How young adults address their parents reflects their perception of parenting

A speaker's use of a title for the listener shows the speaker's deference to the listener. Previous studies suggested that the use of kinship terms in the family also shows deference to the listener. The present study focused on young adults' use of kinship terms for their parents to investigate whether their use of kinship terms reflects their perception of their parenting. The participants were 329 Japanese college students, who answered a questionnaire about their forms of address for their parents, perceived parental emotional accessibility, and perceived parental control. They also reported their satisfaction with their parent–child relationships and the frequency of parent–child communication. The results suggest that young adults who use kinship terms for their parents perceive their parents to be more emotionally accessible and communicate with their parents more than those who do not. Young adults who use kinship terms for their father are also more satisfied with their father–child relationships than those who do not. Young adults' use of kinship terms might signal not only their deference to their parents, but also their acceptance of their parent–child relationships.     

“I’m not a lesbian; I’m just a freak”: A Pilot Study of the Experiences of Women in Assumed-Monogamous Other-Sex Unions Seeking Secret Same-Sex Encounters Online,their Negotiation of Sexual Desire,and Meaning-Making of Sexual Identity

This pilot study looked to examine the experiences of women who are “undercover,” the meaning-making of their sexual identity, how they came to negotiate their same-sex sexual desires alongside their primary other-sex unions, and their experience of a secret, compartmentalized life. The study sought to understand their experiences as well as their meaning-making in the course of maintaining a public heterosexual persona while balancing their secret desire for sex with women. The thirty-four women in this study report lifelong incidence of attraction to and encounters with other women as well as men. They are not transitioning toward a lesbian identity nor experiencing fluidity; rather, clandestine encounters are part of an ongoing means to negotiate their opposite-sex marriages. For them, our culture’s limited notions of sexual identity are less than useful. It was important to their self-concept that their sexuality be understood in terms of its intensity and their desire for frequency and diversity of acts. They defined themselves on their own terms and by their sexual personalities and inclination toward what they considered “hypersexuality” or “freakiness.” Despite conventional ideas that women are emotionally driven in their extra-relational affairs and need to “fall in love” to participate in extra-relational sexual activity, all of the women were clear in their desire to limit their association with their same-sex partners to sexual encounters only.     

Understanding Women's Body Satisfaction: The Role of Husbands

This study was designed to examine the role women's husbands may play in determining their body satisfaction. One hundred and seventy-two (172; mean age = 37.53 years) European American women's body satisfaction, their perceptions of their husbands' satisfaction with their bodies, and their husbands' actual satisfaction with their bodies were assessed using the Body Figure Rating Scale; women's weight status was assessed using body mass index (BMI). Results indicated that wives were much more dissatisfied with their bodies than were their husbands and that wives thought their husbands were much more dissatisfied with their bodies than the husbands actually were. Further, findings suggested that wives' BMIs were not as strongly related to husband's satisfaction with their wives' bodies as they were to wives' own satisfaction or perceptions of their husbands' satisfaction with their bodies.     

Effects of feedback on the overestimated capacity to detect lies and the underestimated ability to tell lies

People tend to overestimate their capacity to detect lying in others and to underestimate their own ability to tell lies. These biases were demonstrated in a sample of 60 police officers. In a lie‐detection task, the officers evaluated their accuracy as high and were overconfident in their judgements. In fact, their performance was below chance level. Participants also received false feedback about their performance. When the feedback suggested that they had performed better than they thought, this further enhanced their perceived lie‐detection capacity and also increased their belief in their ability to conceal their own lies. When the feedback suggested they had performed worse than they thought, their ratings of both lie detection and their lie‐telling abilities were lowered. Results are discussed in terms of anchoring, availability, and the self‐assessment bias. On a practical level, the tendency of police interrogators to overestimate their ability to detect deception could change suspicion into certainty and increase the risk of a false confession. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Matters of the heart: patients' adjustment to life following a cardiac crisis

In a sample of patients who experienced a myocardial infarction, coronary artery bypass graft surgery or both within the past year, we examined the extent to which patients' attempts to intrapersonally inhibit their emotions about their cardiac event and their attempts to disclose their feelings about the event to their partner predicted their psychological health (depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress) and relational functioning (closeness, satisfaction). The more patients inhibited their feelings about their cardiac event, the poorer their psychological and relational functioning. Greater disclosure was associated with greater closeness to their partner. However, frequency of disclosure was also an indicator of level of distress, such that the more frequently patients talked about their feelings regarding the cardiac event with their partner, the more they had anxiety and post-traumatic stress symptoms. Important interactions of inhibition by disclosure on outcomes as well as moderation by time since the cardiac event were found and are discussed in greater detail.     

Pina Bausch and the Interweaving of Trauma,Memory, and Creative Transformation: Commentary on Papers by Sarah Mendelsohn and Deborah Dowd

In her “dance-theater” (Tanztheater), Pina Bausch famously instructed her dancers with almost no language, encouraging her dancers to feel their way into the dance, to get in touch with their deepest vulnerabilities. In their papers, Sarah Mendelsohn and Deborah Dowd share with us, their audience, ways in which they, too, struggled to get in touch with their most vulnerable selves. Caught in an unending present with their challenging, traumatized patients, their struggle to locate themselves, and their own vulnerabilities in their patients, to experience the shame of their own childhood trauma, allowed for enlivened creative movement and profound psychic change.     

Children's estimates of their parents' job satisfaction

319 3rd and 5th grade children were asked to rate their parents' job satisfaction. These ratings were compared to parents' self-reports of job satisfaction. Older children were more accurate in their estimates. Girls were more accurate in rating their mothers, while boys were more accurate in rating fathers. Children who perceived their parents as satisfied with their jobs were more likely to aspire to their parents' occupations than those who rated their parents less satisfied.     

Little Girls in Women's Bodies: Social Interaction and the Strategizing of Early Breast Development

The purpose of this study was to analyze early breast developers' narratives of their experience of early development to understand the patterns of social interaction and resulting emotion that generated the meaning of their breasts and their bodies. Thirteen women were interviewed, and three of their stories were selected to tell in detail to demonstrate the various strategies of interaction that these women developed as girls in response to the social context of their early breast development. These results suggest that whether early breast developers rely on proactive or defensive strategies for managing their breasts has implications for their ways of thinking and feeling about their sexuality and their bodies. This research also helps to illuminate the significance of social interaction in generating the meaning of breasts and of femininity more generally.     

Social Distancing in Adolescents’ Perceptions of Alcohol Use and Social Disapproval: The Moderating Roles of Culture and Gender1

College students attribute more conservative attitudes and behaviors concerning alcohol use to themselves and progressively less conservative attitudes and behaviors to their friends and more distal peers. We examined whether a similar social‐distancing effect would occur with adolescents in America and Ireland. Students (n= 2, 554) attributed the most conservative drinking frequency to themselves and progressively less conservative frequencies to their best friends, other good friends, other students their age at their own school, and other students their age at other schools, respectively. Similarly, adolescents attributed more disapproval of drinking to their best friends and progressively less conservative disapproval to other good friends, other students their age at their own school, and other students their age at other schools, respectively. As predicted, more social distancing occurred among Americans (relative to Irish) and girls (relative to boys).     

The Deep Bodily Roots of Emotion

This article explores emotions and their relationship to “somatic responses”, i.e., one’s automatic responses to sensations of pain, cold, warmth, sudden intensity. To this end, it undertakes a Husserlian phenomenological analysis of the first-hand experience of eight basic emotions, briefly exploring their essential aspects: their holistic nature, their identifying dynamic transformation of the lived body, their two-layered intentionality, their involuntary initiation and voluntary espousal. The fact that the involuntary tensional shifts initiating emotions are irreplicatable voluntarily is taken to show that all emotions have an innate core, a conclusion corroborated by their strong similarities to somatic responses in dynamics, hedonic tone, and topology. The fact that emotions may be culturally reworked is shown to be explicable in terms of their complex nature: their dependence on belief, their voluntary espousal, and their ready social transmittability. Finally, it is argued that emotions may plausibly be deemed the evolutionary descendants of somatic responses.     

The perception of consistency in attitudes

A study was conducted to test the hypothesis that when people change their attitudes they reduce the dissonance associated with the inconsistency of their new and previous positions by distorting their recall of their initial stand to make it consistent with their new attitude. Small groups of high school students discussed bussing, one of 30 pretested issues. An experimental confederate participated in each session with the task of effecting attitude change. After the discussion, the subjects' new attitudes were assessed and they were asked to duplicate their pretest scores. The results confirmed the hypothesis. Subjects distorted their recall of their initial stand on bussing so as to make it consistent with their new attitude. Such distortion allows persons to feel that their new position is the one they have always held. The subjects made such recall errors only on the bussing issue. Control subjects did not distort their original bussing attitudes.     

The Age of Uncertainty: Parent Perspectives on the Transitions of Young People with Mental Health Difficulties to Adulthood

For young people aged 16–24, the transition from adolescence to young adulthood involves predictable and unpredictable changes and they may encounter challenges in their roles, relationships, and responsibilities. Young people with mental health difficulties face additional challenges as they and their families navigate this transition. As a result, families commonly experience anxiety, uncertainty, frustration, and turbulent relationships. After learning to become advocates to secure appropriate services for their children, in late adolescence and young adulthood, parents are likely to find themselves excluded from their children’s treatment planning and services. This article reports findings from a recent qualitative study of the experiences and perceptions of 42 family members supporting their children with mental health difficulties during the transition years. Family members described their goals for their children, their frustrations trying to access appropriate services for their children, and their strategies to provide the support their children needed. Recommendations are for service providers to connect transition age youth with practical assistance and supportive mentoring relationships. Family members requested service providers to consider them as resources and potential collaborators in supporting young people with mental health difficulties to live successful lives in the community.     

Why the unskilled are unaware: Further explorations of (absent) self-insight among the incompetent

People are typically overly optimistic when evaluating the quality of their performance on social and intellectual tasks. In particular, poor performers grossly overestimate their performances because their incompetence deprives them of the skills needed to recognize their deficits. Five studies demonstrated that poor performers lack insight into their shortcomings even in real world settings and when given incentives to be accurate. An additional meta-analysis showed that it was lack of insight into their own errors (and not mistaken assessments of their peers) that led to overly optimistic estimates among poor performers. Along the way, these studies ruled out recent alternative accounts that have been proposed to explain why poor performers hold such positive impressions of their performance.     

Parent attributions of emotion to their children and the cues children use in perceiving their own emotions

A number of studies have demonstrated stable individual differences in the cues that generate emotions and other feeling states. These differences are assumed to arise from the cues parents use to identify their children's emotional states. As children learn about their own emotional states, they come to rely on these same cues. To test one implication of their view, the facial expressions of children (N=41) were manipulated and their feelings assessed. Some children reported emotions consistent with their expressions, while others reported emotions appropriate to the situation. In a separate procedure, their mothers were asked to identify the emotional states of children whose expressions were inconsistent with an account of their circumstances. Mothers who paid more attention to their children's expressive behavior had children who were more responsive to their own expressive behavior. In contrast, the mothers who were more responsive to situational cues had children whose emotions arose from the situational cues as well.The authors would like to thank numerous teachers and administrators of the Worcester Public School system in Worcester, Massachusetts, for their assistance.     

A prolegomenon for a viable evolutionary psychology--the myth and the reality: comment on Lickliter and Honeycutt (2003)

R. Lickliter and H. Honeycutt (2003) attempted to create a dynamic developmental systems theory of evolutionary psychology. In this commentary, the author argues that the quality of their reasoning, their conflation of evolution and evolution by natural selection, their failure to explain the relative importance of multilevel, epigenetic interactions, their lack of population thinking, and their failure to define adaptation undermines their endeavor.     

Pet dogs synchronize their walking pace with that of their owners in open outdoor areas

Affiliation between interacting partners is associated with a high level of behavioural synchronization in many species. Pet dogs are known to share strong affiliative bonds with their owners and to synchronize their behaviour with them when moving freely indoors. Surprisingly, outdoor dog–human interspecific synchronization has seldom been investigated. We therefore explored whether, when allowed to move freely in a familiar outdoor space, dogs synchronize their behaviour with their owners’ movements. We found that dogs visibly synchronized both their location (staying in close proximity) and their activity (moving when their owner moved, and at the same pace, and standing still when their owner stood still) with those of their owners. By demonstrating that owners act as attractors for their dogs in an outdoor space, the present study contributes new data to the understanding of interspecific behavioural synchronization.     

Work–family planning attitudes among emerging adults

Using social learning theory as a framework, we explore two sets of antecedents to work and family role planning attitudes among emerging adults: their work–family balance self-efficacy and their perceptions of their parents' work-to-family conflict. A total of 187 college students completed a questionnaire concerning their work–family balance self-efficacy, their perceptions of their parents' work-to-family conflict, and their work and family role planning attitudes. Participants' work–family balance self-efficacy was positively related to their knowledge of and commitment to future work and family roles. In addition, perceptions of their same-gender parent's work-to-family conflict were positively related to knowledge of, commitment to, and involvement in planning for future work and family roles. Results suggest that enhancing emerging adults' self-efficacy to balance work and family may improve their attitudes toward planning for future work and family roles. Also, emerging adults appear to be more knowledgeable of, involved in, and committed to planning for work and family roles when their same-gender parents expose them to, rather than shield them from, work-to-family conflict.     

Zulu mothers' beliefs about their own and their children's intelligence

Zulu women (N = 133) were given a structural interview concerning their own and their children's multiple intelligences. The best predictor of their own self-estimated overall intelligence rating was mathematical and spatial intelligence. Mothers showed few significant differences in their estimates of their sons and daughters' overall or multiple intelligences. However, they rated their daughters' interpersonal intelligence higher than those of their sons, and their sons' bodily-kinesthetic intelligence higher than those of their daughters. The mothers believed that overall their children were about 6 IQ points more intelligent than themselves. Although mothers estimated their own spatial, inter-, and intrapersonal intelligence to be higher than those of their children, they also believed that their children had higher mathematical intelligence.