The hospitalized abused child: An interdisciplinary approach

The interdisciplinary approach to family diagnosis and treatment of child abuse often begins in the hospital. The tone established at this time has crucial implications for the treatment program following discharge from the hospital. There is, however, a paucity of information in the literature regarding the best utilization of this critical phase of treatment. Often this period is viewed as a time for assessment, diagnosis and treatment of the physical injuries while neglecting to recognize and utilize the potential for planned therapeutic intervention during the hospital stay. This paper identifies methods and interventions in implementing a treatment plan particular to this phase of the over-all treatment of the child and family.     

Women in politics: A global review

At the end of the 1970s, discrimination against women as political participants continues, but it is being challenged and, in some countries, steadily eroded. There are only eight countries in the world today in which national law excludes women from political processes that are open to men. While in most countries that have elections, women lag behind men in exercising the franchise; the tendency is for the difference in men's and women's voting rates to narrow over time in stable electoral systems. However, there is an enormous disparity between women's attainment of formal political equality and their real exercise of political power. The numbers of women in public office remains low in most countries; in very few do women fill even 10% of such positions. Yet there are scattered signs of improvement, with slowly rising numbers of women in elective and appointive offices. The real centers of political power are still overwhelmingly dominated by men, but the fact that women in most countries can enter the political contest on a routine basis is a sign that exclusion based on sex roles is diminishing.     

Modulation of an activity response with associative and nonassociative fear in the rat: A lighting differential influences the form of defensive behavior evoked after fear conditioning

Rats confronted with the onset of a light gradient display a transient increase in locomotion called theactivity response (AR) and a dark preference (Godsil & Fanselow, 2004). These experiments demonstrate that the magnitude of the AR can be blunted with Pavlovian fear-conditioning procedures via associative and nonassociative fear. Although manifested in decreased locomotion, the blunted AR effect was not due to increased freezing or immobility behaviors. Instead, rats displayed reduced rearing and an increase in a class of behaviors calledstationary activity. These results suggest that the lighting differential supplied by the cue influences the topography of defensive behavior and reduces the expression of freezing. This procedure provides a means by which to examine learned and unlearned defensive responses to the same stimulus.