoric of modernisation in UK health care and moves toward democratisation. While recognising that within these new ways of working there are opportunities for empowerment and user-led health care, there are other implications. How these changes link to simplistic cognitive behavioural ideologies of health promotion and rational decision-making is explored. Utilising two different empirical studies, this article highlights how self-management and expected compliance with governmental authority in relation to health practices position not only communities that experience multiple disadvantage but also more seemingly privileged social actors. The article presents a challenge to self-management and informed choice, in which the importance of navigational networks is evident. Because health care can become remote and inaccessible to certain sections of the community, yet pervasive and deterministic for others, we need multiple levels of analysis and different forms of action.

Yes / Childbirth has been positioned as a life changing event that has profound long term psychological effects upon women. This paper adopts a community psychology approach to explore the role that the Positive Birth Movement (PBM may have in tackling negative birth experiences by supporting women before and after birth. Six women who all regularly attend UK based Positive Birth Movement meetings and had given birth to at least one child participated in one to one semi-structured interviews designed to explore the support they received before, during and after their birth, as well as their experiences with the positive birth movement. A Foucauldian inspired discourse analysis explores themes relating to the lack of support and information provided by the NHS and the function of the positive birth movement as a transformative community space which offers social support and information. Within these themes a focus on neoliberalism, choice and the woman’s position as an active consumer of health care is critically discussed. It is argued that the PBM has the potential to prepare women for positive birth experiences but more attention needs to be paid to the wider contexts that limit women’s ability to make ‘free’ choice.