Cigarettes are present during the everyday life of the nicotine addicts and not only theirs. A cigarette always accompanies successfully the cup of coffee, the parties, the times we feel depressed, the times we feel nervous, and boredom. But the question that comes into my mind is: Are cigarettes just a bad habit or are they the surest way to lungs cancer?
We can have endless discussions about the effects that nicotine has over our health. We all know that nicotine gives the smokers breathing disorders, that it can even lead to lungs cancer, that people who smoke have higher risk of heart attack. Also nicotine makes the skin, the fingers and the teeth yellow, and makes the smokers grow older in a faster time.
A recent study from the United States of America showed that men who smoke have a 30 times higher risk of starting malignant oral tumors, while the ex smokers have a 9 times higher one than the men who don’t smoke. There is also a well established relationship between the people who smoke pipe and lips cancer, although it has not yet been clearly evaluated the amount of damage that the heat produces and the one produced by the material of the pipe.
The risk of smoking is highly connected with the increase of the number of cigarettes and with the length one gets exposed to this factor. The risk factor equals that of non smokers after around 10 years one quits. These values are smaller in the case of women, without knowing the mechanism that makes them stronger and protects them. So, the women who smoke have a 6 times higher risk than the ones who don’t smoke and his value reduces to 3 for the former smokers. Studies show that around 92% of the deaths from oral or pharyngeal cancer in the case of men may be attributed to smoking. The percentage for women is of 61%.
Most of the persons who smoke start this “ritual” during their adolescence. A study conducted in England showed that 450 children smoke daily, and most of the ones who die because nicotine are those who have started smoking during their adolescence.
There are a lot of people who see smoking as a “bad habit” saying “it is a vice that make me feel good, I am spoiling myself with a cigarette. As a smoker, you have the tendency to ignore the fact that you are addicted, you smoke because you like it. This is wrong, because studies have shown that tobacco gives the same dependence as heroine or cocaine. In fact smoking is an entire concourse of circumstances, as it is both a habit and an addiction. And these two elements, when combined make smoking a habit very hard to quit.
On a sample made of 23 people, researchers have found out that 10 have managed to quit smoking, 13 of them smoke on a regular basis and 9 of them plan to quit this vice in the future.
But we all have other reasons that make us postpone this decision.
I wouldn’t feel good without a cigarette…
The image we have about ourselves is very difficult o change and a lot of smokers cannot get used to the idea of being non smokers. But the people who quit smoking agree that it is difficult for them to imagine themselves as smokers. It is only a matter of usage.
Smoking is one of the few pleasures. Enjoy it!
If you smoke one box of cigarettes per day that means that you smoked 7300 cigarettes last year. How many of these have you really enjoyed? Try to see the “pleasure” in a different light. Do you really enjoy smoking so much, or do you honestly think that you will not enjoy the life of a non smoker?
All my friends smoke
But also the people from the street, the ones from your office, and the ones in bars smoke. The truth is that there will always be smokers everywhere. If this is the reason for which you don’t quit, than try to weight the disadvantages of smoking as well…
There are a lot of persons who see smoking as a “social” habit. If this is the case, it may be a lot more difficult, but you must try to determine your friends to help you or to make new friends among those who quit smoking. If your partner smokes and you have decided to quit this bad habit, you must both make a compromise and have in your house a non-smoking area.
Smoking helps me relax. Nicotine is a powerful energizer that makes your pulse rise. It releases adrenaline into your blood in just a few minutes. It is also a powerful drug which makes you want some more 15 minutes after you have put down the previous cigarette. As long as you smoke, you will never feel relaxed because your body is always asking for the next “dose”. The oscillating nicotine level turns a smoker into a person who doesn’t relax.
Smoking helps me concentrate
It helps you concentrate in the same way it makes you relax. As long as you smoke, you will never be able to fully concentrate, because you will always think about your next cigarette. Besides, smoking affects the blood vessels, which means that less oxygen gets into your brain. As for your concentration power…
Smoking helps me when I am bored
Boredom is a psychological state. Do something in order to have fun. Think of a thing you want but can’t afford and in the same time think about the amount of money you spend on cigarettes and the time you waste every day for this bad habit (2 hours for a box of cigarettes every day).
I am too young to quit now
If you are young that doesn’t mean that you are invincible. Even the persons under 30 can suffer from diseases caused by nicotine, so think that your next cigarette may be the one that kills you.
It is too late, the damage has been done
Nobody knows for sure the number of cigarettes it takes to lead to cancer. The number varies from one person to another. Anyway, if you aren’t sick yet, you will discover that it is amazing how rapidly you will recover. And even if you suffer from any diseases caused by nicotine, if you quit now, it will be much easier to beat the disease.
I only smoke when I go to parties
There isn’t such thing as “party smoking”. Almost every people who don’t smoke are disturbed by the smoke and almost every smokers wished they hadn’t smoked.
It is my body, so, if I feel like it, I smoke
If someone attacked someone from your family on the street, you wouldn’t like it. So, think about the fact that smoking affects the active smokers and the passive ones in the same way.
I will try to reduce the numbers of cigarettes I smoke
Studies confirm the fact that the ones who only try to reduce the number have a smaller chance to succeed because they feel very impatient until their next cigarette and it becomes much more important for them. To cut them off all of a sudden will work much better, as this will reduce your worries.
I don’t have a strong will
If you are a smoker now, it means that you have a strong will. Remember the time when you started smoking and the cigarettes had that awful taste. You didn’t quit until you got used to that awful taste. The other way round works just as fine.
I will gain weight
It is true that nicotine is a powerful incentive and when you quit smoking your metabolism gets lazier. But you can spend one hour every day exercising. This would be in so many ways better for your health and it would also have the same incentive effect nicotine has.
I need cigarettes when I drink
There are a lot of people who think that smoking is very connected to drinking and this bound seems very strong to them. If possible, try not to drink any alcohol when you try to quit smoking and replace the morning coffee with milk. Drink just water or juice because these drinks don’t ask for a cigarette to accompany them.
There are a lot of methods you can quit smoking with. But the first thing you have to do is to be conscious about the damage they produce. Once you have settled this, to quit smoking is a piece of cake.


PostgreSQL supports basic table partitioning. This section describes why and how to implement partitioning as part of your database design.
Partitioning refers to splitting what is logically one large table into smaller physical pieces. Partitioning can provide several benefits:
Query performance can be improved dramatically in certain situations, particularly when most of the heavily accessed rows of the table are in a single partition or a small number of partitions. The partitioning substitutes for leading columns of indexes, reducing index size and making it more likely that the heavily-used parts of the indexes fit in memory.
When queries or updates access a large percentage of a single partition, performance can be improved by taking advantage of sequential scan of that partition instead of using an index and random access reads scattered across the whole table.
Bulk loads and deletes can be accomplished by adding or removing partitions, if that requirement is planned into the partitioning design. ALTER TABLE NO INHERIT and DROP TABLE are both far faster than a bulk operation. These commands also entirely avoid the VACUUM overhead caused by a bulk DELETE.
Seldom-used data can be migrated to cheaper and slower storage media.
The benefits will normally be worthwhile only when a table would otherwise be very large. The exact point at which a table will benefit from partitioning depends on the application, although a rule of thumb is that the size of the table should exceed the physical memory of the database server.
Currently, PostgreSQL supports partitioning via table inheritance. Each partition must be created as a child table of a single parent table. The parent table itself is normally empty; it exists just to represent the entire data set. You should be familiar with inheritance (see Section 5.8) before attempting to set up partitioning.
The following forms of partitioning can be implemented in PostgreSQL:
The table is partitioned into "ranges" defined by a key column or set of columns, with no overlap between the ranges of values assigned to different partitions. For example one might partition by date ranges, or by ranges of identifiers for particular business objects.
The table is partitioned by explicitly listing which key values appear in each partition.
To set up a partitioned table, do the following:
Create the "master" table, from which all of the partitions will inherit.
This table will contain no data. Do not define any check constraints on this table, unless you intend them to be applied equally to all partitions. There is no point in defining any indexes or unique constraints on it, either.
Create several "child" tables that each inherit from the master table. Normally, these tables will not add any columns to the set inherited from the master.
We will refer to the child tables as partitions, though they are in every way normal PostgreSQL tables.
Add table constraints to the partition tables to define the allowed key values in each partition.
Typical examples would be:
CHECK ( x = 1 ) CHECK ( county IN ( 'Oxfordshire', 'Buckinghamshire', 'Warwickshire' )) CHECK ( outletID >= 100 AND outletID < 200 )
Ensure that the constraints guarantee that there is no overlap between the key values permitted in different partitions. A common mistake is to set up range constraints like:
CHECK ( outletID BETWEEN 100 AND 200 ) CHECK ( outletID BETWEEN 200 AND 300 )
This is wrong since it is not clear which partition the key value 200 belongs in.
Note that there is no difference in syntax between range and list partitioning; those terms are descriptive only.
For each partition, create an index on the key column(s), as well as any other indexes you might want. (The key index is not strictly necessary, but in most scenarios it is helpful. If you intend the key values to be unique then you should always create a unique or primary-key constraint for each partition.)
Optionally, define a trigger or rule to redirect data inserted into the master table to the appropriate partition.
Ensure that the constraint_exclusion configuration parameter is not disabled in postgresql.conf. If it is, queries will not be optimized as desired.
For example, suppose we are constructing a database for a large ice cream company. The company measures peak temperatures every day as well as ice cream sales in each region. Conceptually, we want a table like:
CREATE TABLE measurement ( city_id int not null, logdate date not null, peaktemp int, unitsales int );
We know that most queries will access just the last week's, month's or quarter's data, since the main use of this table will be to prepare online reports for management. To reduce the amount of old data that needs to be stored, we decide to only keep the most recent 3 years worth of data. At the beginning of each month we will remove the oldest month's data.
In this situation we can use partitioning to help us meet all of our different requirements for the measurements table. Following the steps outlined above, partitioning can be set up as follows:
The master table is the measurement table, declared exactly as above.
Next we create one partition for each active month:
CREATE TABLE measurement_y2006m02 ( ) INHERITS (measurement); CREATE TABLE measurement_y2006m03 ( ) INHERITS (measurement); ... CREATE TABLE measurement_y2007m11 ( ) INHERITS (measurement); CREATE TABLE measurement_y2007m12 ( ) INHERITS (measurement); CREATE TABLE measurement_y2008m01 ( ) INHERITS (measurement);
Each of the partitions are complete tables in their own right, but they inherit their definitions from the measurement table.
This solves one of our problems: deleting old data. Each month, all we will need to do is perform a DROP TABLE on the oldest child table and create a new child table for the new month's data.
We must provide non-overlapping table constraints. Rather than just creating the partition tables as above, the table creation script should really be:
CREATE TABLE measurement_y2006m02 ( CHECK ( logdate >= DATE '2006-02-01' AND logdate < DATE '2006-03-01' ) ) INHERITS (measurement); CREATE TABLE measurement_y2006m03 ( CHECK ( logdate >= DATE '2006-03-01' AND logdate < DATE '2006-04-01' ) ) INHERITS (measurement); ... CREATE TABLE measurement_y2007m11 ( CHECK ( logdate >= DATE '2007-11-01' AND logdate < DATE '2007-12-01' ) ) INHERITS (measurement); CREATE TABLE measurement_y2007m12 ( CHECK ( logdate >= DATE '2007-12-01' AND logdate < DATE '2008-01-01' ) ) INHERITS (measurement); CREATE TABLE measurement_y2008m01 ( CHECK ( logdate >= DATE '2008-01-01' AND logdate < DATE '2008-02-01' ) ) INHERITS (measurement);
We probably need indexes on the key columns too:
CREATE INDEX measurement_y2006m02_logdate ON measurement_y2006m02 (logdate); CREATE INDEX measurement_y2006m03_logdate ON measurement_y2006m03 (logdate); ... CREATE INDEX measurement_y2007m11_logdate ON measurement_y2007m11 (logdate); CREATE INDEX measurement_y2007m12_logdate ON measurement_y2007m12 (logdate); CREATE INDEX measurement_y2008m01_logdate ON measurement_y2008m01 (logdate);
We choose not to add further indexes at this time.
We want our application to be able to say INSERT INTO measurement ... and have the data be redirected into the appropriate partition table. We can arrange that by attaching a suitable trigger function to the master table. If data will be added only to the latest partition, we can use a very simple trigger function:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION measurement_insert_trigger() RETURNS TRIGGER AS $$ BEGIN INSERT INTO measurement_y2008m01 VALUES (NEW.*); RETURN NULL; END; $$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;
After creating the function, we create a trigger which calls the trigger function:
CREATE TRIGGER insert_measurement_trigger BEFORE INSERT ON measurement FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE measurement_insert_trigger();
We must redefine the trigger function each month so that it always points to the current partition. The trigger definition does not need to be updated, however.
We might want to insert data and have the server automatically locate the partition into which the row should be added. We could do this with a more complex trigger function, for example:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION measurement_insert_trigger() RETURNS TRIGGER AS $$ BEGIN IF ( NEW.logdate >= DATE '2006-02-01' AND NEW.logdate < DATE '2006-03-01' ) THEN INSERT INTO measurement_y2006m02 VALUES (NEW.*); ELSIF ( NEW.logdate >= DATE '2006-03-01' AND NEW.logdate < DATE '2006-04-01' ) THEN INSERT INTO measurement_y2006m03 VALUES (NEW.*); ... ELSIF ( NEW.logdate >= DATE '2008-01-01' AND NEW.logdate < DATE '2008-02-01' ) THEN INSERT INTO measurement_y2008m01 VALUES (NEW.*); ELSE RAISE EXCEPTION 'Date out of range. Fix the measurement_insert_trigger() function!'; END IF; RETURN NULL; END; $$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;
The trigger definition is the same as before. Note that each IF test must exactly match the CHECK constraint for its partition.
While this function is more complex than the single-month case, it doesn't need to be updated as often, since branches can be added in advance of being needed.
Note: In practice it might be best to check the newest partition first, if most inserts go into that partition. For simplicity we have shown the trigger's tests in the same order as in other parts of this example.
As we can see, a complex partitioning scheme could require a substantial amount of DDL. In the above example we would be creating a new partition each month, so it might be wise to write a script that generates the required DDL automatically.
Normally the set of partitions established when initially defining the table are not intended to remain static. It is common to want to remove old partitions of data and periodically add new partitions for new data. One of the most important advantages of partitioning is precisely that it allows this otherwise painful task to be executed nearly instantaneously by manipulating the partition structure, rather than physically moving large amounts of data around.
The simplest option for removing old data is simply to drop the partition that is no longer necessary:
DROP TABLE measurement_y2006m02;
This can very quickly delete millions of records because it doesn't have to individually delete every record.
Another option that is often preferable is to remove the partition from the partitioned table but retain access to it as a table in its own right:
ALTER TABLE measurement_y2006m02 NO INHERIT measurement;
This allows further operations to be performed on the data before it is dropped. For example, this is often a useful time to back up the data using COPY, pg_dump, or similar tools. It might also be a useful time to aggregate data into smaller formats, perform other data manipulations, or run reports.
Similarly we can add a new partition to handle new data. We can create an empty partition in the partitioned table just as the original partitions were created above:
CREATE TABLE measurement_y2008m02 ( CHECK ( logdate >= DATE '2008-02-01' AND logdate < DATE '2008-03-01' ) ) INHERITS (measurement);
As an alternative, it is sometimes more convenient to create the new table outside the partition structure, and make it a proper partition later. This allows the data to be loaded, checked, and transformed prior to it appearing in the partitioned table:
CREATE TABLE measurement_y2008m02 (LIKE measurement INCLUDING DEFAULTS INCLUDING CONSTRAINTS); ALTER TABLE measurement_y2008m02 ADD CONSTRAINT y2008m02 CHECK ( logdate >= DATE '2008-02-01' AND logdate < DATE '2008-03-01' ); \copy measurement_y2008m02 from 'measurement_y2008m02' -- possibly some other data preparation work ALTER TABLE measurement_y2008m02 INHERIT measurement;
Constraint exclusion is a query optimization technique that improves performance for partitioned tables defined in the fashion described above. As an example:
SET constraint_exclusion = on; SELECT count(*) FROM measurement WHERE logdate >= DATE '2008-01-01';
Without constraint exclusion, the above query would scan each of the partitions of the measurement table. With constraint exclusion enabled, the planner will examine the constraints of each partition and try to prove that the partition need not be scanned because it could not contain any rows meeting the query's WHERE clause. When the planner can prove this, it excludes the partition from the query plan.
You can use the EXPLAIN command to show the difference between a plan with constraint_exclusion on and a plan with it off. A typical unoptimized plan for this type of table setup is:
SET constraint_exclusion = off; EXPLAIN SELECT count(*) FROM measurement WHERE logdate >= DATE '2008-01-01'; QUERY PLAN ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Aggregate (cost=158.66..158.68 rows=1 width=0) -> Append (cost=0.00..151.88 rows=2715 width=0) -> Seq Scan on measurement (cost=0.00..30.38 rows=543 width=0) Filter: (logdate >= '2008-01-01'::date) -> Seq Scan on measurement_y2006m02 measurement (cost=0.00..30.38 rows=543 width=0) Filter: (logdate >= '2008-01-01'::date) -> Seq Scan on measurement_y2006m03 measurement (cost=0.00..30.38 rows=543 width=0) Filter: (logdate >= '2008-01-01'::date) ... -> Seq Scan on measurement_y2007m12 measurement (cost=0.00..30.38 rows=543 width=0) Filter: (logdate >= '2008-01-01'::date) -> Seq Scan on measurement_y2008m01 measurement (cost=0.00..30.38 rows=543 width=0) Filter: (logdate >= '2008-01-01'::date)
Some or all of the partitions might use index scans instead of full-table sequential scans, but the point here is that there is no need to scan the older partitions at all to answer this query. When we enable constraint exclusion, we get a significantly cheaper plan that will deliver the same answer:
SET constraint_exclusion = on; EXPLAIN SELECT count(*) FROM measurement WHERE logdate >= DATE '2008-01-01'; QUERY PLAN ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Aggregate (cost=63.47..63.48 rows=1 width=0) -> Append (cost=0.00..60.75 rows=1086 width=0) -> Seq Scan on measurement (cost=0.00..30.38 rows=543 width=0) Filter: (logdate >= '2008-01-01'::date) -> Seq Scan on measurement_y2008m01 measurement (cost=0.00..30.38 rows=543 width=0) Filter: (logdate >= '2008-01-01'::date)
Note that constraint exclusion is driven only by CHECK constraints, not by the presence of indexes. Therefore it isn't necessary to define indexes on the key columns. Whether an index needs to be created for a given partition depends on whether you expect that queries that scan the partition will generally scan a large part of the partition or just a small part. An index will be helpful in the latter case but not the former.
The default (and recommended) setting of constraint_exclusion is actually neither on nor off, but an intermediate setting called partition, which causes the technique to be applied only to queries that are likely to be working on partitioned tables. The on setting causes the planner to examine CHECK constraints in all queries, even simple ones that are unlikely to benefit.
A different approach to redirecting inserts into the appropriate partition table is to set up rules, instead of a trigger, on the master table. For example:
CREATE RULE measurement_insert_y2006m02 AS ON INSERT TO measurement WHERE ( logdate >= DATE '2006-02-01' AND logdate < DATE '2006-03-01' ) DO INSTEAD INSERT INTO measurement_y2006m02 VALUES (NEW.*); ... CREATE RULE measurement_insert_y2008m01 AS ON INSERT TO measurement WHERE ( logdate >= DATE '2008-01-01' AND logdate < DATE '2008-02-01' ) DO INSTEAD INSERT INTO measurement_y2008m01 VALUES (NEW.*);
A rule has significantly more overhead than a trigger, but the overhead is paid once per query rather than once per row, so this method might be advantageous for bulk-insert situations. In most cases, however, the trigger method will offer better performance.
Be aware that COPY ignores rules. If you want to use COPY to insert data, you'll need to copy into the correct partition table rather than into the master. COPY does fire triggers, so you can use it normally if you use the trigger approach.
Another disadvantage of the rule approach is that there is no simple way to force an error if the set of rules doesn't cover the insertion date; the data will silently go into the master table instead.
Partitioning can also be arranged using a UNION ALL view, instead of table inheritance. For example,
CREATE VIEW measurement AS SELECT * FROM measurement_y2006m02 UNION ALL SELECT * FROM measurement_y2006m03 ... UNION ALL SELECT * FROM measurement_y2007m11 UNION ALL SELECT * FROM measurement_y2007m12 UNION ALL SELECT * FROM measurement_y2008m01;
However, the need to recreate the view adds an extra step to adding and dropping individual partitions of the data set. In practice this method has little to recommend it compared to using inheritance.
The following caveats apply to partitioned tables:
There is no automatic way to verify that all of the CHECK constraints are mutually exclusive. It is safer to create code that generates partitions and creates and/or modifies associated objects than to write each by hand.
The schemes shown here assume that the partition key column(s) of a row never change, or at least do not change enough to require it to move to another partition. An UPDATE that attempts to do that will fail because of the CHECK constraints. If you need to handle such cases, you can put suitable update triggers on the partition tables, but it makes management of the structure much more complicated.
If you are using manual VACUUM or ANALYZE commands, don't forget that you need to run them on each partition individually. A command like:
will only process the master table.
The following caveats apply to constraint exclusion:
Constraint exclusion only works when the query's
WHERE clause contains constants. A
parameterized query will not be optimized, since the
planner cannot know which partitions the parameter value
might select at run time. For the same reason, "stable" functions such as
CURRENT_DATE must be avoided.
Keep the partitioning constraints simple, else the planner may not be able to prove that partitions don't need to be visited. Use simple equality conditions for list partitioning, or simple range tests for range partitioning, as illustrated in the preceding examples. A good rule of thumb is that partitioning constraints should contain only comparisons of the partitioning column(s) to constants using B-tree-indexable operators.
All constraints on all partitions of the master table are examined during constraint exclusion, so large numbers of partitions are likely to increase query planning time considerably. Partitioning using these techniques will work well with up to perhaps a hundred partitions; don't try to use many thousands of partitions.


| The first white people who lived year-round in
what is now
Colorado were trappers and traders. The trappers set their own traps to
catch beaver. The traders exchanged manufactured goods with Indians for
furs from animals they had killed. Most of the
trappers and traders worked either for Canadian or American fur companies.
Fur trapping and trading with the Indians went
hand in hand. Traders organized the trapping companies and supplied goods to
both the trappers and to the Indians. Many Indian tribes in the region
also participated in the fur trade. They provided furs, supplied traders and trappers with food, and served as guides and interpreters.
Other tribes were hostile. They threatened the work of the traders and
trappers at every turn.
Image Courtesy the Colorado Historical Society


Code Injection is the general term for attack types which consist of injecting code that is then interpreted/executed by the application. This type of attack exploits poor handling of untrusted data.
Code Injection differs from Command Injection in that an attacker is only limited by the functionality of the injected language itself. If an attacker is able to inject PHP code into an application and have it executed, he is only limited by what PHP is capable of. Command injection consists of leveraging existing code to execute commands, usually within the context of a shell.
This example server use PHP eval() function:
– The eval() function evaluates a string as PHP code. It’s accepts a string of PHP code to be executed.
Consider folowing url:
In this example server recieve message from url request client and send back to client using eval() function.
<?php @eval ("echo " . $_REQUEST["message"] . ";");?>
As there is no input validation, the code above is vulnerable to a Code Injection attack. Lets check by request with parameter message=test;phpinfo();
With exploiting this bug, an attacker can execute system command. For example.


Mercy Otis Warren was one of the few women who expressed her political views in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her first play, The Adulateur, used fictional characters to criticize Boston’s royal governor Thomas Hutchinson. She wrote that he would stop at nothing to destroy the colonists “boasted rights, and mark them as slaves.” Although Mercy was bold to publish her writings at a time when a woman’s involvement in politics was considered scandalous, she was conscious of society’s opinions. She published her early works anonymously, knowing that a female writer might not be taken seriously. At this point in her career she accepted society’s belief that men should take an active role in politics, while women were “confined to the narrow circle of domestic cares.”
Mercy was a gifted political writer, but she was only able to achieve this because of the men in her life. Her father and brother supported her classical, unconventional education, providing her with the skills she needed for a writing career. Her husband supported her talent when she doubted herself, and John Adams became her mentor. As she said in a letter to Adams, “Your Criticism, or Countenance, your Approbation or censure…may in some particulars serve to regulate my future conduct.” As Adams gained political prominence in early America, he often helped Mercy’s work gain an audience.
Later in her career, Mercy asserted that women had the right to understand political matters, and she stopped publishing her works anonymously. Consequently, male reviewers dismissed her History of the American Revolution because it was written by a woman. She gained respect from the men around her for her talent, but her career remained dependent on male opinions of her work.


Order: Apodiformes Family: Apodidae
The swifts are small aerial birds, spending the majority of their lives flying. These birds have very short legs and never settle voluntarily on the ground, perching instead only on vertical surfaces. Many swifts have very long, swept-back wings that resemble a crescent or a boomerang. There is 1 Michigan species.
Chimney Swift, Chaetura pelagica
What do you think?


In the summer increases the number of athlete’s foot infections. High temperatures entice you to Barefoot walking, outdoor pools have high season and increasing enthusiasm for sport again. Spores have to multiply now light game and the risk of infection is high. As the name implies, athlete’s foot is an infection of the skin with mushrooms on the feet and one of the most common fungal diseases. Sela Ward shines more light on the discussion. Unfortunately, many people still think that athlete’s foot due to lack of hygiene is produced and therefore treat him not out of shame. How is athlete’s foot but that is simply wrong, because around every third is affected and a transfer is very fast. At each step, the person loses many tiny dead skin cells from the feet, causing a contagion is possible almost everywhere if you encounter skin particles with mushrooms. Mushrooms can be prove to everyone, but usually only a weakened immune system or injuries of the skin trigger a disease.
Humid climate is very accommodating mushrooms, nests are the athlete’s foot with fondness between the toes and there enters in fine cracks of the skin. Jay Schwartz Attorney has much to offer in this field. Usually, you can see the disease symptoms of athlete’s foot when the skin begins to itch. The itching is followed by the oozing of the affected area and a reddening of the skin with skin cracks. The upper layer of the skin dissolves in shed and swells up. The athlete’s foot now does not, he can extend also to sole, heel, or the top of the foot and painful inflammation can occur. Measures against athlete’s foot, prevention and treatment measures are helpful to fight the fungus or to prevent him: washing you to remove the feet around infected particles of skin after showering or bathing thoroughly, dry the feet between the toes and use the towel at an existing infection only once to avoid becoming infected every day clothes, especially the socks should be air-permeable, does not consist of synthetic material and changed daily you will be washing your laundry with special Detergents shunning it in public showers, hotels, swimming pools, saunas barefoot to run use after disinfection spray pool as long as the infection has not healed, she should always wear shoes, also in the House, to avoid a contagion of other persons skin is dry or cracked, use nourishing creams or lotions at the earliest signs such as itching a doctor or pharmacist should be consulted. The treatment with anti-fungal agents, whether spray, gel or cream must not prematurely aborted and should be done several times a day. Even if the itching is often already after a few days, the treatment should be carried out at least 3 weeks, to fully heal the infection to. More information under and effective anti-athlete’s foot products


Research Spotlights From Past Years
Everyone looks for meaning in life. Psychological research on how people feel their life is meaningful is rather new, but it has revealed that people seek—and obtain—meaning from a variety of sources, especially through relationships. VCU social PhD graduate Daryl Van Tongeren (now a professor at Hope College), current social faculty Jody Davis and Jeffrey Green, and three other researchers investigated in two studies whether forgiveness creates meaning because it helps repair relationships.
One study of 491 people found that those who are naturally higher in forgivingness as well as those who reported more forgiveness after a specific offense by a close other also reported feeling that their life had more meaning. A second study looked at over 100 couples over a six month period. Participants reported every two weeks whether they had experienced offenses by their partner and to what extent they had forgiven their partner for those offenses. Participants who regularly forgave their partner subsequently reported increased meaning in life over time. In addition, forgiveness helped recover lost meaning for those reported more frequent offenses by their romantic partner.
Finding the ultimate meaning of life is beyond the scope of psychology, but psychology can reveal how and why people more or less meaning in their lives. Forgiving someone close to you can help you feel better about the future of the relationship, and thus feel that your life is more meaningful.
Taking note of the long-term clinical course characteristics of disorders has gained increasing importance in recent years. Evolving course descriptions in the DSMs published since 1980 reveal a growing emphasis on the long-term clinical course characteristics of disorders. Gaining a better understanding of a patient’s psychological profile over time can aid in diagnosis, assessment of patients’ functioning and guide treatment planning.
Dr. Jim McCullough and colleagues have developed a Psychosocial Functioning Scale (PFS) as a means to chart the effects symptom severity exerts on psychosocial functioning over time. The PFS uses a timeline graphing procedure where symptom interference over time is anchored on the y axis (vertical) and time is anchored on the x axis (horizontal). The scale uses a 1-10 rating scale anchored by a Severe Level rating (10) and descending in scaled value to a No Interference Level (0). The first step entails asking the patient two questions: (1) “I want you to think about how much all your symptoms interfere right now with your daily functioning in your work, in your family and in your social life? And secondly, (2) “How long have your symptoms remained at this level?” Once the current psychosocial interference level and its duration have been pinpointed by some dated time-point, the clinician asks two further questions: (1) “What happened to the interference level at this change/shift point? Did it increase or decrease and how would you rate the level here?” Secondly, (2) “How long did the symptom interference remain at this level?” Clinicians, by continuing to repeat the questioning procedure, determine the longitudinal symptom interference level variations for the duration of the patient’s disorder(s).
The PFS may be used repeatedly to chart the clinical course of psychosocial functioning levels from the onset of a disorder, throughout treatment process and outcome, and during follow-up periods. The scale is useable for both clinical psychotherapists and researchers wanting to plot the progress of psychosocial functioning of their patients in order to illustrate empirically the changes occurring as a function of treatment.
We engage in numerous activities across a 24-hour period including eating meals, going outside, socializing, beginning work, and exercising, to name a few. The daily repetition of these activities can develop a rhythmic quality. The regularity of these rhythms exists along a continuum, with some individuals exhibiting remarkable consistency in the timing of their daily activities, while others display more chaotic, random timing of events. In the Chronopsychology Lab, we investigated whether greater regularity of these rhythms was associated with better well-being, specifically, better self-reported sleep outcomes. Also, we asked whether the duration of regularity (or irregularity) is important for sleep outcomes. For example, does disruption of routine for one day predict worse sleep outcomes for that night? Lastly, we examined whether age (being a younger versus older adult) affected this association.
This project is a collaboration among graduate students in Dr. Natalie Dautovich's lab (Janna Imel and Dana Schreiber at VCU and Kristy Shoji and Caitie Tighe at the University of Alabama) and Dr. Christina McCrae at the University of Missouri. We used a microlongitudinal study design involving 14 consecutive days of data collection with 50 younger (ages 18 – 30 years) and 50 older (65 – 95 years) community-dwelling adults. Participants completed a variety of self-report measures including daily measures of the regularity of their activities and their sleep. We used a multi-level modeling analytic approach, which allowed us to examine the associations between regularity of daily activities and sleep that occurred within individuals in addition to between-persons.
Overall, we found that younger adults were significantly more irregular in the timing of their daily activities compared to older adults. We also found that weekly, not daily, disruptions of activity rhythms predicted worse sleep outcomes. This effect was moderated by age, such that less regularity of rhythms predicted worse sleep for younger, not older adults. In particular, younger adults who had more irregular daily rhythms took longer to fall asleep and had less efficient sleep compared to those with more regular rhythms.
These results reinforce the idea that our bodies crave consistency. With regular daily activities, our various body systems are able to prepare for, and anticipate, events. However, consistency across a longer period of time (a week) was predictive of sleep while consistency over a shorter duration (a day) was not. Also, this association did not extend to older adults. In our future research, we continue to probe the role of age in predicting mental and physical well-being.
We know that living in high-risk contexts, such as neighborhoods with high levels of violence, noise, and crowding, is stressful for parents and youth, but we don’t know how living in those communities affects how parents parent their adolescents. This question is important because parenting quality affects the extent to which youth use drugs, are aggressive, or engage in delinquent acts. We know that in high-risk neighborhoods parents adapt their parenting to better protect their children, although these strategies are not always successful. In this study we set out to understand how the stress parents experience, including their own exposure to violence, affects how they manage their adolescents. This study builds on work Dr. Wendy Kliewer and her colleagues have conducted on parent-adolescent relationships in high-risk contexts.
Over 300 families living in high-risk neighborhoods in and around Richmond, VA were followed over a two-year period and completed interviews in their home once a year. Parents’ life stress, exposure to violence, and mental health was measured at the start of the study. The analyses showed that parents’ life stress and their exposure to violence affected the extent to which they reported being depressed, anxious, or angry one year later. Parents who reported more stress and more exposure to violence also reported increases in mental health symptoms.
These feelings of depression, anxiety, and anger, in turn, were related to knowing less about their adolescents’ activities and the following year. These findings point to the importance of assisting parents in high-risk neighborhoods. Helping parents to reduce the stress in their life, resolve the trauma they have experienced, and cope more effectively can affect how they manage their adolescents.
Psychological research has demonstrated that individuals’ implicit, or automatic, racial bias can greatly impact decisions about others. For example, individuals who have a pro-White bias are more likely to interview job candidates and potential rental tenants with White sounding names compared to identical applications with Black-sounding names.
Dr. Joy-Gaba, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Virginia, examined whether racial bias can influence physicians’ decisions about patient care. Total knee replacement (TKR) is a cost-effective treatment option for severe osteoarthritis. While prevalence of osteoarthritis is higher among Blacks than Whites, TKR rates are lower among Blacks. Physicians’ implicit preferences might explain racial differences in TKR recommendation. To test, White physicians were given a scenario describing either a Black or White patient with severe osteoarthritis and asked to recommend medical treatment.
The results revealed that physicians displayed strong implicit preference for Whites over Blacks and implicitly believed that White patients were more medically cooperative than Black patients. Importantly, physicians were equally likely to recommend TKR for both the Black and White patients. Neither implicit nor self-reported racial biases predicted differential treatment recommendations by race. Interestingly, the results suggest that physicians’ belief in how medically cooperative a patient is, regardless of race, predicted whether a patient would be recommended for TKR, with the uncooperative receiving stronger recommendations for TKR.
The current tobacco marketplace is rapidly changing with the introduction of new products such as electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) and new regulations related to their use. Determining the impact of these events and those that may occur in the future on patterns of tobacco use is imperative for policymakers and the public health community to best protect the public’s health. Instead of waiting for years for data to accumulate, simulation modeling is one statistical approach that makes use of existing data to achieve this aim.
Dr. Caroline Cobb and colleagues from the Schroeder Institute of Tobacco Research and Policy Studies at Legacy developed a Markov model of tobacco use transitions to demonstrate the utility of this approach for projecting future patterns of tobacco use. As a proof of concept, prevalence estimates of e-cigarette and cigarette use from a cohort of young adults followed over 18 months (2011-2013) were used to populate the model. Tobacco use states included non-current, current, dual, and former use of cigarettes and e-cigarettes. Prevalence and the probability of transitioning between tobacco use states were estimated using available data and projected outwards for 10 years. Results indicated that the largest changes in prevalence occurred in the non-current, cigarette, and former use states with the dual and e-cigarette use states remaining at low prevalence in all years.
This model and accompanying demonstration using e-cigarette and cigarette use represents an important contribution to tobacco regulatory science by providing a means to quantify the extent to which current patterns in tobacco use and potential policies will impact future estimates of tobacco use prevalence. With results from several forthcoming national tobacco surveillance studies (e.g., FDA’s Population Survey of Tobacco and Health), the proposed model will be a valuable tool for researchers and regulators to inform their evaluation of whether the introduction (or removal) certain tobacco products or policies will be beneficial, have little impact on, or be harmful to the population as a whole.
A striking 40% of college students have lost a loved one to death in the previous two years. During the college years, in the midst of so many developmental transitions, students may be particularly at risk for negative health and psychological outcomes following bereavement. What does the research tell us about how college students cope with bereavement and how can we enhance the coping skills of bereaved college students?
Dr. Sandra Gramling and her students in the Good Grief lab at Virginia Commonwealth University have been studying grief and coping processes among bereaved college undergraduates for several years. In a study with 739 students who suffered the loss of a loved one in the previous two years they found that 257 students had experienced the traumatic death of a loved one (suicide, homicide, accident) while the remaining 482 students had lost a loved one to illness. On measures of meaning making (e.g., being able to make sense of the loss; finding benefit/new strengths from the loss) there were no differences in the two groups of bereaved students. In a separate study looking at religious coping in bereaved students they found that the overlap between the positive and negative religious coping subscales when used with a bereaved undergraduate sample detracted from the predictive utility of the instrument. These results are different from those observed with bereaved mid to late adults. Thus, one focus of research in the Good Grief lab has been the development of psychometrically sound well-validated instruments assessing grief and coping processes specifically for bereaved undergraduates. In order to help undergraduates “bend but not break” following bereavement, the development of specific population based measures are paramount.
Why are VCU Researchers Dumpster Diving?
Almost everyone agrees that children should eat more fruits and vegetables (F&Vs). Children who eat healthier diets perform better academically and report higher physical and emotional well-being than their peers with poorer nutritional status. Indeed, poor dietary habits increase risk for many chronic diseases, even among individuals who are not overweight, suggesting that improving children's eating behaviors is an extremely important target of public health efforts. Thus, numerous efforts are being made to improve children’s nutritional health, including revisions to the National School Lunch Program (NSLP).
The NSLP was recently changed to require students to pick fruits and vegetables in the lunch line. This change generated significant concerns from school districts about plate waste and very vocal complaints from students about the palatability of the foods offered. The NSLP policy uses a "serve" model to expose students to healthier nutritional options. However, this approach poses challenges, as research suggests that increasing (not forcing) dietary choices, is associated with greater fruit and vegetable consumption.
Dr. Suzanne Mazzeo and colleagues at VCU are partnering with Title I schools to assess the impact of the serve model on fruit and vegetable consumption during school breakfast and lunch in 1st-3rd grade students. Dr. Mazzeo’s research team will measure how much of the served fruits and vegetables are left on the plates at the end of the meal. They are also investigating methods to increase the “likability” and consumption of fruits and vegetables. This project is important given that many policies are mandated in the absence of data indicating whether they will have the desired effects, and if they might yield any unintended consequences. (Research spotlight summary provided by Dr. Rachel Gow.)
The person-environment relationship is a burgeoning area of research in the field of conservation psychology. How will individuals respond to the day-to-day dilemmas that they face in their environmental behaviors: whether to do what is best for themselves or whether to do what is best for the environment? When confronted with day-to-day environmental dilemmas, willingness to sacrifice for the environment represents the extent to which individuals' decisions take into account the well-being of the environment, even at the expense of immediate self-interest, effort, or costs. For example, what leads individuals to be more likely to exhibit pro-environmental behaviors like recycling or conserving energy?
Dr. Jody Davis and colleagues have examined the connection between individuals' relationships with the natural environment and their environmental behaviors with a focus on commitment to the environment, defined as psychological attachment and long-term orientation to the natural world. Commitment to the environment theoretically emerges from individuals' reliance on the natural world to gratify important needs. A series of studies has identified three key antecedents to commitment to the environment: satisfaction with the environment (e.g., benefits from the environment), investments in the environment (e.g., effort put into the environment), and subjective norms (e.g., beliefs about others' approval).
To the extent that individuals feel satisfaction with the environment, invest in the environment, and believe that those close to them care about the environment, they are more likely to feel psychological attachment and long-term orientation toward the natural world that leads them to be willing to sacrifice by engaging in pro-environmental behaviors. The structure of the commitment model has been supported in undergraduate and community samples, and for general commitment to the environment as well as for commitment to specific conservation behaviors (recycling, alternative transportation, "green" campus initiatives). In addition, individuals who experienced an experimental manipulation designed to increase their dependence on the natural world were more likely to volunteer (or learn about volunteer opportunities) for a local river clean-up. Commitment to the environment is a powerful predictor of pro-environmental behavior.
Asthma disparities research suggests that racial and ethnic minority children are more likely to visit the emergency department (ED) for asthma care. As pediatric asthma is managed within the family context, parents and caregivers are responsible for daily decisions related to child asthma including symptom control, trigger reduction, and even when a child needs to visit the ED. Mechanisms to explain differences in ED rates likely stem from factors within families, such as caregiver quality of life (QOL; caregiver adaption to child asthma) or culturally-based beliefs about asthma that families might share. In fact, research has found that Latino caregivers may experience lower levels of QOL than non-Latino White caregivers in caring for a child with asthma, and that QOL is associated with child asthma morbidity.
Dr. Robin Everhart and colleagues at Rhode Island Hospital have continued to investigate pathways between cultural factors, family factors, and caregiver QOL in pediatric asthma. Recently, Dr. Everhart and her colleagues presented data from an NIH-funded study, Project PAAC (Pediatric Asthma Across Cultures). Project PAAC participants included 102 caregivers and their child with asthma (6-15 years) from non-Latino White, Latino, and African American backgrounds in the Providence area. The results of this study suggest that family beliefs related to asthma medications (e.g., concerns about usage, beliefs about necessity) and beliefs related to fear of child dying from asthma may negatively impact caregiver QOL. Caregivers with poor QOL were also more likely to have a child that had visited the ED in the last year. Moreover, caregiver QOL mediated the association between beliefs related to medication necessity and child ED use. Findings suggest that family beliefs related to medication necessity may be modifiable intervention targets to improve caregiver QOL and reduce child ED use.
Dr. Everhart's research highlights the importance of continuing to understand family and culturally-based processes that may reduce adverse child health outcomes, especially among racial and ethnic minority children living in urban areas. In collaboration with researchers at Penn State, Dr. Everhart and her research team at VCU will begin collecting data for the CARE study (Childhood Asthma in Richmond Families) this fall that uses ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to further understand factors that contribute to pediatric asthma management in urban families. Dr. Everhart's research has also highlighted the importance of understanding caregiver health within the context of pediatric asthma. Working with a community-based health center in the Richmond area, Dr. Everhart is planning a study focused on examining processes related to optimal caregiver and child asthma outcomes in ethnic minority families. Together, Dr. Everhart's research endeavors are focused on understanding processes that will ultimately lead to the development of family-based, tailored interventions to improve both caregiver and child health in urban families.
Many students are struggling to achieve good academic outcomes in school. The typical approach to helping them is to provide content-based remediation or tutoring. Studies show that this type of intervention does not produce a meaningful impact on academic achievement, particularly among minority students. A different approach that is gaining popularity is to directly train cognitive skills independently from academic material. Neuroscientists and educational researchers have been testing a variety of approaches for specifically improving "executive functions"—a term that refers to our ability to plan ahead, switch between tasks, sustain attention, reason, and problem solve. Executive functions are critical for learning and success at all levels of schooling, and there is growing evidence that these skills are trainable.
With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Zewelanji Serpell and collaborators from Virginia State University are studying whether cognitive training improves executive functions in African American students. Preliminary findings suggest that a relatively low dose of training (1 hour/5 days a week for 15 weeks), provided in a school context, improves students' cognitive skills. We have also learned that training one-on-one with a person works better than training with a computer-based program. One-on-one methods are not practical for widespread use in public schools that frequently lack the human resources to provide individualized instruction. As such, developing more effective computer-based programs is an important goal. We are trying to achieve this goal by studying the strategies human trainers use when they are working with students.
We hypothesized that trainers may be using their perceptions of students' emotional states to modulate (i.e. change the difficulty level, provide strategies or use motivational prompting) the training task. We tested this hypothesis in a small pilot study with 66 African American college students who were randomly assigned to receive training on a cognitive task with a human trainer in a traditional face-to-face context, with a remote trainer who could not see the student but could monitor task performance, or with a trainer that could monitor task performance and view a real-time video of the student's face during the task. Results suggest that access to the video influenced trainer decisions and, that the information available in the video may help them to improve students' training gains. We are currently working with collaborators at University of California San Diego to understand what specific aspects of facial expression and non-verbal behavior human trainers use, and to see if we can replicate them in an automated system they have developed.
Positive psychology helps people build character strengths or virtues. Traditional virtue theory suggests that people glimpse the goal they seek, practice virtue until it becomes second nature, meet self-imposed tests or tests that life throws at us, and thereby build a stronger character.
Within the Counseling Psychology program, researchers in the Positive Psychology Research Group (PPRG) at VCU—Professor Everett Worthington (www.EvWorthington-forgiveness.com), graduate students Caroline Lavelock, Brandon Griffin, Yin Lin, Chelsea Reid (Social Psychology), and Chelsea Greer, and undergraduate honors student Quandrea Harper—have conducted grant-funded research by the John Templeton Foundation and the Fetzer Institute on psychoeducational groups to promote forgiveness, including a study to see whether secular college-based groups would be as well received by foreign students as Virginia-born-and-raised students. In the last two years, the PPRG researchers have expanded the grant-funded research to include self-administered 6-hour workbooks to promote forgiveness (three studies), humility, patience, self-control, and self-forgiveness. Initial results show that workbooks are producing even more character strengths than the evidence-based psychoeducational groups. After using feedback provided by the participants in the first round of studies, the PPRG researchers have developed beta-versions of the workbooks. Studies are underway in humility and patience.
After these workbooks have been vetted through referred publication, they will be made available to the public in the same way that the REACH Forgiveness psychoeducational group materials are. Visit Everett Worthington’s web site for access to the free materials.
African American young adults are at higher risk for HIV than any other racial/ethnic group with the highest disparity occurring in the 13-24 year old group. Unless this epidemic is reversed, at some point in their lifetimes, an estimated 1 in 16 Black men and 1 in 32 Black women in the United States will be diagnosed with HIV infection. At VCU we are working hard to reduce these disparities.
The Raise 5 project was funded by the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention to reduce HIV risk and substance abuse among African American students attending VCU. Raise 5 uses five major strategies to achieve this goal. The first strategy involves the participation of students in peer-led evidenced-based HIV and substance abuse prevention curriculums. Sisters Informing Sisters about the Topic of AIDS (SISTA) is the curriculum for women and NIA is the HIV prevention curriculum for males. Safe in the City is used for both men and women. A substance abuse education component that emphasizes the role of alcohol and other drug use on sexual risk behaviors is integrated into all curriculums. The second strategy is a social marketing environmental strategy that consists of "stall seat" journal posters specifically targeting African Americans. These "stall" journals are strategically placed on VCU's campus at different time periods. The third strategy is substance abuse and HIV education and awareness "edutainment" sessions, labeled "the Black Perspective." These forums are open to all in the VCU community and held in partnership with Black student organizations. The final strategy is HIV testing. The goal is to encourage routine testing among VCU students.
The project is funded for five years and is beginning its third year. Over a thousand students have attended the education and awareness forums; over one hundred students have participated in our evidenced-based programs; and over 800 students have been tested. The project is carried out under the leadership of Dr. Faye Belgrave, Principal Investigator and Project Director, Deborah Butler, Project Coordinator, and Raymond Tademy, post-doc and evaluator. Graduate students Jasmine Abrams, Joshua Brevard, Sarah Javier, and Morgan Maxwell are also involved in carrying out all five strategies. Learn more at the Center for Cultural Experiences in Prevention web site. Raise 5 partners include Susan Tellier from the Fan Free Clinic, Dr. Linda Hancock and other staff from VCU's Wellness Center, and a host of other student organizations at VCU.
Preliminary evaluation of the program indicates increases in testing among African American college students, high levels of engagement in Raise 5 education and awareness activities, and reduction in risky sexual and drug attitudes and behaviors.
Only about 6% of physicians and surgeons are self-identified as Blacks. Thus, Blacks are more likely to see non-Black physicians when they seek medical help. In fact, approximately 75% of Black patients see non-Black physicians, even though many prefer seeing Black physicians to non-Black physicians.
Dr. Hagiwara and her colleagues have investigated how Black patients behave when they interact with non-Black physicians and what determines those patients' behaviors. They also examined non-Black physicians' behavior during such racially discordant medical interactions. To address these questions, Dr. Hagiwara's research team drew upon prior research in social psychology which provides strong evidence that racial attitudes negatively influence communication during interracial interactions. The results of the study suggested that both Black patients and non-Black physicians tried to exert more control over the interactions by talking more when they harbored more negative racial attitudes. Their findings highlight the importance of racial attitudes and biases in the dynamics of racially discordant medical interactions.
As demonstrated in the above study, Dr. Hagiwara bridges basic social psychology research of intergroup biases and applied health disparities research. Her basic social psychology research investigates the underlying mechanisms involved in stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, and her applied health research focuses on how these factors contribute to inequality in health status and health care among socially disadvantaged groups. She is currently conducting a NIH-funded study examining the effects of Black patients' and non-Black physicians' racial biases and attitudes on their affective expression during racially discordant medical interactions.
Every child, every adolescent, and every adult is teased, for better or for worse; it may feel like fun or it may be painful. Three components of teasing—aggression, humor, and ambiguity—are at the heart of what makes teasing both dangerous and attractive. Unlike teasing, which may be playful, bullying always has an aggressive intent. Bullying can cause deep problems for both the perpetrator and the victim. We know that both bullies and victims show deficits in emotion regulation, the ability to manage the experience and the expression of emotion. We proposed that how children perceive and respond to teasing is related to their capacity to regulate their emotions. Led by faculty member Dr. Barbara Myers, she and her former grad students (now all Ph.D.’s) Virginia Mackintosh, Maria Kuznetsova, Geri Lotze, and Neeraja Ravindran, along with Dr. Al Best from Dentistry, explored these questions with a vulnerable group of children, those whose mothers were incarcerated.
Sixty-one children of currently or previously incarcerated mothers who were attending a summer camp answered questions on the teasing they observed, experienced, and practiced, at home and at school. Children self-reported that they were more likely to practice hurtful teasing if they experienced it at school and more likely to practice playful teasing if they observed it at school and experienced it at home. Adult camp mentors rated the children’s teasing, bullying, peer behavior, and emotion regulation. From their reports, high bullying was predicted by a child being a hurtful teaser, being aggressive with peers, and having low prosocial behavior, high lability/negativity, and low emotion regulation. Emotion regulation was a strong predictor of being a bully. The children whose moods flew up and down, showing more Lability/negativity, were at greatly increased probability of being a bully. Each point increase on the scale raised the odds almost 20 times. This held real and concrete meaning in our camp context. Children who are labile and negative are difficult to supervise and cause trouble with the other children in a crowded cabin; they are no doubt just as hard to live with at home and in the classroom. They show wide mood swings, frustration, and impulsivity, and they are prone to disruptive outbursts and tantrums. Emotion regulation has potential importance as a mechanism for understanding resilience and long-term outcomes for children of incarcerated parents. Supporting their emotion regulation is a worthy goal, though one that is challenged by the difficult life histories and family situations of children whose parents are in prison or jails.
Our group is interested in children of incarcerated parents because they are a large and growing group who are at high risk for many problems in their lives as children and then when they grow up. For more than a decade, VCU undergraduate students have taken the summer field study class PSYC 493, Mentoring Children at Risk, and gone to work with these children at a summer camp. It is a challenging, exhausting, sweaty, exhilarating, and deeply meaningful experience for the students—as well as a great week of camp for the kids.
Graduate students in the Clinical and Counseling Psychology doctoral programs have completed a series of studies under the mentorship of Dr. Bruce Rybarczyk that will contribute to advancing the treatment of insomnia in individuals with co-morbid psychiatric conditions. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) has several treatment components, including an initial reduction in sleep to increase sleep drive and retrain normal sleep as well as methods for eliminating time spent in bed while awake to weaken the association between being in bed and having anxiety about not falling asleep. The treatment also includes education in the science of sleep, in order to provide the patient with an “owner’s manual” for their sleep system.
Dr. Nile Wagley's dissertation included patients undergoing outpatient psychiatric treatment for an average of 3.6 years who continued to have insomnia symptoms in spite of their psychiatric care. Two sessions of CBT for insomnia (one conducted via telephone) were effective in improving sleep and reducing depressive symptoms. A second dissertation study at the same clinic employing a large group of patients and a longer format of treatment is currently being conducted by graduate student Hannah Lund. Another study targeting recent veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was conducted by Dr. Skye Margolies. This dissertation study tested four sessions of CBT and an optional supplementary treatment for nightmares (imagery rehearsal therapy) with 40 combat veterans who served in Afghanistan and/or Iraq. The treatment led to significant improvements in self-report and objectively measured sleep, a reduction in PTSD symptom severity and PTSD-related nighttime symptoms, and a reduction in depression and distressed mood compared to the waitlist control group. This study is also being replicated by Laurin Mack. Her study provides a classroom CBT intervention to veterans who have recently completed a psycho-educational course on coping with PTSD.
These studies contribute to growing evidence that CBT for insomnia is a treatment that should be offered to all mental health patients as a supplement other treatments they are receiving that are targeting the primary mental health diagnosis. Not only is sleep substantially improved as a result of these interventions, but other mental health symptoms are alleviated as a consequence of improved sleep. Additionally, there are no side effects, treatment is brief, the benefits are sustained over time and the cost is limited, especially when employing self-help materials. The challenge that lies ahead is training more clinicians to deliver this brief treatment and getting the word out to health professionals and the public that this should be a first line treatment for persistent insomnia. To address the science-practice gap, future research by Dr. Rybarczyk and colleagues will test a “stepped care” approach to delivering CBT in primary care, using varied levels of treatment intensity and different methods of delivery, including the internet. This concept was detailed in a 2011 publication by Laurin Mack and Dr. Rybarczyk.
When many people come to counseling, they want religiously consistent counseling. Is it helpful to match a religiously accommodated treatment to the client's religious beliefs? Turns out, the answer is yes. It can be helpful, but religious people can also benefit from purely secular treatments. They improve in mental health symptoms just as much with either treatment, but sometimes the religious treatments can produce more positive spiritual benefits.
Dr. Everett Worthington, Jr., who just finished up a three-year commitment as President (President-elect, President, and Immediate Past-President, for the three years, respectively) of the Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality (Division 36 of the American Psychological Association, APA), has worked with two former student colleagues now at the University of North Texas (Dr. Joshua Hook) and Georgia State University (Dr. Don E. Davis), and a VCU faculty colleague in another Department (Dr. Michael McDaniel) to analyze the accumulated literature. Their meta-analysis was considered by an APA joint task force (Divisions of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy) on relationship factors in psychotherapy. That task force evaluated the evidence Worthington and his colleagues presented as providing the highest level of support for considering the religious beliefs and values of the client in considering treatment options.
Dr. Worthington is a member of the Counseling Psychology program and also affiliated with Social, Developmental, and Health Psychology programs. He typically studies forgiveness and other aspects of positive psychology, religious and spiritual issues, and couple enrichment.
Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is one of the most commonly diagnosed childhood disorders. Children with ADHD frequently experience problems at school, and these problems often get worse during adolescence. Compared to their peers, adolescents with ADHD earn significantly lower school grades, score significantly lower on standardized achievement tests and experience higher rates of special education placements, grade retention and school dropout.
Dr. Joshua Langberg, a clinical psychologist at VCU, partnered with investigators from multiple universities to develop a better understanding of the school performance of adolescents with ADHD (Langberg, Molina et al., 2011). The investigators examined data collected as part of the Multimodal Treatment Study for Children with ADHD (MTA study), a large dataset including over 500 children with ADHD followed from elementary school through high school. Dr. Langberg and colleagues wanted to determine if school problems in high school age adolescents with ADHD could be predicted by behaviors present when the students were in elementary school. If behaviors in elementary school can be used to predict later school problems, interventions can be developed to target these issues, with the goal of preventing these problems from occurring.
The results of the study showed that in elementary school, students' ability to organize and manage homework materials as rated by parents and students' reading and writing abilities as rated by teachers were strong predictors of grades and achievement scores in high school. In fact, these behaviors were stronger predictors of school performance than the severity of their ADHD symptoms in elementary school and were more important predictors than the treatments they received, including medication and/or school services.
These data suggest that it is very important to develop school-based interventions that seek to improve students' materials organization and reading and writing skills. Dr. Langberg has been working to develop an intervention that targets the organizational skills of students with ADHD, the Homework, Organization, and Planning Skills (HOPS) intervention (Langberg, 2011). Results from the initial tests of the HOPS intervention demonstrate that it has significant potential to improve the school functioning of students with ADHD (Langberg et al., 2008; 2011).
Dr. Langberg's research focuses on improving the school performance of children and adolescents with ADHD. He conducts research to identify why students with ADHD struggle in the school and develops interventions to improve academic and behavioral performance. Dr. Langberg has focused much of his research on the school performance of young adolescents with ADHD, especially surrounding the transition to middle school. This tends to be a very difficult period for students with ADHD and interventions targeting school performance are frequently needed during this time. Dr. Langberg focuses on developing interventions that are feasible for delivery in the school setting as providing interventions in schools allows many more children to have access to these much needed supports and interventions.
Why have African American Youth Traded Cigarettes for Cigars?
As a child growing up in the rural South during the 1980s, cigarette smoking seemed to him a necessary rite of passage into manhood; so seamlessly intertwined with developmental as well as cultural aspects of African American life. From the vantage point of a ten year-old, smoking was an ostensible attribute of family eldership status, independence, and coolness. He became so enamored with smoking that on several occasions he would venture off behind a workshed to light a cigarette and emulate the smoking behaviors of family members (as well as fictive kin) – all the time, hoping that it would instill within him the same bravado he had witnessed among older men in his family. However, as he grew older, the unfortunate and untimely demise of family elders because of tobacco-related diseases led to a more sobering assessment of the impact of tobacco in his family and within African American communities, in general.
Since then, Dr. Aashir Nasim has endeavored to understand the link between cigarette smoking and the social and cultural experiences of African Americans (Nasim et al. 2011a; Nasim et al., 2009; Nasim et al., 2007; Nasim et al., 2003). Although there are many known risks for smoking, his research has identified cultural and religious / spiritual factors that protect against risks for smoking among African American adolescents (e.g., neighborhood stressors; see Belgrave et al., 2010) and young adults (e.g., race-related stress; see Fernander et al., 2008). Promotive and protective factors identified in his research include a strong ethnic identity (Clark et al., 2008), family cohesion and interdependency (Nasim et al., 2007) and endorsement of religious coping strategies (Nasim, et al., 2006). Perhaps more importantly, Dr. Nasim's research on protective factors for cigarette smoking has led to the development of theoretical frameworks (Nasim et al., 2011b) and models of praxis for broader efforts in substance use prevention (Belgrave et al., 2007; Belgrave et al., 2008).
More recently, Dr. Nasim's research has followed the shifting landscape of adolescent tobacco use. For instance, in Virginia, cigars (specifically, little cigars) have now supplanted cigarettes as the most prevalent form of tobacco use among youth ages 12 to 17. What is more, his recent study on cigar misreporting revealed that statewide tobacco surveillance systems have significantly underestimated rates of cigar use among African Americans and other health disparities populations (Nasim et al., in press). Many African American youth have chosen cigars over cigarettes because cigars are generally less expensive than cigarettes; smell and taste better (e.g., strawberry, cherry, and chocolate flavorings); pose fewer perceived health risks; and, are considered more socially acceptable and attractive. This is particularly concerning because his research, in collaboration with Drs. Melissa Blank and Thomas Eissenberg (Director of VCU's Clinical Behavioral Pharmacology Laboratory), shows that little cigar smoke contains many of the same lethal toxicants and effects as cigarette smoke (Blank et al., 2011). These misperceptions are compounded by adolescents' beliefs that modifying (hyping or freaking) the little cigar by removing the "chemical / cancer paper" renders the tobacco product "cancer-free." His ongoing qualitative research funded by the Virginia Foundation for Healthy Youth (VFHY) – a multi-study project involving content analytic methods – reveals that many of attitudes and beliefs about little cigar smoking are socially (e.g., social and urban cachet) and culturally-rooted (e.g., traditional health beliefs).
Dr. Nasim is currently awaiting review of his revised grant application to the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to investigate the effects of little cigar modification (i.e., hyping) on smoke toxicant and user toxicant exposure. In addition, he is preparing a research study to determine if risks and protective factors for little cigar smoking and other alternative tobacco uses (e.g., hookah) are consistent with previous findings for cigarette smoking.
Each year, 700,000 Americans suffer a new or recurrent stroke, and currently 5.6 million Americans are living with the effects of stroke, positioning it as the leading cause of disability in the United States. The effects of stroke are especially pronounced in Black and Latino individuals, who experience more strokes and recover more slowly from stroke than White individuals do. For example, Black individuals who sustain a stroke are twice as likely as White individuals to sustain a second stroke, whereas Latinos are 2.6 times as likely. Further, these differences are even more pronounced in the Southeastern United States, where there has long been a 50% greater mortality rate from stroke across the "Stroke Belt."
Dr. Paul Perrin and his colleagues have hypothesized that one of the contributors to racial/ethnic disparities in stroke rehabilitation could be the nature of informal care that individuals with stroke receive. Individuals with stroke from differing racial/ethnic backgrounds can often have very different caregiving experiences because of family structure, cultural norms, and living arrangements.
In order to investigate the connections between caregiving and racial/ethnic disparities in stroke, Dr. Perrin's research team collected data on caregiver mental health and functioning of individuals with stroke from 124 White, Black, and Latino/Puerto-Rican caregiving dyads at 1, 6, and 12 months post-hospital discharge. Out of the three racial/ethnic groups, Latino/Puerto-Rican individuals with stroke showed the lowest functioning, and their caregivers showed the poorest mental health.
Based in part on the findings from this study, Dr. Perrin's research team developed and implemented a pilot study of a culturally sensitive Transition Assistance Program (TAP), primarily for Latino stroke caregivers. The program was implemented completely through videophone devices while caregivers were at their own homes. The intervention was comprised of (1) skill development, (2) education, and (3) supportive problem solving. Sixty-one dyads participated: thirty-nine from Puerto Rico and twenty-two from Texas. Participants were randomly assigned to the TAP treatment or a control group. The TAP effectively reduced caregiver strain at the 3-month follow-up, and when controlling for baseline differences, the treatment group had lower depression than the control group at follow-up. Among individuals with stroke who had low functioning at the beginning of the study, those whose caregivers had received the TAP improved in functioning more so than did those whose caregivers had been in the control group.
Dr. Perrin's studies have shown that critical knowledge may be lost regarding the connections between caregiver mental health and the functioning of individuals with stroke when researchers and clinicians look only across race/ethnicity as opposed to also within. A culture-free approach to mental-health interventions for stroke rehabilitation is likely limited, and race/ethnicity may affect how caregiver mental health and functioning of individuals with stroke reciprocally influence each other, contributing to some of the disparities in rehabilitation seen all too often.
Our emotions are an integral part of who are, coloring our relationships, impacting our decisions, and playing an important role in determining our mental and even physical health. We are “hard-wired” to be emotional. But our emotions do not always serve our best interests, as anyone knows who has ever fought with a loved one, made an impulse purchase, or gotten sick from too much stress. Emotions, particularly of the difficult kind – fear, sadness, anger, jealousy, and so on – often need to be “regulated” for us to behave in healthy, adaptive ways. How can people better regulate their emotions when provoked or stressed? To date, much research devoted to understanding emotion regulation has either focused on maladaptive ways to manage emotions, like rumination and suppression, or has focused on strategies that are brought to bear after some judgment about an event or situation has already been made. Less research has focused on ways to intervene in the early stages of a challenging encounter – ways that may help to inhibit the arising of difficult emotions before they have a chance to impact us and, potentially, the people around us.
Dr. Kirk Warren Brown studies a beneficial quality of mind that we all have the potential to exercise, called mindfulness, that may be a game-changer in otherwise stressful situations. Mindfulness, simply put, is presence of mind, the capacity to be receptively attentive to what we encounter moment to moment. Instead of approaching people or situations through the filter of our memories of them from past encounters, or reacting on the basis of our prior experiences or our expectations, a mindful response encounters what is happening with openness and freshness. Dr. Brown’s research, and that of numerous others, has shown that mindfulness, and training to enhance it, can positively impact a host of life domains, from mood states to decision-making to romantic relationship quality. Given the key role of emotion regulation in these and other important domains, Dr. Brown and graduate student Robert Goodman, both of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at VCU, along with colleague Michael Inzlicht of the University of Toronto, recently set out to explore how mindfulness might play a role in healthy emotion regulation.
Emotions often arise very quickly after we encounter a provocative stimulus – over a matter of seconds, even milliseconds, so it was important to capture this process as close as possible to the source of emotion generation – by investigating what happens in key regions of the brain in the immediate aftermath of an encounter with evocative stimuli. After completing a battery of psychological measures, including two assessing dispositional mindfulness, college student participants in the study viewed a series of photographs that varied in valence – some pleasant (e.g., a baby), some unpleasant (e.g., a pointed gun), some mildly evocative, and some very provocative. During the viewing of 150 such images, neural responses to them that unfolded over milliseconds – called “event-related potentials” – were recorded through highly sensitive sensors placed at multiple sites on the scalp.
The results, described in a new article in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, were, well, provocative. More mindful participants showed attenuated neural responses to highly arousing images of both pleasant and unpleasant kinds. Their brains simply did not react as strongly to the kinds of provocation that typically lead to challenging emotions (that then often require psychological work to manage them). The study findings lent support to the claim that mindfulness may alter the time course of emotion very early in the game – within fractions of a second after being confronted with emotionally potent stimuli. The findings suggest that being present, or attending openly and receptively to what we encounter on a day-to-day basis, may be important to enhancing our moment-to-moment experience and our quality of life more generally. Finally, the findings of this study also support the value of now widely available mindfulness training to promote healthy emotional lives.
Are you more likely to recall the compliment your boss gave you, or the criticism? Dr. Jeffrey Green and colleagues have examined how people process and remember feedback. In a series of experiments, they have had people take an alleged personality test via computer that provides feedback in the form of positive and negative behaviors that they are likely to do, such as keeping a secret, or forgetting to pick up a friend. Then they have given them a surprise memory task. They have found that people do indeed recall poorly negative, threatening information about themselves, but they remember flattering or affirming information well. However, people tend to be strategically flexible. They do not neglect all negative information about themselves, but only the most threatening information: feedback that relates to their most central or cherished aspects of themselves.
However, there probably are some downsides to wholesale forgetting of threatening negative feedback, most notably not learning from our mistakes. Are there other conditions that might limit this general selective forgetting tendency? Green and colleagues reasoned that if the feedback came from someone close, like a romantic partner or best friend, then it should be remembered better. Such feedback might be seen as more trustworthy or helpful for the relationship. In a twist on their previous experiments, close friends or romantic partners were separated and thought that the other sent them feedback about themselves. Others received the very same information from a stranger. The usual forgetting of negative, threatening feedback occurred when it supposedly came from a stranger, but it was remembered better when it came from a close friend or romantic partner.
We also may be more open to threatening feedback when we are motivated to improve. We may accept the short-term drop in self-esteem in order to better ourselves in the long run. Green and colleagues subliminally activated in people a desire to self-improve by having them read sentences that included improvement-related words. Others in a control condition read words unrelated to improvement. The results were similar to the close other study: people in the control condition exhibited the usual forgetting of threatening information, but those who had self-improvement activated in their minds recalled more of the threatening information. Thus, while we are generally motivated to protect the self by engaging in selective forgetting, we can turn off this tendency when the feedback comes from those who are close to us or when we are focusing on self-improvement.
Dr. Jeffrey Green has investigated the cognitive processes by which individuals are able to forget threatening information as well as various factors that can increase or reduce this forgetting. He and his colleagues have published nine articles and chapters on this topic.
Does Your Family Work Together Successfully?
In an ideal world, a family would work together like a well-oiled machine, but in reality, things don't always go so smoothly. Coordinating school, friends, meals, and extracurricular activities is challenging enough during adolescence. Families who also deal with the diagnosis and management of a chronic medical condition stretch available resources and resilience even thinner. Type 1 diabetes requires constant monitoring of blood sugar levels and multiple insulin injections every day. Individuals must also be aware of how daily activities, such as exercise, type/amount of food, and stress will affect blood sugar levels and insulin dose calculations. No matter how mature a teen may be, management of type 1 diabetes is a complex process, and the help of a concerned parent is crucial. In fact, parental involvement in disease care is the single best social predictor of better health outcomes in youth with diabetes. Greater personal health demands and parental monitoring come at a time when teens desire independence from parents and may result in family conflict, making successful family teamwork even more challenging. Since parental involvement and teamwork are key elements of successful diabetes management, Dr. Holmes' NIH-funded research seeks to provide families with a set of fundamental coping skills. These techniques allow families to continue working together toward good diabetes management while minimizing parent-teen conflict. Trained interventionists help parents and teens practice productive ways to communicate, avoid arguments, problem solve as well as change attitudes and behaviors.
Managing diabetes at school can present another layer of challenges. High and low blood sugar levels can have immediate and long term effects on school performance. Some symptoms of high/low blood sugar levels include feeling lightheaded, dizzy, nauseous, trouble with concentration, and feelings of fatigue. People who have skipped a meal can experience some of these symptoms. However, individuals with diabetes often have blood sugar levels outside the normal range and experience these symptoms more frequently and to a greater degree. Best cognitive performance occurs when blood sugar levels are optimal; it is easy to imagine how a student with diabetes may have trouble doing their best on an assignment or exam while experiencing high or low symptoms. Therefore, disease management and performance at school is optimized when family teamwork involves teachers and school nurses.
The research of Dr. Clarissa Holmes explores the effects of type 1 diabetes on aspects of psychosocial and cognitive functioning in children and adolescents with diabetes. She is currently conducting a prevention program for families of youth with type 1 diabetes to maintain parental involvement in daily disease care through family teamwork. Dr. Holmes also is interested in the cognitive side effects of extreme blood sugar levels. An exploratory study is underway to evaluate the effects of blood sugar changes on memory and learning performance and to help youth manage diabetes challenges at school.
Dating is a common experience among adolescents. It gives them the chance to learn about interacting and communicating with romantic partners and influences patterns of behavior in intimate partner relationships in adulthood. Although dating offers opportunities for positive growth, adolescents may also have to face problematic dating situations including those that place them at-risk for dating violence. Terri N. Sullivan and colleagues are conducting a series of qualitative studies to better understand the dynamics of problem situations that happen in dating contexts. The first step was interviewing adolescents and asking them to describe situations in dating contexts they perceived as problematic. We then conducted follow-up interviews to determine adolescents' perceptions of the best response in these situations and supports and barriers that would help or hinder them in engaging in those responses. We believe this information will benefit prevention effort focused on helping adolescents develop and maintain healthy dating relationships.
Dr. Terri Sullivan works more generally on the development, implementation, and evaluation of school-based prevention efforts to promote behavioral, social, and emotional competence among middle school students.
Most people receive prescription drugs at some point—you break your wrist, your doctor gives you a week's worth of Vicodin, but it stops hurting after three days and you put the leftover pills in your medicine cabinet. Most of the time they stay there. Sometimes they are later shared with other people.
Over the past decade, the number of people who use prescription drugs without a doctor's prescription has increased dramatically. In a recent study with young adults, Eric Benotsch and colleagues found that 36% of those surveyed reported using a prescription medication without a doctor's consent. The most commonly used type of medication was pain medication (e.g., Vicodin), followed by anxiolytics (e.g., Xanax), stimulants (e.g., Adderall), and sedatives (e.g., Ambien). Friends and family were the main sources of prescription medications—those leftover pills in the medicine cabinet were used, but not for the purpose the doctor intended.
Common motivations for using prescription medications included some legitimate medical uses such as pain relief but also included recreational use-- to "get high" or to "try something new." In general, young people who used prescription medications without a prescription were also more likely to use traditional recreational drugs, especially marijuana (50%), ecstasy (18%), and cocaine (10%). Overall, prescription drugs taken without a doctor's prescription were more frequently used than all other recreational drugs except alcohol and marijuana.
Among individuals who reported the non-medical use of prescription drugs, 43% indicated that they had combined this use with the use of alcohol and 21% indicated that they had used a prescription medication in combination with an illicit drug. Although the majority of participants believed that the use of prescription medications posed little or no risk for injury or illness, overdose of opioid analgesics is now the primary cause of drug-related poisoning in the United States, and these drugs are particularly dangerous when combined with alcohol. Additional research aimed at understanding the recreational use of prescription drugs is needed. Dr. Eric Benotsch and colleagues have published several articles on the non-medical use of prescription drugs.
How Can We Reduce Childhood Obesity?
In the past 30 years, the number of obese children has more than tripled! This statistic is concerning because obesity is associated with a number of physical and mental health concerns, including diabetes, cardiovascular problems, and poor quality of life. As a result, many programs have been developed to prevent and reduce pediatric obesity, however, they have had limited success.
Dr. Suzanne Mazzeo and her colleagues, including Dr. Marilyn Stern, believe that targeting the parents of overweight children might be the best approach to fighting childhood obesity, largely because parents serve as powerful models of eating and exercise behaviors. In fact, the best predictor of children's exercise and eating behaviors are their parents' eating and exercise behaviors. For example, parents who eat more fruits and veggies are more likely to have children that do the same. Also, other researchers have found that when parents are involved in the treatment of pediatric obesity, children's outcomes improve. Further, because most overweight children have overweight parents, targeting parents can help the entire family improve its health. Finally, parent-only interventions are more cost-effective than family-based approaches, as they require fewer staff and other resources.
To test their hypothesis, Drs. Mazzeo and Stern and their colleagues recruited families with overweight children from all over the Richmond area to participate in a study. Half of the parents were assigned to the NOURISH (Nourishing Our Understanding of Role Modeling to Improve Support and Health) program in which parents were taught how to be healthy role models for their children. The other half of the parents were assigned to a control group which received publicly-available information in a one-session meeting and through the mail over the course of the intervention period. Results showed that children in the control group gained more weight than children in the NOURISH program. Children in the NOURISH group also reported higher quality of life and less dissatisfaction with their body. These findings suggest that NOURISH may be an effective way to prevent overweight children from becoming overweight adults, while also enhancing the way children feel about themselves and their body. The next step for Dr. Mazzeo and her colleagues is to evaluate the impact of the NOURISH program on childhood obesity with a much larger sample. It is Dr. Mazzeo's hope that this study will lead to the dissemination of a program capable of combating today's obesity epidemic.