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In the United States, 17% of children and adolescents are overweight and 20% live in a food insecure household. Previous studies examining the association between household food insecurity and overweight among children have been inconclusive but are limited insofar as they did not assess child-specific measures of food insecurity and overweight. In response, this study examined the association between food insecurity and child overweight status when these variables were measured for the same child using information on children (n = 1031) aged 10-15 y from the Three-City Study. Approximately 8% of the children were food insecure, whereas 50% were either at risk of overweight or overweight. Bivariate analyses indicated that there were no significant differences in the prevalence of at risk of overweight and overweight between food secure and food insecure children. Gender, race, and income showed similar patterns. Results from logistic regression analyses also indicated that the likelihood of being overweight or at risk of overweight was not significantly different for food secure and food insecure children. Although child-specific food insecurity was not associated with overweight in this sample of low-income children, food insecurity and overweight coexist among these low-income children, because ~25% of the food insecure children were overweight. Additional research is needed to explore the potential relationships between food insecurity and overweight and to better inform policy that attempts to address these issues among low-income households with children.

Studies addressed the hypothesis that people perceive lower status individuals as more feminine- than masculine-typed, and higher status individuals as more masculine- than feminine-typed, even when the feminine and masculine descriptors are equated in terms of their potency, evaluation, or activity; the latter are underlying dimensions of meaning (Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957), and potency and activity are linked to status. Participants were presented the minimal status instantiation of Conway, Pizzamiglio, and Mount (1996) and rated low- and high-status individuals in terms of Adjective Check List (Gough & Heilbrun, 1980) descriptors. The expected status X gender-typing interactions emerged in Study 1 for the negative low-potency indices for male and female participants, and for the positive low-potency indices for female participants alone. Similarly, the status X gender-typing interactions emerged in Study 2 for the low-potency indices, for both low and high activity. Contrary to expectation, high-potency terms were generally attributed to high-status individuals. The findings indicated that status seems to be gendered beyond the correspondence observed in prior research between status and gender for the dimensions of potency and activity. KEY WORDS: gender; status; potency; activity; evaluation.

This article examines the relationship between depression during pregnancy and reductions in fetal growth. Results indicate that there is a significant relationship between elevated scores on a depression scale and lower birth weights among women from lower social classes.

Two key questions are addressed regarding the intersection of socioeconomic status, biology, and low birth weight over the life course. First, do the income and other socioeconomic conditions of a mother during her pregnancy affect her chances of having a low-birth-weight infant net of her own birth weight, that of the father, and other family-related, unobserved factors? Second, does an individual's birth weight status affect his or her adult life chances net of socioeconomic status? These questions have implications for the way we conceive of the relationship between socioeconomic status and health over the life course, specifically in sorting out causal directionality. We use intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, for the years 1968 through 1992. Results of sibling comparisons (family-fixed-effects models) demonstrate that maternal income does not appear to have a significant impact on birth weight. However, low birth weight results in lower educational attainment net of other factors. These findings suggest that, when considered across generations, causality may not be as straightforward as implied by cross-sectional or unigenerational longitudinal studies.

The interactions of skin color, socioeconomic status (SES) and blood pressure have been investigated in a group of Brazilians, using cultural consonance in lifestyle as a measure of the cultural dimension of SES. Among darker skinned Brazilians, adjusted systolic blood pressure was 16.2 mm Hg higher and adjusted diastolic blood pressure was 9.7 higher for those with lower cultural consonance. For Brazilians with lighter skins, blood pressure increases of 6.4 mm Hg (systolic) and 1.0 mm Hg (diastolic) were associated with lower cultural consonance.

This article provides a comprehensive review of research on the effects of neighborhood residence on child and adolescent well-being. The first section reviews key methodological issues. The following section considers links between neighborhood characteristics and child outcomes and suggests the importance of high socioeconomic status (SES) for achievement and low SES and residential instability for behavioral/emotional outcomes. The third section identifies 3 pathways (institutional resources, relationships, and norms/collective efficacy) through which neighborhoods might influence development, and which represent an extension of models identified by C. Jencks and S. Mayer (1990) and R. J. Sampson (1992). The models provide a theoretical base for studying neighborhood mechanisms and specify different levels (individual, family, school, peer, community) at which processes may operate. Implications for an emerging developmental framework for research on neighborhoods are discussed.

The life-history strategies of organisms are sculpted over evolutionary time by the relative prospects of present and future reproductive success. As a consequence, animals of many species show flexible behavioral responses to environmental and social change. Here we show that disruption of the habitat of a colony of African cichlid fish, Haplochromis burtoni (Gunther) caused males to switch social status more frequently than animals kept in a stable environment. H. burtoni males can be either reproductively active, guarding a territory, or reproductively inactive (nonterritorial). Although on average 25-50% of the males are territorial in both the stable and unstable environments, during the 20-week study, nearly two-thirds of the animals became territorial for at least I week. Moreover, many fish changed social status several times. Surprisingly, the induced changes in social status caused changes in somatic growth. Nonterritorial males and animals ascending in social rank showed an increased growth rate whereas territorial males and animals descending in social rank slowed their growth rate or even shrank. Similar behavioral and physiological changes are caused by social change in animals kept in stable environmental conditions, although at a lower rate. This suggests that differential growth, in interaction with environmental conditions, is a central mechanism underlying the changes in social status. Such reversible phenotypic plasticity in a crucial life-history trait may have evolved to enable animals to shift resources from reproduction to growth or vice versa, depending on present and future reproductive prospects.