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This paper reports a study of the premedical student culture at a major university, based on fieldwork and interviews with 30 premedical students. The paper examines the role of stereotypes in the premedical culture; specifically, the common belief in "cut-throats" among premedical students. Cut-throats are described as excessively competitive, selfish, gradehungry students who cheat, steal books and lab reports, and sabotage lab experiments. Despite the widespread belief, our findings suggest cut-throats are a myth. We found more evidence for cooperative than cut-throat behavior. The myth emerges from the competitive and pressured situation of premedical students and the uncertainty of the medical school admission process, and is in part a manifestation of students' collective anxiety. More significantly, it provides cultural explanations for failure and success for premedical students. We discuss its connection to the general premedical stereotype and its relation to pre-medical education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how multiple roles affect the mental health of the elderly in Japan and the United States, two countries with vastly different cultures. Hypotheses were drawn based on the cultural differences in role experiences, and these hypotheses are tested by analyzing nationally representative samples of the elderly in these countries. The results show that Americans are more likely to be involved in roles related to family, work, and community, while the Japanese are more likely to be involved in only those roles related to family and work. Multiple roles are also found to be less beneficialfor the mental health of Japanese elderly compared to American counterparts. National differences in the effects of individual roles and role configurations on mental health are also documented. Overall, the results show the importance of broad cultural contexts for understanding the relationship between roles and mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than 100 studies have cited M. Harvey Brenner's (1973) claim that fluctuations in the economy increase the onset of mental illness and thus generate increases in mental hospitalization. Published attempts to replicate Brenner, however, have considered only twentieth-century data. One of Brenner's most memorable claims was that a stable inverse relationship between mental illness and the economy could be seen over a 127-year span beginning in the early nineteenth century. Unfortunately, no research since Brenner's has considered nineteenth-century populations. In this paper we analyze the hypothesis that economic change provokes a substantial fraction of first admissions to mental hospitals. We used admissions registers from the three institutions to construct a data base that approximates a psychiatric case register for a nineteenth-century American city from 1881 to 1891. Time-series tests show no support for the "provocation" hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, a body of research has developed which purports to show that the well-established relationship between race and psychological distress is duc entirely to social class. In our paper we demonstrate that this view is incorrect: Most prior research has assumed that the effects of race and social class are additive; our analysis shows that they are actually interactive. The form of interaction is such that thc true effect of race is suppressed and tire true effect of social class is magnified in a model that fails to take the interaction into consideration. An analysis of eight different epidemiologic surveys documents this result and shows that race differences in psychological distress are particularly pronounced among people with low incomes. On the basis of this result we call for renewed interest in the effect of race on mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]