HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean Basin.

After Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean Basin has the second highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the world. The number of HIV cases in the region is likely to increase significantly over the next decade due to patterns of sexual behaviour, drug use, migration, and the sociocultural practices and legal and religious taboos which serve as barriers to safe sex, as well as stigma, shame, and denial which preclude many issues from being openly discussed and addressed. Studying the HIV epidemic in the Caribbean Basin is difficult, as efforts to synthesize information are often hampered by a lack of uniformity and availability of surveillance data in many parts of the region. In addition, behavioural surveillance is limited, and interventions addressing the cultural context of Caribbean populations are few in number. Overall, the geographic, political, cultural, and linguistic diversity of the Caribbean underscores the complexity of understanding broader regional patterns of HIV infection and developing and implementing targeted and appropriate responses.

Negative affectivity and intellectual ability: a study of their relation to self-reported physical symptoms, perceived daily stress and mood, and disciplinary problems in military recruits.

In this study we examined the relationship between cognitive ability and Negative Affectivity (NA) (measured as cognitive and behavioral aspects of anxiety) on the one hand, and somatic complaints, symptom attribution (i.e. subjective evaluation of psychological vs somatic symptom causes), perceived daily stress/mood, and disciplinary problems on the other hand, in a sample of military recruits. As expected, cognitive and behavioral anxiety correlated with measures of somatic complaints and with perceived stress/negative mood in the daily service, as well as with symptom attribution. General ability correlated negatively with three of the five somatic complaint scales as well as with presence of disciplinary problems after controlling for NA. However, the effect of the ability factor on these dependent variables was very weak and difficult to interpret. On the whole, cognitive ability does not seem to be an interesting variable in research on the NA-somatic complaints relationship, at least as conceptualized on the trait level. Thus, cognitive ability appears to be of less importance as an explanatory factor in theories of symptom perception and symptom attribution.