Concordance Between the Quality of Maternal and Paternal Parenting Behavior Within Couples

There is compelling evidence that the quality of maternal and paternal parenting behavior bears critical importance for child development. Yet, less is known of the degree of similarity between maternal and paternal parenting behavior in families, and especially little is known about the factors that may explain variation in degrees of similarity. This article aims to examine (a) the concordance (similarity) between the quality of mothers’ and fathers’ interactive behavior with their child and (b) the sociodemographic determinants of this concordance. The sample included 74 families (mother, father, and their child). The quality of maternal and paternal interactive behavior was assessed independently, and rated with the Maternal Behavior Q-Sort (mother–infant, 12 months; D. R. Pederson et al., 1990) or the Mutually Responsive Orientation scale (father–toddler, 18 months; N. Aksan et al., 2006). The results indicated that the overall correlation between the quality of mothers’ and fathers’ behavior was moderate. The concordance was greater among higher socioeconomic status families or when interacting with a boy, but did not differ according to the presence or absence of siblings in the family.     

Marital Satisfaction and Quality of Father–Child Interactions: The Moderating Role of Child Gender

The authors aimed to investigate the prospective links between normative variation in fathers’ marital satisfaction and the observed quality of father–toddler interactions, as well as the moderating role of child gender in these associations. Sixty-three fathers reported on their marital satisfaction when their children were 15 months of age, and were observed interacting with their child at 18 months. The results suggested that marital satisfaction was positively associated with the quality of father–son interactions, while no relations emerged among fathers of girls. These findings reiterate the importance of marital relationships for the quality of fathers’ parenting, while reaffirming previous suggestions that the role of child gender in the marriage-parenting connections requires further investigation.     

Cognition and Emotion in TV Message Processing: How Valence,Arousing Content,Structural Complexity,and Information Density Affect the Availability of Cognitive Resources

This paper examines whether emotional message content alters the effects of structural complexity and information density on available resources, measured by secondary task reaction times (STRTs), and message encoding, measured by audio recognition. In addition, hypotheses relating motivational activation and resource availability based on the motivational activation concepts of positivity offset (greater appetitive activation in a neutral environment) and negativity bias (faster aversive activation) influence are tested. Results replicate previous research supporting the contention that STRTs measure available resources. In addition, they show that the basic pattern of STRTs and recognition as a function of allocated and required resources is relatively consistent regardless of emotional content of the message. Emotion appears to function as a constant, increasing both resource allocation and resources required. Finally, these data provide some initial support for predicted relationships between motivational activation and resource allocation based on the constructs of positivity offset and negativity bias.     

Amélioration de la qualité de vie au travail dans les unités de soins : la démarche ORSOSA

Improve the quality of working conditions is a major issue for healthcare workers who have to deal with productivity obligations and multiple procedures. Based on the magnet hospital concept, the ORSOSA study (prospective cohort study of 4000 helthcare workers) helped develop and validate a methodolody that allows to quickly diagnose the levels of psychological and organizational constraints (CPO) from the staff’s point of view / of the staff. The ORSOSA method relies on an organisational psychologist who launches a dynamic during the diagnostic feedback phase. He gets the team to appropriate the strengths and weaknesses and to rank their recommendations. This article presents an overview of the method and it the first stages of its evaluations.     

Differences between traces of negative emotions in smile judgment

While a smile can reflect felt happiness, it can also be voluntarily produced, for instance, to mask negative emotions. Masking strategies are not always perfect and traces of the negative emotion can leak. The current study examined the role of traces of anger, sadness, fear and disgust in the judgment of authenticity of smiles. Participants judged the authenticity of the smiles while their eye movements were recorded. They were also asked if the stimuli comprised another emotion and, if so, what the emotion was. Results revealed that participants were sensitive to traces of negative emotions. Variations were observed between emotions with performance being best for traces of fear and lowest for traces of anger in the eyebrows in the judgment task. However, when the presence of a negative emotion was reported, participants were less accurate in identifying fear but more accurate in identifying anger. Furthermore, variations were observed as a function of the location of the trace whether in the mouth or eyes as a function of the emotion. Traces in the eyebrows were associated with better performance than traces in the mouth for sadness but the opposite was observed for anger. The performance at the judgment task was not linked to eye movement measures or explicit knowledge of the masked emotion. Future research should explore other explanation for the variations in performance in the judgments of authenticity of masking smiles such as emotional contagion.     

Racial Microaggressions Against Black Americans: Implications for Counseling

Racial microaggression themes were identified using a focus‐group analysis of self‐identified Black participants. Six categories of demeaning and invalidating messages reflected beliefs of White supremacy that were unintentionally conveyed by perpetrators. Implications for counselors and the counseling process are discussed.     

Measurement of self-evaluative motives: a shopping scenario

To develop measures of consumers' self-evaluative motives of Self-verification, Self-enhancement, and Self-improvement within the context of a mall shopping environment, an initial set of 49 items was generated by conducting three focus-group sessions. These items were subsequently converted into shopping-dependent motive statements. 250 undergraduate college students responded on a 7-point scale to each statement as these related to the acquisition of recent personal shopping goods. An exploratory factor analysis yielded five factors, accounting for 57.7% of the variance, three of which corresponded to the Self-verification motive (five items), Self-enhancement motive (three items), and Self-improvement motive (six items). These 14 items, along with 9 reconstructed items, yielded 23 items retained and subjected to additional testing. In a final round of data collection, 169 college students provided data for exploratory factor analysis. 11 items were used in confirmatory factor analysis. Analysis indicated that the 11-item scale adequately captured measures of the three self-evaluative motives. However, further data reduction produced a 9-item scale with marked improvement in statistical fit over the 11-item scale.     

Processing prefixes and suffixes in handwriting production

Previous research showed that handwriting production is mediated by linguistically oriented processing units such as syllables and graphemes. The goal of this study was to investigate whether French adults also activate another kind of unit that is more related to semantics than phonology, namely morphemes. Experiment 1 revealed that letter duration and inter-letter intervals were longer for suffixed words than for pseudo-suffixed words. These results suggest that the handwriting production system chunks the letter components of the root and suffix into morpheme-sized units. Experiment 2 compared the production of prefixed and pseudo-prefixed words. The results did not yield significant differences. This asymmetry between suffix and prefix processing has also been observed in other linguistic tasks. In suffixed words, the suffix would be processed on-line during the production of the root, in an analytic fashion. Prefixed words, in contrast, seem to be processed without decomposition, as pseudo-affixed words.