Giving Support and Mental Health in Older Adults at Risk for Vision Impairment

Physical disability and visual impairment place older adults at a doubled risk for depression and a seven-fold increased risk for death by suicide. Social interaction is one of the factors that may aid adaptation to vision impairment. Preliminary research suggests that giving support to others has a significant relation with fewer depressive symptoms, greater life satisfaction, and greater satisfaction with support received in older adults. There has been no study to date addressing the role of giving support to others in protecting against suicidal behaviors, or other factors related to suicide risk, such as reasons for living. Using a sample of older adults with vision related diagnoses (N = 101), this study investigated the direct, moderating, and mediating roles of informal and formal support giving behaviors and satisfaction with support received from others on depressive symptoms, suicide risk, reasons for living, and life satisfaction. Higher scores on a measure of informal support giving were related to lower likelihood of reported suicide ideation, OR = .82, CI [.68, .99]. Higher scores on measures of volunteer activity were directly related to higher levels of reasons for living (Number of hours volunteered during the past year: b = .07, SE = .02, p = .05; Volunteered during past year: b = .23, SE = .09, p = .04). Volunteer activity was an intervening variable in the indirect relation between lower levels of disability and higher levels of reasons for living (Number of hours volunteer: b = .07, SE = .04; Number of volunteer organizations: b = .06, SE = .03). Satisfaction with support received from others was related to lower levels of depressive symptoms, beta = -.21, p = .03, suicide ideation, OR = .02, CI [\u3c.001, .52], and higher levels of reasons for living, b = .51, SE = .19, p = .005. Satisfaction with support buffered the relation between disability and life satisfaction. Perceived satisfaction with support was also an intervening variable in the indirect relation between higher levels of visual functioning and lower levels of depressive symptoms, b = -.002, SE = .001, as well as higher levels of reasons for living, b = .001, SE = .0005. This study provides several important insights into the relation between visual functioning, support giving behaviors, and mental health in older adults with vision related diagnoses. Informal and formal support giving may be two targets for decreasing suicide risk and increasing protective factors. Satisfaction with support received from others is an important construct in understanding both positive and negative aspects of mental health in older adults. These results shed light on the role giving support and perceived satisfaction with support have on mental health outcomes within the context of visual disability

College student perceptions of system-culpability in the frequency of wrongful convictions: gauging the importance of respondent characteristics

Prior literature has highlighted several factors that contribute to wrongful convictions and described the frequency in which these factors influence wrongful convictions; they include mistaken eyewitness identification, mishandling of forensic evidence, and misconduct among criminal justice professionals. The literature concerning perceptions of the influence of these factors on wrongful convictions is limited, however, by its failure to consider the impact of respondent characteristics on their perceptions. In this study, I extend this line of research by examining the influence of respondent characteristics on perceptions of the culpability of criminal justice actors, contamination of forensic evidence, and mistaken eyewitness identification in the frequency of wrongful convictions. Results of Pearson’s correlation suggest that perceptions are shaped by sex, political affiliation, college major, having a friend or close friend or family member employed in criminal justice, perceptions of race-based sentencing disparities, and perceptions of the frequency of wrongful convictions

Depression, Anxiety, and Symptom Profiles Among Female and Male Victims of Sexual Violence

Sexual violence is a serious public health problem that has been associated with negative mental and physical health outcomes. Few existing studies have examined the prevalence and patterns of adverse mental health among victims of sexual violence using data from nationally representative samples of U.S. adults. The main objectives of this study were to identify patterns in the associations between sexual violence victimization and depression and anxiety (DA) symptoms using data from the sexual violence and DA Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) modules. Stratified multivariate logistic regression models were conducted to test the associations between sexual violence victimization and DA controlling for demographic characteristics. Multiple stratified MANOVA models were used to detect the effect of sexual violence victimization on DA symptoms while controlling for key demographic characteristics. Among all 61,187 participants, more than 5% ( n = 3,240) were victims of sexual violence, out of which 18.82% reported being diagnosed with depression, 8.37% reported an anxiety disorder, and 28.28% reported being diagnosed with DA disorder. Victims of sexual violence reported significantly higher number of days when they had trouble concentrating, sleep difficulties, poor appetite, little interest or pleasure in activities, blamed themselves for personal failure, felt depressed, and had little energy. The present study highlights the importance of collecting nationally representative data from victims of sexual violence and extends previous findings from clinically based studies. This study also serves as an example of an analytic approach that addresses a public health priority area by drawing on data from multiple topic-specific BRFSS modules. </jats:p

Masculine Traits and Depressive Symptoms in Older and Younger Men and Women

Evidence suggests that men who strongly endorse masculine traits display an atypical presentation of depression, including more externalizing symptoms (e.g., anger or substance use), but fewer typical, internalizing symptoms (e.g., depressed mood or crying). This phenomenon has not been adequately explored in older adults or women. The current study used the externalizing subscale of the Masculine Depression Scale in older and younger men and women to detect atypical symptoms. It was predicted that individuals who more strongly endorsed masculine traits would have higher scores on the measure of externalizing symptoms relative to a measure of typical depressive symptoms Center for Epidemiologic Studies–Depression Scale. It was anticipated that results would differ by age-group but not by gender. Multigroup path analysis was used to test the hypothesis. The hypothesized path model, in which endorsement of masculine traits was associated with lower scores on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies–Depression Scale and with scores on the externalizing, but not internalizing, factor of the Masculine Depression Scale, fit the data well. Results differed significantly by age-group and gender. Masculine individuals reported lower levels of typical depressive symptoms relative to externalizing symptoms, but further research is needed within age- and gender groups. Results are consistent with the gendered responding framework and suggest that current assessment tools, which tend to focus on internalizing symptoms of depression, may not detect depression in individuals who endorse masculine traits

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Gender differences in the impact of perceived social support on the relation between disability and depressive symptoms

Older adults with functional disabilities are at an increased risk for experiencing depressive symptoms. Studies using cross-sectional analyses have reported that social support mediates the relation between depressive symptoms and functional disability in older adults. Nonetheless, few studies have investigated this model over time. Additionally, the role of gender in this mediation relation has not been explored. This study used latent growth curve modeling to investigate the potential mediating role of perceived social support within the relationship between disability and depression and whether gender moderates that relation. Twins (n = 656) and co-twins (n = 678) from the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging were analyzed separately to cross-validate the results through a nonindependent replication. Four waves of mailed questionnaires were examined, spanning sixteen years. The overall analysis yielded a poor model fit. Mediation and moderation analyses could not be performed due to inadequate model fit. Poor model fit was also evident in sample two. Post-hoc analyses in sample two, in which observations from the last time of measurement were excluded, suggest that perceived social support may have a direct effect on depressive symptoms rather than playing a mediating role, but replication of these results is needed

Gauging support for the death penalty in cases of sexual assault: the interplay between respondent characteristics and victim age

We extend this line of inquiry by asking survey respondents to indicate their support for application of the death penalty in cases of rape/sexual assault across multiple victim age categories. Logistic regression is used

College student perceptions of system-culpability in the frequency of wrongful convictions: gauging the importance of respondent characteristics

We examined the influence of survey respondent characteristic on perceptions of the culpability of criminal justice actors, contamination of forensic evidence, and mistaken eyewitness testimony in the frequency of wrongful convictions