Empirical Relationships among Trauma Exposure, Anxiety Sensitivity, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

This review synthesized and critically reviewed empirical studies that assessed relationships among trauma exposure, anxiety sensitivity (AS), and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Across the literature, the prominent theory conceptualized anxiety sensitivity as a causal risk factor within two competing models. One model posited that individuals with dispositionally high AS prior to experiencing a potentially traumatizing event (PTE) have a greater likelihood of developing PTSD after trauma exposure. The second model theorized that the introduction of a PTE raises an individual’s baseline level of AS, leading to the development and maintenance of PTSD symptoms. Emerging research highlighted the possibility of reciprocal relationships, as well as moderating and mediating variables (e.g., age, gender) that cause differential relationships among the variables of interest. The majority of studies to date used a cross-sectional study design, and primarily relied on a descriptive approach that solely highlighted correlations between AS and PTSD. Consequently, the current state of the literature is still unable to authoritatively discern whether AS causes PTSD, PTSD increases AS, or if the two variables have a bidirectional relationship. Accordingly, extant evidence has only demonstrated that AS is a variable risk factor for the development and maintenance of PTSD symptoms. Current limitations within the literature, clinical implications, and suggestions for future research are discussed.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/gradposters/1063/thumbnail.jp

The Proverb and the Western-Educated African: Use or Neglect?

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Leadership Skills for Success of Home Health Care Agencies

Small business managers often lack the leadership skills necessary to sustain their businesses beyond 5 years. The United States Small Business Administration reported that more than 65% of small business owners, including home health care agency managers, fail within the first 5 years of operation. Guided by Burns and Bass\u27s transformational leadership theory, this multiple case study explored leadership skills that managers in home health care agencies need to sustain their new businesses beyond 5 years. The purposeful sample comprised of 3 managers from 3 different home health care agencies within a 75-mile radius of Baltimore, Maryland, that had demonstrated success in surviving past 5 years. Semistructured interviews, agencies\u27 quality assurance plans and policies were reviewed, and procedural documents related to leadership skills were gathered as data. Yin\u27s 5-step data analysis technique was used to identify key themes. Member checking enhanced the credibility of data interpretation. Themes that emerged from data analysis were business management, knowledge and performance, and transformational leadership. Study findings may contribute to positive social change by providing practical guidance to home health care managers, which may improve their agencies\u27 viability and delivery of patient care. Business implications include the provision of long-term employment to workers and safety assurance to patients\u27 families

Should Racially Vulnerable Victims Show Mercy?

On June 17, 2015, twenty-one-year-old Dylann Roof entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, sat, and prayed with nine congregants for at least an hour before pulling out a handgun and killing Cynthia Hurd, Susan Jackson, Ethel Lance, DePayne Middleton-Doctor, State Senator Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Rev. Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Singleton, and Myra Thompson.\u27 He left three survivors, explicitly so they could tell the story of his killings. Roof did so for his own demented reasons; his racist rage was laid out publicly in an online manifesto, and he hoped his murders would begin a race war. Roof was ultimately convicted of a range of murder and hate crimes

Compulsory Voting and Black Citizenship

Protesting Black votes is part of our history of rejecting Black Americans as legitimate wielders of political power and contesting the fullness of Black citizenship. Obviously, hostility toward viewing Black Americans as deserving of the rights owed to other Americans is present in nearly every aspect of American life. But, among the oldest and most contentious hostilities—from the Civil War to Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement to contemporary voter suppression efforts—has been the resistance against Black votes. Any opportunity to quell this locus of racial animus calls for urgent address. Particularly, at this moment, when long-standing prophylactic measures such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) are being dismantled, a permanent solution to Black disenfranchisement, its material costs, and its symbolic harm, should be pressing. One simple, if not (politically) easy, solution beckons. Notwithstanding sporadic academic attention, compulsory voting and its connection to Black citizenship has not, to my knowledge, been explored in legal literature. The possible effects of compulsory voting on political inequality, particularly across wealth and class, have been intermittently examined. Scholars who have argued for compulsory voting have also noted the potential material effects of compulsory voting on minority communities, in passing. But, the important symbolic antidote that compulsory voting offers to the history of racist attacks on Black voting remains unexplored