You Need the Words?: Portrayals of Romantic Anxiety in Film

Viewers’ interpretations of characters with anxious attitudes in romantic relationships can affect their opinions on what constitutes appropriate relationship behavior. This paper analyzes the impact of media on people through a literature review and offers an explanation of different portrayals of romantic anxiety in film: the language used to describe characters and characters’ ends. The films studied - Sunset Boulevard, Sid and Nancy, Hard Core Logo, Burnt Money, and The Hustler - all showed a pattern where a character with romantic anxiety was mistreated by the storyline or other characters, and most of these characters meet their end through suicide or murder. The impact of these types of negative portrayals have not yet been explored, but similar studies find that viewers watch films to learn the norms of their community (Levy, 1990), and negative portrayals of romantic anxiety could lead to negative effects for anxious individuals. Further studies using questionnaires and focus groups are recommended in order to better understand the impact of these messages, viewer awareness, and sources of exposure

Surviving Communicative Labor: Theoretical Exploration of the (In)Visibility of Gendered Faculty Work/Life Struggle

The work experiences of faculty in higher education often entail being overworked and stressed, and this is particularly true for women faculty and faculty of color. This essay is situated at the intersection of gender, race, axiological, epistemological, and occupational identities. In this metatheoretical argument, we propose a new concept communicative labor by exploring how existing scholarly frameworks regarding workplace emotion, compassionate communication, and gendered work intersect to inform the experiences of critical women scholars and the ways their labor is communicatively manifested across research, teaching, and service. More specifically, we argue that communication itself (i.e., literally listening, speaking, and writing) becomes emotionally-laden work amid the research, teaching, and service performed by critical women scholars. We aim, through our articulation of communication labor, to disrupt dominant narratives of what faculty work lives should be, and we call for a paradigm shift in the way faculty labor is socially constructed so that we can improve critical women faculty’s success and well-being

The burden of psychotropic and anticholinergic medicines use in care homes:population-based analysis in 147 care homes

Background: older people living in care-homes are particularly vulnerable to adverse effects of psychotropic and anticholinergic drugs. Methods: anonymised dispensed prescription data from all 4,478 residents aged ≥ 60 years in 147 care-homes in two Scottish health boards were analysed. Psychotropic medicines examined were antipsychotics, antidepressants, hypnotic/anxiolytics, opioids and gabapentinoids. Anticholinergic burden was measured using the modified anticholinergic risk scale (mARS). Variation between care-homes and associations with individual and care-home characteristics were examined using multilevel logistic regression. Results: 63.5% of residents were prescribed at least one psychotropic drug, and 27.0% two or more, most commonly antidepressants (41.6%), opioids (20.3%), hypnotic/anxiolytics (16.9%) and antipsychotics (16.7%). 48.1% were prescribed an anticholinergic drug, and 12.1% had high anticholinergic burden (mARS ≥ 3). Variation between care-homes was high for antipsychotics (intra-cluster correlation coefficient [ICC] 8.2%) and hypnotics/anxiolytics (ICC = 7.3%), and moderate for antidepressants (ICC = 4.7%) and anticholinergics (ICC = 2.8%). Prescribing of all drugs was lower in the oldest old. People with dementia were more likely to be prescribed antipsychotics (adjusted OR = 1.45, 95%CI 1.23–1.71) but less likely to be prescribed anticholinergics (aOR = 0.61, 95%CI 0.51–0.74). Prescribing of antipsychotics was higher in Tayside (aOR = 1.52, 95%CI 1.20–1.92), whereas prescribing of antidepressants (particularly tricyclic-related) was lower (aOR = 0.66, 95%CI 0.56–0.79). There was no association with care-home regulator quality scores. Conclusion: care-home residents have high psychotropic and anticholinergic burden, with considerable variation between care-homes that is not related to existing measures of quality of care. Research to better understand variation between care-homes and the interaction with local prescribing cultures is needed

A small constellation: risk factors informing police perceptions of domestic abuse

Police in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) now routinely use risk assessment tools to identify common risk factors for re-abuse and lethality when responding to domestic abuse. Nevertheless, little is known about the extent to which officers understand and perceive the importance of factors commonly included on risk assessment tools for predicting future abuse. This study attempts to shed some light into this area of research by exploring the responses of 720 British and American police officers to questions regarding how important and how essential various risk factors are for evaluating the level of risk or harm a victim of domestic abuse may face in the future. Findings indicated that British and American officers were largely in agreement about a small constellation of risk factors that they considered integral to the risk assessment process: using or threatening to use a weapon; strangulation; physical assault resulting in injury and escalation of abuse. The results revealed that officers’ country of employment, rather than their demographic characteristics or experience policing domestic abuse, was a particularly influential predictor of their perceptions, and that both the situational context and the victim’s perception about risk are important in domestic abuse risk assessment

Under the radar: policing non-violent domestic abuse in the US and UK

Physical violence is but one of many tools that may be used to gain greater power within intimate relationships, yet the legal response has been critiqued for failing to recognise and respond to the full spectrum of abusive behaviours, such as coercive control. Using a sample of police officers from the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK), the current study utilises hypothetical vignettes to assess police officers’ perceptions of domestic abuse, including those incidents that are not necessarily physically violent, but involve stalking and other coercive, controlling behaviours that are harmful and require intervention. Within and between-country similarities and differences were analysed. Findings revealed that the majority of officers in both countries possessed a good level of understanding of domestic abuse and how they should respond to it – amidst and beyond the physical violence. However, our analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data also showed that the use of physical violence is at the forefront of many officers’ expectations about domestic abuse, and that when physical violence is absent, the police response is less proactive. Our study finds some support for the idea that non-physical abuse does go “under the radar” to some extent for some officers, and that this is more the case for American officers than their British counterparts. Findings are discussed in terms of context of the research sites and implications for policy, practice and future researc