University of Massachusetts Boston

About: University of Massachusetts Boston is a education organization based out in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Health care. The organization has 6541 authors who have published 12918 publications receiving 411731 citations. The organization is also known as: UMass Boston.

Clinical Trials and Medical Care: Defining the Therapeutic Misconception

Abstract: A key component of informed consent to participate in medical research includes understanding that research is not the same as treatment.

Infants of Depressed Mothers

Abstract: Depression is the most frequent psychiatric disorder and has long-term, compromising effects on the mother-infant relationship and the child's development. The infant continuously faces a climate of negative affect that disrupts the interactive experience of the infant and the mother. This article presents findings on the impact of maternal depression on the infant affective state and the specific interactive patterns associated with infant affect regulation. Mother-infant interactions were studied using microanalytic, second-by-second methods in the laboratory and also by using naturalistic home observations. The empirical findings highlight the impact of maternal depression on the infant affective state and on the capacity for repairing states of miscoordination. The impact is seen not only in severely and acutely depressed mothers, but in mothers who have only high levels of depressive symptoms. These infants develop negative affective states that bias their interactions with others and exacerbate their affective problems. Further findings with regard to gender-specific effects show that male infants are more vulnerable than female infants to maternal depression. The findings point out the need for therapeutic interventions that focus on the mother-infant dyad and infant affective state in the treatment of maternal depression.

Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract: It is imperative that linguists and educators (and all social theorists and cultural workers for that matter) move beyond the mainstream conceptual limitations of discourse presented as multiple utterances produced within a social context. Unfortunately, this definition, virtually disconnected from the historical, economic, social, and institutional relations within which language is produced, only invokes analysis around such depoliticized aspects as semantics, pragmatics, and the paralinguistics of body language and prosodics. Over the past century, more critical understandings of language, from Valentin Volosinov and Mikhail Bakhtin to Michel Foucault and beyond, have given rise to definitions of the concept of discourse that are far more socially and politically revealing. From such critical perspectives, discourse has evolved into the complex “ways in which reality is perceived through and shaped by historically and socially constructed ways of making sense, that is, language, complex signs, and practices that order and sustain particular forms of social existence” (Leistyna 1996, 336). As Stuart Hall (1997, 6) observes,