The Effect of Praise, Positive Nonverbal Response, Reprimand, and Negative Nonverbal Response on Child Compliance: A Systematic Review

Lack of compliance has both short- and long-term costs and is a leading reason why parents seek mental health services for children. What parents do to help children comply with directives or rules is an important part of child socialization. The current review examines the relationship between a variety of parenting discipline behaviors (i.e., praise, positive nonverbal response, reprimand, negative nonverbal response) and child compliance. Forty-one studies of children ranging in age from 1? to 11?years were reviewed. Reprimand and negative nonverbal responses consistently resulted in greater compliance. Praise and positive nonverbal responses resulted in mixed child outcomes. The findings are discussed based on theory and populations studied. The authors propose a mechanism that may increase children’s sensitivity to both positive and negative behavioral contingencies.     

Sociocultural antecedents of academic motivation and achievement: Role of values and achievement motives in achievement goals and academic performance

With a view to understand the influence of culture on achievement motivation, the study aimed to test the hypothesized mediating role of individual‐oriented and social‐oriented achievement motives in linking value orientations (e.g. achievement, security, conformity, hedonism) to achievement goals (i.e. mastery‐approach, mastery‐avoidance, performance‐approach, and performance‐avoidance goals) as predictors of English and mathematics achievements. These hypothesized relationships were tested in the one‐path analytic model with a sample of Indonesian high‐school students (n = 356; 46% girls, M age = 16.20 years). The findings showed that security and conformity values positively predicted social‐oriented achievement motive; self‐direction values positively predicted individual‐oriented achievement motive; and hedonism values negatively predicted both achievement motive orientations. Both individual‐oriented and social‐oriented achievement motives positively predicted mastery‐approach and performance‐approach goals. Interestingly, social‐oriented achievement motive also positively predicted mastery‐avoidance and performance‐avoidance goals, which in turn, negatively predicted English and mathematic achievement. There was also some evidence for the direct effects of values on performance‐approach goals and achievement. Taken together, the findings evinced the relevance of achievement goal constructs to Indonesian students and the psychometric properties of the Indonesian version of the Achievement Goals Questionnaire for further use in Indonesia. The study concludes that the meanings of academic motivation and achievement should be seen from a sociocultural perspective relevant to the context in which they are being studied.     

Worms under cover: relationships between performance in learning tasks and personality in great tits (Parus major)

In animals, individual differences in learning ability are common and are in part explained by genetic differences, developmental conditions and by general experience. Yet, not all variations in learning are well understood. Individual differences in learning may be associated with elementary individual characteristics that are consistent across situations and over time, commonly referred to as personality or temperament. Here, we tested whether or not male great tits (Parus major) from two selection lines for fast or slow exploratory behaviour, an operational measure for avian personality, vary in their learning performance in two related consecutive tasks. In the first task, birds had to associate a colour with a reward whereas in the second task, they had to associate a new colour with a reward ignoring the previously rewarded colour. Slow explorers had shorter latencies to approach the experimental device compared with fast explorers in both tasks, but birds from the two selection lines did not differ in accomplishing the first task, that is, to associate a colour with a reward. However, in the second task, fast explorers had longer latencies to solve the trials than slow explorers. Moreover, relative to the number of trials needed to reach the learning criteria in the first task, birds from the slow selection line took more trials to associate a new colour with a reward while ignoring the previously learned association compared with birds from the fast selection line. Overall, the experiments suggest that personality in great tits is not strongly related to learning per se in such an association task, but that birds from different selection lines might express different learning strategies as birds from the different selection lines were differently affected by their previous learning performance.     

A telehealth intervention for veterans on antiviral treatment for the hepatitis C virus

The standard treatment for chronic hepatitis C (pegylated interferon and ribavirin) causes challenging physical and psychological side effects. The current pilot study evaluated the efficacy of a brief, telephone-based, cognitive-behavioral self-management intervention designed to address mood and quality of life within a sample of veterans on antiviral treatment for hepatitis C. Results from this pilot study support the feasibility of this telehealth intervention, showing that veterans were highly satisfied with the content of the intervention and compliant with the telephone calls. Findings further indicate that symptoms of depression and anxiety and mental health quality of life either remained stable or improved in those participants who received the brief telephone intervention, while those receiving usual care showed significant declines in mood and mental health quality of life. The findings from this study provide evidence that a brief, clinician-administered phone intervention may help individuals on antiviral therapy for hepatitis C to cope more effectively with the negative treatment side effects.     

Unemployed Adults’ Career Thoughts,Career Self‐Efficacy,and Interest: Any Similarity to College Students?

Little empirical knowledge about unemployed adults exists during a time when this group needs substantial career assistance. Because there is greater empirical understanding of college student career development compared with what is known about unemployed adults, a chi square and analyses of covariance were used to compare the career thinking, self‐efficacy, and interests of 169 unemployed adults seeking public job center assistance with that of 200 college students. Additionally, a diverse sample of 2,444 unemployed adults is demographically reviewed. Unemployed adults reported a higher level of Realistic interests and similar levels of negative career thinking and career decision‐making self‐efficacy compared with college students.     

Should social savvy equal good spatial skills? The interaction of social skills with spatial perspective taking

Real-world perspective-taking problems frequently involve interactions among individuals, suggesting a potential social element to this seemingly spatial problem. Previous studies have suggested that the agency of the target in a perspective-taking task might influence reasoning. This hypothesis is tested directly by manipulating whether one takes the perspective of a potential agent or an object. The results were striking: Even though no overall differences in performance were observed with and without agents, performance was differentially associated with social skills. In particular, participants with better social skills were more accurate than less social peers when the target was a potential agent, whereas no such relationship was observed when the target was an object. These results suggest that bringing domain-specific investigations to bear on real-world problems requires understanding how that domain exists in the broader context of interacting skills and biases.     

In perfect harmony: synchronizing the self to activated social categories

The self-concept is one of the main organizing constructs in the behavioral sciences because it influences how people interpret their environment, the choices they make, whether and how they initiate action, and the pursuit of specific goals. Because belonging to social groups and feeling interconnected is critical to human survival, the authors propose that people spontaneously change their working self-concept so that they are more similar to salient social categories. Specifically, 4 studies investigated whether activating a variety of social categories (i.e., jocks, hippies, the overweight, Blacks, and Asians) increased associations between the self and the target category. Whereas Studies 1 and 2 focused on associations between stereotypic traits and the self, Studies 3 and 4 examined self-perceptions and self-categorizations, respectively. The results provide consistent evidence that following social category priming, people synchronized the self to the activated category. Furthermore, the findings indicate that factors that influence category activation, such as social goals, and factors that induce a focus on the interconnectedness of the self, such as an interdependent vs. independent self-construal, can impact this process. The implications of changes to the working self-concept for intergroup relations are discussed.     

The Influence of Prior Handling on the Effective CS-US Interval in Long-Trace Taste-Aversion Conditioning in Rats

The Psychological Record - In conditioned taste aversion (CTA), a taste, the conditioned stimulus (CS), is paired with an illness-inducing stimulus, the unconditioned stimulus (US), to produce...