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Puerto Rican adults who moved from Puerto Rico to the U.S. mainland during their youth and have been living in the mainland for several decades provide a multifaceted case for analyzing cultural identity. Our article focuses on a group of Puerto Ricans living in Boston and their discussions of their own cultural identity, including their sense of belonging and home. The current study is based on semistructured interviews with a subsample of 26 participants from a large longitudinal cohort study of 1,500 respondents. We analyzed data collected through in-depth interviews and use dialogical self theory (DST) as a framework for understanding the multiple discourses in their responses. Three main I-positions that we identify include I-as-Puerto Rican, I-as-realist, and I-as-other. The dialogical process of these I-positions demonstrates the complex connections participants had to place. Findings can inform future studies of acculturation and assimilation among older Puerto Ricans of the diaspora.

Puerto Ricans are the second largest Hispanic group in the U.S. and older adults have significant health disparities. Educational programs that address heart disease risk for this population have rarely been developed and implemented.To address this gap, the Heart Healthy Initiative for Puerto Rican adults is being developed. To develop it as a participatory program, the community members were asked about their perspectives.Five focus groups with 28 participants, aged 45-60, were conducted, transcribed and analyzed using Thematic Analysis. In-depth analysis of meanings of health promoting behaviors, in the context of cultural beliefs and values was carried out.The following themes were identified: Health as balance and integration; Health as connection of self, connection with others; Cultural meanings of lifestyle choices; Stresses and struggles. Participants suggested that the program should have significant variety and a holistic perspective, be sensitive to different needs and motivations, stimulate mutual understanding and shared cultural meanings.The program needs to support lifestyle changes which maximally preserve traditions and to introduce multi-level changes.The identified cultural meanings of diet, physical activity and relationships were taken into account to develop the educational curriculum.

Self-rated health (SRH) is an important indicator of overall health, predicting morbidity and mortality. This paper investigates what individuals incorporate into their self-assessments of health and how acculturation plays a part in this assessment. The relationship of acculturation to SRH and whether it moderates the association between indicators of health and SRH is also examined.The paper is based on data from adults in the Boston Puerto Rican Health Study, living in the greater Boston area (n=1357) mean age 57.2 (SD = 7.6). We used multiple regression analysis and testing for moderation effects.The strongest predictors of poor SRH were the number of existing medical conditions, functional problems, allostatic load and depressive symptoms. Poor SRH was also associated with being female, fewer years of education, heavy alcohol use, smoking, poverty, and low emotional support. More acculturated Puerto Rican adults rated their health more positively, which corresponded to better indicators of physical and psychological health. Additionally, acculturation moderated the association between some indicators of morbidity (functional status and depressive symptoms) and SRH.Self-assessments of overall health integrate diverse indicators, including psychological symptoms, functional status and objective health indicators such as chronic conditions and allostatic load. However, adults' assessments of overall health differed by acculturation, which moderated the association between health indicators and SRH. The data suggest that when in poor health, those less acculturated may understate the severity of their health problems when rating their overall health, thus SRH might thus conceal disparities. Using SRH can have implications for assessing health disparities in this population.

Much has changed in health psychology since Rethinking Methods in Psychology (Smith, Harre, & Langenhove, 1995) was published 15 years ago. Today, this shift in stance in health psychology research...

The current rise of immigration to the United States is being accompanied by a dramatic increase of newly arrived immigrant children to American schools. Therefore, there is a clear need to gain an understanding of the way in which the children themselves conceptualize achievement and how they attribute success and failure in their new unfamiliar surroundings. We examined immigrant children's narratives elicited by a modified version of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) (C. Suarez-Orozco & Suarez-Orozco) collected in two separate studies. The first study, Transformations: Immigration, Family Life, and Achievement Motivation Among Latino Adolescents (C. Suarez-Orozco & Suarez-Orozco, 1995) is archived in the Murray Research Archive, Harvard–MIT Data Center, Harvard University. The second study from which we drew data is the Longitudinal Immigrant Student Adaptation Study (LISA) (C. Suarez-Orozco, Suarez-Orozco, & Todorova, in press). In this combination of current and archival data, we applied a unified...

The article discusses the experiences of women facing infertility and infertility treatment in Bulgaria with a focus on identity construction. A theoretical framework invoking an understanding of identity as a social and contextual phenomenon, contingent upon local interpersonal relations and cultural meanings, informs our study. We use semi-structured interviews, which are analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Using this method, we have identified the following overarching themes: Identity as Incomplete, Absent or Invisible; Identity as Present but Separate; Identity Shifts Through Dis/Embodiment; Identity as Nurtured and Nurturing. The study delineates the contextual identity shifts in the social and medical settings and the extent to which the women we interviewed experienced themselves as separate, autonomous and agentic. We discuss some of the possible interpretations of these findings, invoking the meanings and metaphors of the individual and the relational available in Bulgarian ...

On behalf of the European Health Psychology Society, I would like to extend a warm welcome to all delegates at this, the 23rd Conference of our Society, in collaboration with the Italian Heath Psyc...