This report synthesizes the discussions which took place at an international conference on profound mental handicap held in Madrid, Spain (November, 1984). An overview of the issues involved in helping people with profound handicaps cites several positive trends, such as education for all, family support services, home visitations by direct care…

Little information exists on the coping patterns of parents of chronically ill children although there are 1,000,000 severely chronically ill children in the United States. To address the need for psychosocial services, Arizona is developing a program to serve its citizens. A study was conducted to examine the reliability of a major family coping…

This student workbook is intended for use in helping teenage and adult basic education (ABE) students reduce their anxiety over tests in general and over the General Educational Development (GED) test in particular. Exercises are provided to help students analyze and understand their feelings about and while taking tests, recall the childhood…

Urban and rural third graders were studied to test the hypothesis that children's self-reported views of their ability to cope with the environment and their teacher's views of their performance patterns in adaptation and intrapersonal growth would have correlations with academic test performance. Teacher appraisals of adaptation covered…

Job loss is a stressful event, partially because of the obvious stress of economic deprivation. However, research shows that job loss also has psychological effects. The impact of losing a job has been investigated in terms of personality (self esteem, mental health, and affective states) and in terms of the transitional stages of reactions to job…

The field of mental health has had difficulty in developing an adequate conceptualization of racism as a mental health problem. Based on conventional classifications of mental illness, racism might be described as a functional disorder. The racist, however, appears quite normal except for a paranoid disorder in the area of racial relations. The…

This paper evaluates models of positive mental health for their applicability to blacks and describes three studies that examined self-esteem, locus of control, and commitment to social change as critical dimensions of effective functioning and mental health among blacks. The first study examined racial differences in self-evaluation by subjecting…

Since vocational education normally deals with potential workers, it needs to include courses whose content focuses on developing effective coping strategies to deal with occupational stressors that affect job satisfaction. Occupational stress is defined as a dynamic reciprocal relationship between an individual and the work environment.…

The working draft of the teaching guide is intended for use with secondary students with learning and behavior problems and focuses on the development of three school coping skill areas: behavior control, teacher pleasing behaviors, and study skills. Each area is divided into teaching components with terminal objectives and related instructional…

The concept of place identity is a theoretical necessity for understanding the impact of the urban environment on the individual. Place identity refers to clusters of perceptions in the form of images, memories, facts, ideas, beliefs, values, and behavior tendencies relevant to the individual's existence in the physical world. These clusters are…

Case studies of 27 plant shutdowns during the past two decades are summarized and analyzed. The organization of this research summary follows the plant-closing event in a chronological fashion. In the first section is considered the state of plant-closing research and the concerns and options of the groups involved in a shutdown. A second chapter…

Several reasons exist for the wide variation in estimates on the prevalence of alcohol abuse among women from one study to another. An attempt to establish the prevalence of alcohol abuse among both men and women in the working population employed the Short Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test (SMAST) and the Iowa Alcoholic Stages Index (ASI) as…

Reminiscence has long been considered an integral part of the aging process, whether as a form of cultural transmission or as a method of strengthening the ego structure. To examine the form of reminiscence defined as life review and its relationship to adjustment in the final stages of development, older Canadian adults (N=82) completed a…

Although widowhood is a disruptive and inevitable phenomenon for many older people, few studies have explored either adjustment to widowhood or the impact of widowhood on the lives of elderly people. Recently widowed persons (N=51), ranging in age from 49 to 83 years old, were interviewed to examine their relatively immediate psychosocial…

This packet of materials provides information for those who have obtained Lansing Community College's videotape series on stress and professional burnout and who plan to use these tapes in a professional development seminar. General information for seminar leaders is presented first, including a list of the contents of the packet, an outline of…