Family factors and the media have been established as determinants of body satisfaction, yet little research has looked at the contribution of spousal influence in body dissatisfaction. Marital quality and satisfaction can be a protective factor in the health of women, while high rates of criticism have been associated with poorer health outcomes. The present study investigated the relationship...

OBJECTIVE Decreased hippocampal volume is one of the hypothesized pathological features of schizophrenia, but it is not known if this abnormality is familially transmitted. The aim of this study was to measure the hippocampal volume of the parents of schizophrenic probands, in relationship to the apparent transmission of genetic risk. METHOD Eighteen subjects from families consisting of a sch...

There has been a long-standing interest in better understanding how social factors contribute to racial disparities in health, including birth outcomes. A recent emphasis in this context has been on identifying the effects of stress exposure and protective factors experienced over the entire lifetime. Yet despite repeated calls for a life course approach to research on this topic, very few stud...

Cohabitation has become a typical part of most young adults’ pathway toward marriage. Yet, most prior work focuses on expectations to marry and has ignored cohabitation. We examine factors associated with teenagers’ expectations to cohabit and their expectations to marry. Since most young adults are not replacing marriage with cohabitation, but instead cohabit and then marry, it is important to...

Few case control studies were conducted to explore risk factors for severe cases of 2009 influenza A (H1N1) with the mild cases as controls. Mild and severe cases of 2009 influenza A (H1N1), 230 cases each, were randomly selected from nine cities in Zhejiang Province, China, and unmatched case control study was conducted. This study found that it averagely took 5 days for the severe cases of 20...

Despite increasing attention to suicide as a preventable outcome associated with mood disorders, little attention has been given to the risk factors for suicide among women. In this paper, we: 1) review the current literature regarding risk factors for suicide among women; 2) address the theories regarding risk and protective factors for women; 3) integrate the findings into a practical assessm...

In data from the Texas Educational Agency and the Health Resources and Services Administration, we found fewer autism diagnoses in school districts with higher percentages of Hispanic children. Our results are consistent with previous reports of autism rates 2 to 3 times as high among non-Hispanic Whites as among Hispanics. Socioeconomic factors failed to explain lower autism prevalence among H...

Contributions of the Project Competence Longitudinal Study (PCLS) to resilience science and developmental psychopathology are highlighted in this article. Initiated by Norman Garmezy, the PCLS contributed models, measures, and methods, as well as working definitions of concepts like competence, developmental tasks, protective factors, and resilience. Findings from the study corroborated the fea...

The association between community-aggregated levels of peer and individual risk and protective factors and prevalence of adolescent substance use was examined in repeated cross-sectional data among youth in 41 communities ranging in population from 1,578 to 106,221. The association between community levels of these peer and individual risk and protective factors in 2000 and substance use 2 year...

PURPOSE To identify individual, family and community-level risk and protective factors for violence perpetration in a national sample of adolescents. METHODS Analysis of two waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The key outcome variable was Time 2 violence involvement, approximately 1 year after initial data collection, measured by a validated scale of viole...