Adolescent Mental Health Resilience and Combinations of Caregiver Monitoring and Warmth: A Person-centred Perspective

Journal of Child and Family Studies - Caregiver monitoring and warmth have protective mental health effects for adolescents, including vulnerable adolescents. However, combinations of the aforesaid...     

Abusive Supervision from an Integrated Self‐Control Perspective

We investigate the relationship between supervisors’ irritation and follower perceptions of abusive supervision. Based on the integrated self‐control framework, we propose a positive relationship between supervisor irritation and abusive supervision. Moreover, we propose this relationship to be buffered by supervisors’ self‐control capacities and by external monitoring of the supervisor by upper management. We tested our hypotheses in a two‐source survey study with 96 supervisor‐follower dyads. Our results show a positive relationship between supervisor irritation and abusive supervision and an interaction between supervisor irritation and supervisor self‐control. The interaction pattern revealed a positive relationship between supervisor irritation and abusive supervision if supervisor self‐control is low. We also found an interaction between supervisor irritation and external monitoring in predicting active but not passive forms of abusive supervision. Our findings underline the role of self‐control processes in explaining abusive supervision.     

In defense of the disjunctive

Are there any disjunctive properties—features of things such as being either red or round, or Nelson Goodman’s infamous example of being grue (i.e. either green if observed on or before 2500 A.D. or blue otherwise)? As esoteric as the question may seem at first, central issues about the metaphysics of properties hinge upon its answer, such as whether reductive views about special science properties can handle the phenomenon of multiple realizability. A familiar argument for a negative answer is that disjunctive properties fail to guarantee that their instances are similar in some genuine respect. In this paper, I respond to a novel, sophisticated version of this argument developed in recent work by Paul Audi. Along the way, I develop two new accounts of what it is for a property to be disjunctive—which rely on important recent work on the nature of essence and analysis—and clarify what one is committed to in believing that there are any disjunctive properties at all.     

The Effects of a Couples‐Based Health Behavior Intervention During Pregnancy on Latino Couples’ Dyadic Satisfaction Postpartum

Many couples tend to report steadily decreasing relationship quality following the birth of a child. However, little is known about the postpartum period for Latino couples, a rapidly growing ethnic group who are notably underserved by mental and physical health caregivers in the United States. Thus, this study investigated whether a brief couples’ intervention focused on helping couples support each other while increasing healthy behaviors might improve dyadic functioning postpartum. This study presents secondary analyses of data regarding couple functioning from a larger randomized controlled trial with 348 Latino couples to promote smoking cessation. Portions of the intervention taught the couple communication and problem‐solving skills to increase healthy behavior. Couples participated in four face‐to‐face assessments across 1 year starting at the end of the first trimester. Latent growth curve analyses revealed that the treatment group reported an increase in relationship satisfaction and constructive communication after the intervention, which diminished by 1‐year follow‐up, returning couples to their baseline levels of satisfaction. Results suggest that incorporating a brief couple intervention as part of a larger health intervention for Latinos may prevent postpartum decreases in relationship satisfaction.     

Making a Good Impression at Work: National Differences in Employee Impression Management Behaviors in Japan,Korea, and the United States

Impression management has important implications for success at work. This study explores differences in impression management in the East and West by examining the use of self-promotion, ingratiation, and exemplification directed towards three targets: supervisors, peers, and subordinates among 945 company employees from Japan, Korea, and the United States. Our results show that Korean employees used all three strategies most frequently, followed by United States, and then Japanese employees. Japanese and Korean employees used impression management strategies differentially across the three targets, and U.S. employees used impression management equally across targets. This elucidates how cultural trends in hierarchical relationships impact social behavior within the workplace. A follow-up mediation analysis found that relational or labor mobility fully mediated country differences in impression management, suggesting that culture is also reflected in larger social ecological trends in employee's ability and likelihood to change jobs, which also account for impression management strategy usage. Theoretical and practical implications for international business are discussed. This research may be useful in aligning strategies foreign employees might employ for using impression management when in Japan, Korea, and the United States.     

Modified Distribution-Free Goodness-of-Fit Test Statistic

Covariance structure analysis and its structural equation modeling extensions have become one of the most widely used methodologies in social sciences such as psychology, education, and economics. An important issue in such analysis is to assess the goodness of fit of a model under analysis. One of the most popular test statistics used in covariance structure analysis is the asymptotically distribution-free (ADF) test statistic introduced by Browne (Br J Math Stat Psychol 37:62–83, 1984). The ADF statistic can be used to test models without any specific distribution assumption (e.g., multivariate normal distribution) of the observed data. Despite its advantage, it has been shown in various empirical studies that unless sample sizes are extremely large, this ADF statistic could perform very poorly in practice. In this paper, we provide a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon and further propose a modified test statistic that improves the performance in samples of realistic size. The proposed statistic deals with the possible ill-conditioning of the involved large-scale covariance matrices.     

Direction of dependence in measurement error models

Methods to determine the direction of a regression line, that is, to determine the direction of dependence in reversible linear regression models (e.g., x→y vs. y→x), have experienced rapid development within the last decade. However, previous research largely rested on the assumption that the true predictor is measured without measurement error. The present paper extends the direction dependence principle to measurement error models. First, we discuss asymmetric representations of the reliability coefficient in terms of higher moments of variables and the attenuation of skewness and excess kurtosis due to measurement error. Second, we identify conditions where direction dependence decisions are biased due to measurement error and suggest method of moments (MOM) estimation as a remedy. Third, we address data situations in which the true outcome exhibits both regression and measurement error, and propose a sensitivity analysis approach to determining the robustness of direction dependence decisions against unreliably measured outcomes. Monte Carlo simulations were performed to assess the performance of MOM-based direction dependence measures and their robustness to violated measurement error assumptions (i.e., non-independence and non-normality). An empirical example from subjective well-being research is presented. The plausibility of model assumptions and links to modern causal inference methods for observational data are discussed.     

The role of attention in remembering important item-location associations

When encountering an excess of information, people are able to selectively remember high-value information by strategically allocating attention during the encoding period, termed value-directed remembering. This has been demonstrated in both the episodic verbal and visuospatial memory domains. Importantly, the allocation of attention also plays a crucial role in the binding of identity and location information in visuospatial memory. We examined how taxing attentional resources to various degrees during encoding might affect visuospatial memory and selectivity. Participants studied items paired with point values indicating their value in a grid display and were asked to maximize their point score (a summation of the points associated with correctly remembered information). Participants viewed items under either a sequential or simultaneous presentation format and in either the presence or absence of a secondary tone discrimination task. While participants in the divided attention conditions recalled fewer item-location associations overall, participants in all encoding conditions prioritized high-value information in memory, providing further evidence that selectivity can be maintained even when attentional resources are taxed. However, differences between presentation formats emerged when conducting spatial resolution analyses examining errors. Errors in the simultaneous conditions were only influenced by item value when attention was full during encoding, while errors in the sequential conditions were not influenced by item value, regardless of available attentional resources. The results suggest participants can strategically allocate attention during encoding even under cognitively-demanding conditions and that gist-based visuospatial memory may only be influenced by information importance when adequate attentional resources are available.