Search

CONTEXT: Although Croatia is still in an early stage of HIV infection, the rising rates of infection in other central and eastern European countries suggest the need to understand HIV [...]

Among numerous procedures for determination of the psychophysical relation, one approach has seldom been applied. Essential in this method is to present a set of stimuli whose intensity increases in fixed time following different forms. The objective stimulus increment, which the subjects perceive as linear growth directly, represents the inverse psychophysical relation. In this paper the method was tested in the fields of click frequency and sound pressure. This procedure was named 'Perception of the Form of Stimulus Increment in Time'. In comparison to other psychophysical approaches, this one has several advantages. The principal ones are the following: (1) In assessing the psychophysical relation it is not necessary to try to measure the perceptual magnitude; and (2) the psychophysical relation is directly determined by its dynamic pattern. In this paper modifications to the method are reported which facilitate the subject's task and avoid some differences in subjects' individual approaches to the task. The modified procedure leads to results satisfactorily independent of the influence of the factors irrelevant to the psychophysical relationship.

Two groups of refugee families participated in a program aimed at preventing children's mental health problems. The program attempted to gain insight into the character and scope of problems of refugee families and to develop and implement a spectrum of interventions that would meet their specific psychological needs. Data about the family situation and the psychosocial adaptation of refugee children to displacement was gathered during detailed structured interviews with the mothers, while the study families were accommodated either in a shelter or with host families. A considerable range of stress-related reactions among displaced children were identified (e.g., sleeping and eating disorders, separation fears, and withdrawal or aggression). Refugee children exhibited a significantly higher incidence of stress reactions if their mothers had difficulty coping with the stress of displacement. The findings also indicated that children in the collective shelter were at greater mental health risk than their peers housed with host families.

This study addresses the relations between AIDS-related knowledge, attitudes, and behavior change among university students. A questionnaire covering such issues and personal background variables was administered to 750 students at the University of Zagreb. Overall, 62.7% of the knowledge items were answered corrrectly, while functional, self-protective aspects of knowledge proved to be much better than general knowledge. On the average, attitudinal responses were moderately liberal. Both self-reported change in risk-reduction behavior and personal concern due to the appearance of AIDS were very small. Correlations of risk-reducing behavior with permissive (.15) and restrictive (.14) attitude orientations and with general and functional knowledge (.08) were modest. The level of personal concern correlated neither with permissive attitudes nor with functional knowledge, while it correlated negatively with restrictive attitudes (-.20) and with general knowledge (-.08). Substantial association was only established between functional knowledge and permissive (.51) and restrictive attitude orientations (-.23). It is concluded that, in addition to knowledge and attitudes, a number of factors which restrain desired behavioral adjustment should be considered in anti-AIDS campaigns, such as perceived level of exposure to HIV in a particular environment, young age-specific illusion of invulnerability, peer norms, and others.

This article presents an attempt to find out whether supplementing the original nine subdimensions of the widely used Correctional Institutions Environment Scale (CIES) with a few additional ones provides any significant new information about institutional climate. Three new subscales containing 39 items were developed. They were named Judiciary System, Socio-spatial Conditions, and Physical Environment Conditions. The instrument was administered to all 398 male residents in both a maximum and a minimum security correctional facility. The factor analysis showed that the new subscales were related to the same general factor as the original ones. The linear stepwise regression indicated that the Physical Environment Conditions and Socio-spatial Conditions subscales were superior to the six original ones in discriminating between the two very different penal institutions. The proposed nine sub-dimensions of the CIES seem to be neither the only nor the most distinctive attributes of the correctional social climate.