Sociocultural Beliefs,As Well As Goodness of Fit,Influence the Effectiveness of Coping in Japanese Workers

Background

Although the goodness-of-fit hypothesis (GOFH) is one of the most important theories in research about the effect of coping on distress related to different stressful situations, there has been a mixed response to it in the literature.

Purpose

The present study examined whether the effect of the sociocultural context in stressful situations is consistent with the GOFH. The study investigated sociocultural beliefs about the appropriateness of different coping strategies in a given group as the sociocultural context.

Method

Japanese employees (N?=?1,156) of an information technology company reported their appraisal of stressors’ controllability, the coping strategies they employed for the stressors, their sociocultural beliefs about coping strategies, and their psychological distress in response to the stressors.

Results

The GOFH was supported only for problem-focused coping with task stressors and not for interpersonal stressors. The applicability of the GOFH differed by sociocultural beliefs about coping, namely an appraisal of what coworkers might think about the appropriateness of the coping method.

Conclusion

These results suggest that it is important for managing stress to consider the sociocultural context as well as the GOFH.     

Exposure to intermittent hypoxia inhibits allergic airway inflammation in a murine model of asthma

Sleep and Breathing - Obesity increases the severity of asthma, and patients with severe asthma are often complicated with obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS), a concomitant disease of obesity....     

Real-time tissue elastography for evaluation of hepatic fibrosis and portal hypertension in nonalcoholic fatty liver diseases

The aim of this study was to prospectively measure liver stiffness with real-time tissue elastography in patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver diseases (NAFLD) and to compare the result with the clinical assessment of fibrosis using histological stage. One hundred and eighty-one prospectively enrolled patients underwent real-time tissue elastography, with the first 106 being analyzed as the training set and the remaining 75 being evaluated as the validation set. Hepatic and splenic elastic ratios were calculated and compared with stage of histological fibrosis. Portal hypertension (PH) was assessed. Real-time tissue elastography cut-off values by stage in the training set were 2.47 for F1, 2.67 for F2, 3.02 for F3, and 3.36 for F4. Using these cut-off values, the diagnostic accuracy of hepatic fibrosis in the validation set was 82.6%-96.0% in all stages. Only portal fibrosis correlated with the hepatic elastic ratio by multivariate analysis. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of elastic ratio better correlated than serum fibrosis markers in both early and advanced fibrosis stages. Patients with PH, defined by splenic elasticity, had early fibrosis. Patients with severe PH were found only in the group with cirrhosis. Conclusion: Real-time tissue elastography is useful in evaluating hepatic fibrosis and PH in patients with NAFLD. (HEPATOLOGY 2012).