Do as you’re told! Facets of agreeableness and early adult outcomes for inner-city boys

With data from the middle cohort of the Pittsburgh Youth Study, a prospective longitudinal study of inner-city boys, we examined whether Big Five agreeableness facets could be reliably recovered in this sample, and whether facets predicted educational, occupational, social, and antisocial life outcomes assessed a decade later. Caregivers described their adolescent boys’ personalities using the Common California Q-Set; twelve years later, participants were interviewed and court records were obtained. Factor analyses recovered two facets: compliance and compassion. Compliance predicted more schooling and lower risk of unemployment, teenage fatherhood, and crime; compassion related to longer committed relationships. Findings highlight the value of studying personality at the facet level.     

The role of career values for work engagement during the transition to working life

The present longitudinal study examined the role of career values for work engagement across the transition from university education to working life. Finnish young adults reported on their career values (intrinsic, rewards, and security values) at the age of 23; and the degree of person–organization fit (value congruence, and congruence between one's education and the job), subjective income and economic stress two years later at the age of 25. Work engagement was assessed at both measurement points. Structural equation modeling results showed, first, that intrinsic but not rewards or security career values were related to work engagement. Second, value congruence and having a job which was related to young adults' educational field were positively associated with work engagement. Our findings suggest that along with person–organization fit, intrinsic career values are a significant factor in shaping and facilitating successful transitions from education to work.     

Breaking up is Hard to do,Especially for Strongly “Preoccupied” Lovers

Abstract

Is a relationship breakup harder on certain people? To address this question, the present study investigated the relationship of individuals’ attachment styles to various reported aspects of a relationship's dissolution: initiation of the breakup, emotional reactions to the breakup, reasons for the breakup, and experiences and perceptions following the breakup. One hundred nineteen undergraduates completed an extensive questionnaire concerning a past romantic relationship that had broken up. Feeney, Noller, and Hanrahan's (1994) Attachment Style Questionnaire (ASQ) provided continous measures for five attachment styles or “attitudes”: confidence, discomfort with closeness, need for approval, preoccupation with relationships, and relationships as secondary. Principal-components analyses served to derive criterion indexes from the breakup questionnarie measures, which were individually regressed on the five ASQ scales. As predicted form attachment theory, respondents scoring high on preoccupation with relationships (reflcting anxious/ambivalent attachment) showed distinctive responses to the relationship breakup, in contrast to those scoring high on other attachment styles. Specifically, those strongly preoccupied with relationships reported (a) that their partner was unhappy in the relationship and had initiated the breakup, (b) having experienced difficulty adjusting to the breakup and felling it had been a mistake, and (c) more negative emotion and less positive emotion following the breakup. Implications of these findings are discussed     

Parts function as perceptual organizational entities in infancy

Both objects and parts function as organizational entities in adult perception. Prior research has indicated that objects affect organization early in life: Infants grouped elements located within object boundaries and segregated them from those located on different objects. Here, we examined whether parts also induce grouping in infancy. Five- and 6.5-month-olds were habituated to two-part objects containing element pairs. In a subsequent test, infants treated groupings of elements that crossed part boundaries as novel, in comparison with groupings that had shared a common part during habituation. In contrast, the same arrangement of elements failed to elicit evidence of grouping in control conditions in which the elements were not surrounded by closed part boundaries. Thus, infants grouped and segregated elements on the basis of part structure. Part-based processing is a key aspect of many theories of perception. The present research adds to this literature by indicating that parts function as organizational entities early in life.     

Social Mishap Exposures for Social Anxiety Disorder: An Important Treatment Ingredient

Conventional cognitive-behavioral therapy for social anxiety disorder, which is closely based on the treatment for depression, has been shown to be effective in numerous randomized placebo-controlled trials. Although this intervention is more effective than waitlist control group and placebo conditions, a considerable number of clients do not respond to this approach. Newer approaches include techniques specifically tailored to this particular population. One of these techniques, social mishap exposure practice, is associated with significant improvement in treatment gains. We will describe here the theoretical framework for social mishap exposures that addresses the client's exaggerated estimation of social cost. We will then present clinical observations and outcome data of a client who underwent treatment that included such social mishap exposures. Findings are discussed in the context of treatment implications and directions for future research.     

Balance and dyslexia: An investigation of adults’ abilities

Balance ability in dyslexia is an issue of considerable theoretical and applied significance, but the literature currently lacks consensus. This study applied objective measures to established balance tasks. 17 dyslexic adults and 20 controls matched for age and IQ undertook the heel-to-toe balance test for 1 minute. Further “dual task” tests were also undertaken in which the subject had to balance while undertaking secondary cognitive tasks (counting, slow choice reaction, fast choice reaction). Two factor analyses of variance revealed significant between-group balance differences in the dual task conditions. 24–82% of the dyslexic group showed balance impairment, depending on the criterion chosen. At the group level, the results are directly consistent with the Nicolson and Fawcett (1990) automatisation deficit hypothesis, but the considerable within-group heterogeneity deserves further investigation.     

Assessing the Readability of Mental Health Internet Brochures for Children and Adolescents

We investigated the readability of seven mental health brochures on mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders in children that were selected from a website developed by the Center for Mental Health Services at http://www.mentalhealth.org. The reading grade levels of the brochures ranged from 11.1 to 14.8 (mean 13.23), considerably higher than the 8th grade level recommended for educational material by the U. S. Department of Education (1986). On other readability variables, assessed using the Readability Assessment Instrument (RAIN; Singh, 1994), all brochures met criterion on most variables but failed on those for new words (audience appropriateness) and print size. This is a favorable result in comparison with other studies that have assessed readability of mental health information on the Internet using the RAIN, although less so with reading grade levels.     

Similarity to the self influences cortical recruitment during impression formation

Prior work has shown that whether or not someone is similar to the self influences person memory—a type of self-reference effect for others. In this study, we were interested in understanding the neural regions supporting the generation of impressions and subsequent memory for targets who vary in similarity to the self. Participants underwent fMRI scanning while forming positive or negative impressions of face–behavior pairs. We tested participants’ memory for their generated impressions and then back-sorted the impression trials (encoding) into different levels of self-similarity (high, medium, low) using a self-similarity posttest that came after recognition. Extending prior behavioral work, our data confirmed our hypothesis that memory would be highest for self-similar others and lowest for self-dissimilar others. Dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) activity increased with self-similarity (high > medium > low) to targets, regardless of later memory for them. An analysis of regions supporting impression memory revealed a double dissociation within medial temporal lobe regions: for similar others, amygdala recruitment supported memory, whereas for dissimilar others, hippocampal activation supported memory. These results suggest that self-similarity influences evaluation and memory for targets but also affects the underlying neural resources engaged when thinking about others who vary in self-similarity.     

Linguistic and prosodic aspects of child-directed speech: The role of maternal child-rearing experiences

This study explored if the quality of mothers’ reported child-rearing experiences influences the prosodic and linguistic features of maternal child-directed speech. Lexical, syntactic, functional and prosodic aspects of maternal speech directed towards their 24-month-old children were examined. Results showed that mothers with different child-rearing histories differed in the ways they talked to their children. Mothers who recalled the caregiving they received during childhood as characterized by high levels of care and low levels of control, used a lexically and syntactically more complex speech and expressed more positive emotions. This kind of input seems to be more attuned with the typical growing skills of two-year-old children. Implications for the study of mother–infant relationship as well as for the study of child language development are addressed.     

Verbs and Verb Phrases as Instructional Stimuli in the Control of Stimulus-Equivalence Effects

The Psychological Record - This research examined in 26 undergraduate students a form of instructional control of certain emergent relations definitional of the stimulus-equivalence relationship....