African American Sample (african + american_sample)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Race and religion: differential prediction of anxiety symptoms by religious coping in African American and European American young adults,

DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY, Issue 3 2010
L. Kevin Chapman Ph.D.
Abstract Background: Psychosocial factors, including religious coping, consistently have been implicated in the expression of anxiety disorders. This study sought to investigate the relationship between religious coping on anxiety symptoms among a nonclinical sample of African American and European American young adults. Methods: One hundred twenty-one European American and 100 African American young adults completed measures of anxiety and religious coping. Results: As predicted, results differed according to race. African Americans reported significantly more positive religious coping, less negative religious coping, and experienced fewer anxiety symptoms than European Americans. European Americans demonstrated a significant, positive relationship between negative religious coping and anxiety symptoms, and an opposite trend related to anxiety and positive religious coping. However, no such relationships emerged among the African American sample. Conclusions: Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed. Depression and Anxiety, 2010. © 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]


Effects of parental supportiveness on toddlers' emotion regulation over the first three years of life in a low-income African American sample,

INFANT MENTAL HEALTH JOURNAL, Issue 5 2009
Erika London Bocknek
The purpose of this study was to examine how parental supportiveness and child gender are related to toddlers' emotion regulation over time among low-income African American mothers and their children (n = 803). Data for the current study were collected as part of the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project. Using latent growth curve modeling, results indicated that parental supportiveness predicted toddlers' emotion regulation skills, on average (intercepts), and rates of growth of parental supportiveness predicted the rates of growth in emotion regulation over time (slope), beyond the effects of initial parental risk status, child gender, Early Head Start treatment effects, and infant emotionality. However, parental supportiveness over time did not differentially predict toddler emotion regulation over time for boys as compared to girls. Results suggest that parental supportiveness may represent a subtle form of emotion socialization by providing a context in which toddlers may be better able to utilize their mothers as effective resources in managing emotions. Practitioners should emphasize with the parents the role of parent,child interactions as a context for development. The lack of gender differences suggests that differential parenting towards boys and girls, evident in research with older children, may not yet be present in toddlerhood. Recognizing similarities in parenting across racial groups early on as well as being sensitive to differences that may emerge later will position practitioners to provide support within a culturally sensitive framework. [source]


Evidence for the multigenic inheritance of schizophrenia

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF MEDICAL GENETICS, Issue 8 2001
Robert Freedman
Abstract Schizophrenia is assumed to have complex inheritance because of its high prevalence and sporadic familial transmission. Findings of linkage on different chromosomes in various studies corroborate this assumption. It is not known whether these findings represent heterogeneous inheritance, in which various ethnic groups inherit illness through different major gene effects, or multigenic inheritance, in which affected individuals inherit several common genetic abnormalities. This study therefore examined inheritance of schizophrenia at different genetic loci in a nationally collected European American and African American sample. Seventy-seven families were previously genotyped at 458 markers for the NIMH Schizophrenia Genetics Initiative. Initial genetic analysis tested a dominant model, with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, depressed type, as the affected phenotype. The families showed one genome-wide significant linkage (Z,=,3.97) at chromosome 15q14, which maps within 1 cM of a previous linkage at the ,7-nicotinic receptor gene. Chromosome 10p13 showed suggestive linkage (Z,=,2.40). Six others (6q21, 9q32, 13q32, 15q24, 17p12, 20q13) were positive, with few differences between the two ethnic groups. The probability of each family transmitting schizophrenia through two genes is greater than expected from the combination of the independent segregation of each gene. Two trait-locus linkage analysis supports a model in which genetic alleles associated with schizophrenia are relatively common in the general population and affected individuals inherit risk for illness through at least two different loci. © 2001 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]


Technical note: Prediction of sex based on five skull traits using decision analysis (CHAID)

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 3 2009
Joan C. Stevenson
Abstract Osteologists commonly assess the sex of skeletal remains found in forensic and archaeological contexts based on ordinal scores of subjectively assessed sexually dimorphic traits. Using known-sex samples, logistic regression (LR) discriminant functions have been recently developed, which allow sex probabilities to be determined. A limitation of LR is that it emphasizes main effects and not interactions. Chi-square automatic interaction detection (CHAID) is an alternative classification strategy that emphasizes the information in variable interactions and uses decision trees to maximize the probability of correct sex determinations. We used CHAID to analyze the predictive value of the 31 possible combinations of five sexually dimorphic skull traits that Walker used previously to develop logistic regression sex determination equations. The samples consisted of 304 individuals of known sex of English, African American, and European American origin. Based on practical considerations, selection criteria for the best sex predictive trait combinations (SPTCs) were set at accuracies for both sexes of 75% or greater and sex biases lower than 5%. Although several of the trees meeting these criteria were produced for the English and European American samples, none met them for the African American sample. In the series of out-of-sample tests we performed, the trees from the English and combined sample of all groups predicted best. Am J Phys Anthropol, 2009. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]