Following Kohn and Schooler's theoretical and analytical frameworks, this study establishes that the reciprocal relationships between self-directed occupational conditions and both self-directed orientation and intellectual functioning are the same for older US and Japanese men. Using longitudinal data from representative samples of US men employed in 1964 and 1994 and Japanese men employed in 1979 and 2006, we conducted multi-group structural equation modeling. In both countries, self-directed complex work increased both self-directed orientation and intellectual functioning. Reciprocally, these two types of psychological functioning had positive effects on self-directed occupational conditions. These findings indicate that although there exist cultural and structural differences in occupational settings, in stable societies, job conditions can continue to affect and reflect central aspects of psychological functioning in relatively late life stages.

We examine the effects of socio-environmental change on personality in Mali in three ways, using data from a longitudinal two-wave (1994, 2004) survey conducted in rural Mali. Firstly, we compare the between-wave personality stability of Anxiety, Self-confidence, Mastery/Fatalism, and Authoritarianism with that in USA, Japan, Poland, and Ukraine. Secondly, we examine socio-economic hardship and political instability in pre-industrial Mali. Thirdly, we examine patterns of psychological reaction to political and social change during the study period. Our findings have implications for comparisons and generalizations across times and cultures about the contribution of socio-environmental conditions to over-time change in personality.

This chapter examines cross-national differences in individual values, attitudes, and behaviors. The central question raised is how social-structural and cultural factors account for the differences found. After discussing a series of theoretical issues raised by this question, the chapter reviews the findings of four quantitative sociological research programs on modem cross-national differences. The program on individual modernity led by Alex Inkeles established that socialstructural conditions associated with industrialization are linked to an increase in individuals' being open to new experience, rejecting traditional authority, and taking a rational, ambitious, orderly approach to both work and human problems. The cross-national research on the Kohn-Schooler hypothesis that self-directed work increases intellectual functioning and self-directed orientations confirmed the generality of that hypothesis and established that the social status and social class differences in these psychological characteristics found within different countries are largely the result of social-structurally determined differences in the opportunity for occupational self-direction. Eric Wright's cross-national research IThe US government has the right to retain a nonexclusive, royalty-free license in and to any

Background: Some symptom dimensions in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients have a familial and putative genetic foundation, based on replicated findings in studies of sib-pairs with OCD. However, these symptom dimensions are all from exploratory factor analyses of Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale Symptom Checklist ratings based on non-empirically derived symptom categories, rather than individual symptoms. Methods: In this study, we used a novel latent variable mixture model analysis to identify meaningful patient subgroupings. This was preceded by a confirmatory factor analysis of a 65-item OCD symptom inventory from 398 OCD probands, which yielded a five-factor solution. Data from all five symptom factors were used in a latent variable mixture model analysis, which identified two statistically separate OCD subpopulations. Results: One group of probands had a significantly higher proportion of OCD-affected relatives (parents or close parental relatives), whereas the other group had a less prevalent familial OCD. The group with the more familial OCD was also found to have an earlier age of OCD onset, more severe OCD symptoms, and greater psychiatric comorbidity and impairment. Conclusions: Especially if the results are verified in other samples, this research paradigm, which identified characteristics of individuals with familial OCD, should prove useful in carrying out genome-wide linkage and association studies of OCD and may provide a model for other symptom-based studies of additional medical disorders.

We analyzed the effects of patterns of brain lesions from penetrating head injuries on memory performance in participants of the Vietnam Head Injury Study (Grafman et al., 1988). Classes of lesion patterns were determined by mixture modeling (L. K. Muthén & B. O. Muthén, 1998–2004). Memory performance was assessed for short-term memory (STM), semantic memory, verbal episodic memory, and visual episodic memory. The striking finding was that large STM deficits were observed in all classes of brain-injured individuals, regardless of lesion location pattern. These effects persist despite frequent concomitant effects of depressive symptomatology and substance dependence. Smaller deficits in semantic memory, verbal episodic memory, and visual episodic memory depended on lesion location, in a manner roughly consistent with the existing neuropsychological literature. The theoretical and clinical implications of the striking, seemingly permanent STM deficits in individuals with penetrating head injuries are discussed.

BACKGROUND:Cohen et al.'s (1990, 1999) concept of context has been employed to explain various schizophrenic cognitive deficits. Braver et al.'s (2001) modified definition allows us to link context to cognitive complexity and explain a range of our experimental findings.METHOD:Saccadic and manual responses to experimental paradigms involving familiar and unfamiliar versions of tasks varying in stimulus-response compatibility, response familiarity, and temporal factors were used. These include comparison of acoustic and visually driven saccades and antisaccades, manual and saccadic pattern reproduction, and colour (cognitively guided) saccades with two delay intervals.RESULTS:In one experiment, schizophrenic participants, unlike controls, made fewer errors on the auditory compared to the visual antisaccade task, suggesting that prepotent responses are more easily inhibited when stimulus-response compatibility is reduced. In a second experiment in which a left-right response sequence is reproduced manually or saccadically, schizophrenic performance is impaired when the novel and thus more complex saccadic response is required. In the third experiment, a colour signal is interpreted to determine the correct direction of a saccade. With two different blocked delay intervals, shortening the delay results in schizophrenic performance decline, suggesting difficulty adjusting to temporal context changes.CONCLUSION:These results, together with our previous findings (Schooler et al., 1997a; Zahn et al., 1998) suggest schizophrenic context processing deficits become increasingly evident as contexts become more complex. These results may be due to microgaps in schizophrenic individuals' maintenance of context.

This chapter details the history of the Laboratory of Socioenvironmental Studies (LSES) of the Intramural Research Program (IRP) of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) ‐ a topic that might at first glance seem of little interest to any but the relatively few who were part of that history. Nevertheless, for better or for worse, the history of the Laboratory is of very direct relevance to the field of sociology and of particular relevance to sociologists interested in mental health. The nature of the Laboratory’s accomplishments illustrate what sociological researchers working within a government research setting, especially one focused on mental health issues, can add to our theoretical and practical knowledge of how environmental factors, especially those affected by a society’s social structure, can affect normal and abnormal human functioning. The history of the LSES’s decline in size and resources provides an example of the problems that sociology faces in establishing and maintaining itself in presentday governmental and academic scientific settings, particularly biomedical ones. Furthermore, this example is not a trivial one, the intramural research programs of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), although not always well-known or understood outside of the NIH, are generally seen within the NIH as the most prestigious units within the various Institutes. Their relative successes and failures often appear to have a notable effect on the programmatic directions of the NIH programs that fund academic research. More generally, gaining some understanding of the changing currents of scientific thought and medical values underlying the history and predicament of the LSES within the NIMH IRP tells us something of the nature of the losses that would occur, not only to sociology, but also to various of the ‘supposedly’ harder medical and biological sciences, should sociological research be substantially down-sized. As I hope I will make clear, such down-sizing would be especially harmful, if this means that sociology is squeezed out of relevant government and academic institutions where it can interact in a symbiotic and productive manner with other disciplines. An unfortunate bonus to my discussion of the LSES is that, as we shall see, the fates of other behavioral science researchers, as well as of the IRP units representing sub-disciplines of psychology that do not directly study brain function, closely parallel those of the sociologists of the LSES. Thus, the description of the LSES generalizes to other behavioral and social sciences.

In this article, I call into serious question Salthouse's (2006) conclusions evaluating and disparaging the validity of the “use it or lose it” hypothesis regarding mental exercise and mental aging. I do so, in some part, by using data not discussed by Salthouse. The core of my argument relies heavily on a critical assessment of the conclusions that Salthouse derived from both his theoretical reasoning and his review of the literature. The more judicious conclusion I reach is that, although the whole story regarding cognitive function and aging is not known, at some level and to some degree, “using” it often delays the eventuality of “losing” it.

We examine how parents' relationships with their 13- to 25-year-old offspring affect the parents' willingness to ask them for help with financial and personal problems 20 years later. Husbands and wives were interviewed in 1974 and 1994; a child was interviewed in 1974. We used two aspects of parental style, responsiveness and restrictive dominance, to predict parents' willingness to request help from a child 20 years later. Structural equation modeling analyses revealed the following: (a) mothers' willingness to ask an adult child for help with a personal problem was increased by higher levels of responsiveness; (b) mothers' willingness to ask for financial help was increased by responsive and decreased by restrictive-dominant maternal behavior; and (c) neither responsive nor restrictive-dominant paternal behavior affected fathers' later willingness to ask an adult child for help of either kind.

We examine the relations among socioeconomic status, control beliefs, and two coping styles (problem-focused vs. emotion-focused) in the context of financial stress. Findings indicate that low socioeconomic status (SES) is linked to greater use of emotion-focused financial coping and lesser use of problem-focused financial coping. The effects of SES on the use of problem-focused financial coping appear to be entirely mediated by two measures of perceived control: self-confidence and fatalism. In contrast, the effects of SES on emotion-focused financial coping are not mediated in this way. Results also indicated that problem-focused and emotion-focused financial coping are differentially related to financial stress and to general psychosocial distress. These results suggest that low SES may decrease one's control beliefs, which in turn decrease the likelihood of choosing effective financial coping processes, resulting in double disadvantage.