Parental Rearing Behaviors and Adolescent’s Social Trust: Roles of Adolescent Self-esteem and Class Justice Climate

Research on the antecedents and underlying mechanisms of the formation of adolescent social trust is scant. Family and school are two major environments in which adolescents become socialized. The current study examined the effect of parental rearing behaviors (rejection, emotional warmth and overprotection) on adolescent social trust, exploring the mediating role of adolescent self-esteem and the multilevel moderated role of the Level 2 variable class justice climate. The sample included 612 (12–16 years old) middle school students in China. Participants completed the s-EMBU, the Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale, Rosenberg’s Faith in People Scale and the perceptions of class justice scale, along with other control variables. The results suggested that parental rearing behaviors significantly predicted adolescent social trust, regardless of adolescent gender or age. Additional mediation analysis suggested that parental rearing behaviors had both direct effects on adolescent social trust and indirect effects through adolescent self-esteem. Further multilevel structural equation modeling indicated that class justice climate moderated the effect of parental rejection on adolescent self-esteem. The findings suggest that family and school practice jointly shape adolescents’ social trust. How parents treat their children has a huge influence on the degree to which their children trust other people. In addition, perceived class justice could buffer the harmfulness of negative parental rearing behaviors.     

Emotional support from parents early in life, aging, and health

The purpose of this study is to estimate the relationship between receiving emotional support from parents early in life and an individual's health in adulthood. Analysis of data from a nationally representative sample of adults ages 25-74 years suggests that a lack of parental support during childhood is associated with increased levels of depressive symptoms and chronic conditions in adulthood. These associations between early parental support and adult health persist with increasing age throughout adulthood. Personal control, self-esteem, and social relationships during adulthood account for a large portion of these long-term associations. These findings underscore the importance of adopting a life course perspective in studying the social determinants of health among adults.     

Predicting children's media use in the USA: Differences in cross‐sectional and longitudinal analysis

The purpose of this paper is to examine the predictors of children's media use in the USA, comparing cross‐sectional and longitudinal analyses. Data come from Waves 1 and 2 of the Child Development Supplement (CDS‐I; CDS‐II), a nationally representative sample of American children aged 0–12 in 1997 and 5–18 in 2002. Twenty‐four hour time use diaries are used to assess children's time spent with media (television, video games, computers, and reading). Predictors examined include socio‐demographics, neighbourhood quality, family factors, and other media use. Ordinary least square (OLS) multiple regressions were performed by three age groups (preschoolers, early school age, and preadolescence). The findings suggest that neighbourhood quality, parental limits and family conflict are significant predictors of children's media use within time or over time, but the significance depends on the type of media and child's developmental stage. In addition, children's television viewing and reading habits are formed early in life and reinforced over time. This study is among the first to provide empirical evidence for the effect of early contextual factors on the life course of children's media use from a developmental perspective.     

Life satisfaction in old age: linking social psychology and history

A life course perspective on aging assumes that adaptation is governed by factors beyond the immediate situation. Using longitudinal data on 79 women from the 1900 generation of the Berkeley Guidance Study, we examined how social and psychological factors interact over time in the course of successful aging, as expressed by life satisfaction. The consequences of adaptive resources in early adulthood vary in relation to social class. Intellectual skills in 1930 indirectly predict life satisfaction in old age for women from the working class, whereas emotional health is more influential in the life satisfaction of women with higher class origins. Social activity in old age makes a difference only in the lives of women from the working class. Finally, adaptation to old age is related to women's experiences with past stressful events. Middle-class women in 1930 showed gains attributable to Depression hardship (1930s), whereas the life satisfaction of women from the working class was diminished by such hardships. Several mechanisms are discussed that may link widely separated problem situations and life events across the life course. The analysis provides empirical support for the proposition that the influence of social change on life trajectories is contingent on what individuals bring to change situations.     

Social development from infancy to adolescence: longitudinal and concurrent factors in an adoption sample

In the present longitudinal study, early adopted children (N = 160) were followed from infancy to adolescence to assess the influence of previous and concurrent factors on the children's social development. This study allowed for more conclusive evidence of the influence of early and concurrent rearing experiences and temperament on adolescents' social development, independent of shared genetic factors between children and parents. Results showed that social development and temperament were stable over time and that both previous and current parental sensitivity were important in predicting social development in adolescence. Quality of the early parent-child relationship was indirectly associated with social development in adolescence through the influence on social development in middle childhood. Maternal sensitivity in middle childhood and in adolescence partly buffered the negative effects of difficult temperament on social development in adolescence. Adaptation emerged as the product of both developmental history and current circumstances.     

父母物质主义与大学生网络强迫性购物:序列中介效应分析

本研究基于生命历程范式,探讨父母物质主义与大学生网络强迫性购物的关系,并在此基础上建构了一个序列中介效应模型,考察大学生物质主义和社会比较的中介作用。采用方便抽样法对武汉市一所综合性大学858名具有网络购物经验的学生进行问卷调查,结果显示：（1）父母物质主义、大学生物质主义、社会比较和网络强迫性购物两两显著正相关;（2）在控制了性别和家庭社会经济地位之后,父母物质主义对大学生网络强迫性购物具有显著正向预测作用;（3）大学生物质主义和社会比较在父母物质主义与大学生网络强迫性购物之间起中介作用。具体而言,父母物质主义通过两条路径影响大学生网络强迫性购物,一是大学生物质主义的单独中介作用;二是大学生物质主义和社会比较的序列中介作用。上述结果表明,父母物质主义对大学生网络强迫性购物具有一定影响,且这种影响是通过个体因素（物质主义）和同伴互动因素（社会比较）共同作用形成的。     

Inferring the popularity of an opinion from its familiarity: a repetitive voice can sound like a chorus

Despite the importance of doing so, people do not always correctly estimate the distribution of opinions within their group. One important mechanism underlying such misjudgments is people's tendency to infer that a familiar opinion is a prevalent one, even when its familiarity derives solely from the repeated expression of 1 group member. Six experiments demonstrate this effect and show that it holds even when perceivers are consciously aware that the opinions come from 1 speaker. The results also indicate that the effect is due to opinion accessibility rather than a conscious inference about the meaning of opinion repetition in a group. Implications for social consensus estimation and social influence are discussed.     

Externalizing symptoms among children of alcoholic parents: Entry points for an antisocial pathway to alcoholism

The authors examined heterogeneity in risk for externalizing symptoms in children of alcoholic parents, as it may inform the search for entry points into an antisocial pathway to alcoholism. That is, they tested whether the number of alcoholic parents in a family, the comorbid subtype of parental alcoholism, and the gender of the child predicted trajectories of externalizing symptoms over the early life course, as assessed in high-risk samples of children of alcoholic parents and matched controls. Through integrative analyses of 2 independent, longitudinal studies, they showed that children with either an antisocial alcoholic parent or 2 alcoholic parents were at greatest risk for externalizing symptoms. Moreover, children with a depressed alcoholic parent did not differ from those with an antisocial alcoholic parent in reported symptoms. These findings were generally consistent across mother, father, and adolescent reports of symptoms; child gender and child age (ages 2 through 17); and the 2 independent studies examined. Multialcoholic and comorbid-alcoholic families may thus convey a genetic susceptibility to dysregulation along with environments that both exacerbate this susceptibility and provide few supports to offset it.     

Bringing life history theory into relationship science

In this article, I review three longitudinal studies that have investigated how exposure to more versus less predictable environments shunt individuals down different developmental pathways. After describing key principles of life history theory and how stress can shape social development over time, I discuss an interrelated set of findings from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation. Collectively, these studies reveal the pathways through which exposure to more unpredictable, chaotic early‐life environments prospectively forecast engaging in riskier behaviors and shorter‐term, more opportunistic, and less investing orientations to mating and parenting in one or both genders. I conclude by discussing the broader goals underlying this program of research.     

Familial correlates of social anxiety in children and adolescents

Retrospective studies suggest a relationship between parental rearing practices and social phobia. The present study investigated whether socially anxious children perceive their current parental rearing as rejecting, overprotective, and lacking emotional warmth, and as emphasizing the importance of other's opinion, and de-emphasizing social initiatives and family sociability. Furthermore, we examined whether parents of socially anxious children report to rely on such rearing practices, and suffer themselves from social fears. A regression analysis as well as extreme group comparisons were applied. Little support was found for the presumed role of the assessed family rearing aspects in the development of social anxiety in children. Solely family sociability (children's and mothers' report) and children's perception of overprotection of the mother predicted social anxiety in the regression analysis. Given the influence of the mentioned rearing practices, social anxiety of the mother still significantly predicted social anxiety of the child. In the extreme group comparisons, differences in the expected direction were found between socially anxious and normal children on parental rejection, emotional warmth, and family sociability. However, the lack of differences between socially anxious and clinical control children suggests that these variables do not form a specific pathway to social fears.     

Continuities and Consequences of Interactional Styles Across the Life Course

Behavior patterns can be sustained across the life course by two kinds of person-environment interaction. Cumulative continuity arises when an individual's interactional style channels him or her into environments that themselves reinforce that style, thereby sustaining the behavior pattern across the life course through the progressive accumulation of its own consequences. Interactional continuity arises when an individual's style evokes reciprocal, sustaining responses from others in ongoing social interaction, thereby reinstating the behavior pattern across the individual's life course whenever the relevant interactive situation is replicated. Using archival data from the Berkeley Guidance Study (Macfarlane, Allen, & Honzik, 1954), we present evidence for the operation of these two continuity-promoting processes by identifying individuals who were ill-tempered, shy, or dependent in late childhood and then tracing the continuities and consequences of these interactional styles across the subsequent 30 years of their lives in the domains of work and family. The importance of the sociocultural context in mediating these continuities and consequences is stressed.     

Does anxiety or cardiovascular reactivity have a causal role in hypertension?

Anxiety, stress, and cardiovascular reactivity (CVR) are variously believed to play a role in sustained hypertension. Although acute anxiety or stress elicits acute pressor responses, there is little support for their significant role in sustained hypertension. Anxiety correlates poorly with CVR, and blood pressure levels and anxiolytics do not sustain blood pressure lowering in subjects with hypertension-associated anxiety. Chronic anxiety disorders tend to be characterized by relatively low blood pressure and prevalence of sustained hypertension. Blood Pressure Regulation in hypertension is normal, and normo- and hypertensives have similar ambulatory blood pressure variability. Laboratory CVR fails to predict variability in natural environments, hyperreactors do not exhibit increased variability in natural environments, and the increased variability and ambulatory reactivity that is "accounted for" by laboratory responses is small. These findings do not support the belief that hypertension is related to a summation of heightened pressor responses over time. Antihypertensives normalize elevated blood pressures but do not alter CVR in the laboratory or variability in natural environments, probably because of a dual central regulation of resting and reactive blood pressures. Psychological stress responses result from selective neuronal activation rather than from generalized sympathetic neural responses or dysregulation. Differences in blood pressure responses during various emotions are only quantitative, with no specificity of sympathoadrenal or emotional responses to stressors. It may be time to regard reactive cardiovascular responses as physiological, rather than as psychological, and to require much stronger evidence to confirm causal roles of anxiety, stress, and reactivity in sustained hypertension.     

Time and Its Relationship to Development in the Life Course: Some Reflections from a Study of HIV-Positive Adults

Although adult development is commonly understood as change over time, the relationship between time and development is rarely highlighted in research in the field. This paper first reviews 3 dimensions of time that interact in the study of developmental processes in the life course. The 3 dimensions are historical time; chronological age or life time; and social time, the culturally-specific, systematic ordering of life events. Second, the paper utilizes data from a follow-up study of HIV-positive men and women to illustrate the importance of time in development. In the original study, an HIV-positive diagnosis was viewed as a death sentence and had the effect of suspending the normal developmental patterns of adult life. Two years later, with the advent of protease inhibitors—an event in historical time—participants had reengaged with life time, once again making social time a relevant factor in their development. These data demonstrate how a better understanding of adult development can be achieved when historical time, life time, and social time are moved center stage in the study of developmental processes.     

Pulling the strings: Effects of friend and parent opinions on dating choices

The current study examined how dating choices are affected when individuals are faced with social network opinions that are in agreement or disagreement about the quality of potential dates. In a virtual dating game paradigm, participants spoke to 2 potential romantic partners online and received positive and/or negative feedback ostensibly from their friend and parent about 1 of the partners. The study employed a 2 (parent opinion: approve, disapprove) × 2 (friend opinion: approve, disapprove) × 2 (interaction partner: evaluated target, control target—within subjects) mixed factorial design. Friend opinion influenced who the participants liked, whereas parental opinion was influential when participants relied on their parent for more resources than their friend. In the end, though, only friend opinion predicted dating choice.     

Observer Influences on Fathers and Mothers: An Experimental Manipulation of the Structure and Function of Parent – Infant Conversation

From studies over the past 20 years four contrasting hypotheses can be made about the nature of parent–infant communication: (1) mothers and fathers display similar skills to their infants and do not exert a differential influence on their development; (2) fathers are less sympathetic to their infants' level of development and therefore inadvertently stretch the child's development more than mothers; (3) both parents differentially socialize their sons' and daughters' early communicative skills; (4) any apparent differences between parents reflect their expectations about being observed. To examine these hypotheses together, this experiment records the communication of 10 mother–infant and 10 father–infant dyads in two conditions: when an observer was present or absent. The analysis revealed two patterns. Firstly, in keeping with most research on parent–child communication, mothers and fathers both simplified their speech to their infants in similar ways. Secondly, both the structure and function of parental communication showed differences between the two conditions and many of these differences were moderated by interactions between condition and sex of parent or child. The data thus provide more support for the first and fourth hypotheses cited above. It is suggested that analyses of parent–infant interaction should move away from simple assumptions about parental ‘influences’ upon children's development to consider the subtleties of different parental styles in different settings.     

Biopsychosocial Influences That Promote and Impede Social Brain Maturation

ABSTRACT

Social, emotional, and executive function systems of the brain change greatly during adolescence as the result of biopsychosocial influences. These factors alter the course of adolescent behavior through effects on the component processes of social behavior. Specifically, the influences of chronic stress, social and economic adversity, alcohol and drugs, and brain injury as well as parental buffering and support, increased neural connectivity and mentalizing resources, and enriched environments can impede or promote maturation of the social and executive brain networks that regulate social adjustment and emotional expression. Hence, there are many early “windows of opportunity” to affect the biological and neurocognitive foundations of adolescent social executive functions such as empathy, theory of mind, self-monitoring, and social emotions.     

Multiple Cues in Social Perception: The Time Course of Processing Race and Facial Expression

The purpose of the present study was to examine the time course of race and expression processing to determine how these cues influence early perceptual as well as explicit categorization judgments. Despite their importance in social perception, little research has examined how social category information and emotional expression are processed over time. Moreover, although models of face processing suggest that the two cues should be processed independently, this has rarely been directly examined. Event-related brain potentials were recorded as participants made race and emotion categorization judgments of Black and White men posing either happy, angry, or neutral expressions. Our findings support that processing of race and emotion cues occur independently and in parallel, relatively early in processing.     

College Sophomores in the Laboratory Redux: Influences of a Narrow Data Base on Social Psychology's View of the Nature of Prejudice

In this article we review answers to 5 questions concerning the development of personality across the life course: How early in the life course can we identify characteristics unique to individuals that will show continuity over time? When in the life course is personality fully developed? What life course factors moderate continuity and change in personality? What are the mechanisms that promote continuity in personality? And finally, what are the mechanisms that promote change in personality? Based on the answers to these 5 questions we conclude (a) that there is modest continuity from childhood to adulthood, (b) that personality traits do not become fixed at a certain age in adulthood and retain the possibility of change even into old age, and (c) that with time and age people become more adept at interacting with their environment such that personality consistency increases with age and is more common than change in midlife and old age.     

SEXUAL SOCIALIZATION DIFFERENCES BY GENDER, GREEK MEMBERSHIP, ETHNICITY, AND RELIGIOUS BACKGROUND

Socialization theories have included parents and peers as important determinants of the initial sexual standards and sexual behavior of teenagers and young adults. The purpose of the research reported here was to examine how parental and peer sexual socialization influences are related to gender, ethnicity, religious background, and college membership in a fraternity or sorority. A sample that included a majority of Caucasian university students and about 13% Asian and 7% Black students completed questionnaires both as entering first-year students and as seniors. Results indicated that compared to women, men continue to experience a more permissive sexual socialization from both parents and peers. Greek membership was associated with a more permissive socialization from peers but not parents. Asian students reported a more restrictive socialization than Blacks or Caucasians. Findings are discussed with respect to concerns of social scientists regarding the influence of fraternities and differential gender socialization.