Managing job strain: a randomized, controlled trial of an intervention conducted by mail and telephone.

A randomized, clinical intervention focused on alleviating job strain was conducted over 6 months by mail and/or telephone with a total of 136 employees of Bank of America. Both the mail and mail plus telephone interventions evidenced positive results, with the mail plus telephone intervention being the more effective. Given the relative low cost of such mediated interventions, the results provide a basis for the further development of interventions that may demonstrate both clinical and cost effectiveness.

Initialized near-term regional climate change prediction.

Climate models are seen by many to be unverifiable. However, near-term climate predictions up to 10 years into the future carried out recently with these models can be rigorously verified against observations. Near-term climate prediction is a new information tool for the climate adaptation and service communities, which often make decisions on near-term time scales, and for which the most basic information is unfortunately very scarce. The Fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project set of co-ordinated climate-model experiments includes a set of near-term predictions in which several modelling groups participated and whose forecast quality we illustrate here. We show that climate forecast systems have skill in predicting the Earth's temperature at regional scales over the past 50 years and illustrate the trustworthiness of their predictions. Most of the skill can be attributed to changes in atmospheric composition, but also partly to the initialization of the predictions.

[Self-efficacy among health learners/self-efficacy among health educators].

The Social Cognitive Theory has helped health educators develop effective health education programs that target self-efficacy among participants in changing their health behavior. Bandura has identified four resources on which individuals determine their levels of self-efficacy: (1) performance accomplishment, (2) vicarious reinforcement, (3) verbal persuasion, and (4) emotional arousal. Examples of health education strategies that utilize each of the four resources to increase participants' self-efficacy are described. Health education professionals in Japan have attempted to use programs based on the Social Cognitive Theory for Japanese populations. It is criticized that health educators that use such programs are not well trained in effective use, and that those programs have not been utilized at their maximum potentials. Using the frame-work of the Social Cognitive Theory, the importance of incorporating ways to increase self-efficacy of health educators in providing health education services into education and training of health educators is discussed.