A Comparison of Two Measures of Parental Behavior

We compared two common measures of parenting behavior, the Children's Report of Parental Behavior Inventory (CRPBI) and the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI), evaluating their psychometric properties and predictive ability. One hundred sixty seven college students completed the CRPBI, PBI, and measures of depression and anxiety with 123 participants returning three to six months later for follow-up evaluations. The parenting measures were found to have similar psychometric properties and to be moderately to highly correlated with each other. In addition, both measures were similar in their ability to predict depression and anxiety symptoms, although neither was significantly predictive of actual diagnoses. Given that the PBI is a shorter measure and, based on previous studies, appears to be more stable over time than the CRPBI, there is evidence to suggest that it might be a more useful measure of parenting behavior than the CRPBI.     

Visual perspective taking impairment in children with autistic spectrum disorder

Evidence from typical development and neuroimaging studies suggests that level 2 visual perspective taking - the knowledge that different people may see the same thing differently at the same time - is a mentalising task. Thus, we would expect children with autism, who fail typical mentalising tasks like false belief, to perform poorly on level 2 visual perspective taking as well. However, prior data on this issue are inconclusive. We re-examined this question, testing a group of 23 young autistic children, aged around 8 years with a verbal mental age of around 4 years and three groups of typical children (n = 60) ranging in age from 4 to 8 years on a level 2 visual perspective task and a closely matched mental rotation task. The results demonstrate that autistic children have difficulty with visual perspective taking compared to a task requiring mental rotation, relative to typical children. Furthermore, performance on the level 2 visual perspective taking task correlated with theory of mind performance. These findings resolve discrepancies in previous studies of visual perspective taking in autism, and demonstrate that level 2 visual perspective taking is a mentalising task.     

Masculinities, Femininities, Behaviour and Health

Using the notion that gender is performed in daily life and through daily activities, I review some of the health behaviour literature which employs ideas about masculinity and femininity. I argue that recent theorising about both masculinities ( Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005 ) and femininities ( Schippers, 2007 ) can be extremely useful in this field. I consider two specific health behaviours in light of this theorising, namely healthy eating and drinking alcohol, and explore how and which versions of masculinities and femininities are played out, which are problematic, and what they mean for gender hegemony. I argue that across both areas (and across other health behaviours), there are three specific issues that are important and require further conceptual development and empirical work: (1) the relationality of gender; (2) masculinities and femininities as embodied; and (3) the local, contingent and intersectional nature of masculinities and femininities. This conceptual framework and the aspects of relationality, embodiment and intersectionality have important implications not only for understanding health behaviours, but for any social psychological work theorising identities and everyday social practice.     

Good Workers and Crooked Bosses: The Effect of Voice Suppression by Supervisors on Employees’ Populist Attitudes and Voting

This study is the first to explore the effect of political socialization in the workplace on populist attitudes. We investigate the effect of workplace voice suppression on employees' populist attitudes and voting. We expect employees who were suppressed by supervisors to hold more populist attitudes and to be more likely to vote for a populist party than employees who were not. We argue that some employees experience voice suppression by supervisors as stressful, so splitting is likely to be employed as a defense mechanism. Splitting is achieved through cognitive distinction and antagonism between “the good workers” and “the crooked bosses.” Such a split mental framework can generalize into a worldview that contrasts “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite,” a core characteristic of populism. We predict that the extent to which suppression triggers splitting and consequentially incites populist attitudes and voting depends on employees' acceptance of power distance. We test our hypotheses using SEM on survey data from 2990 members of the Dutch labor force. Our results show that experiences of voice suppression are positively related to populist attitudes and populist voting. As expected, this effect is stronger for employees who are less accepting of power distance.     

Assessing Adolescents’ Information Management with Mothers and Fathers: A Brief Report

Journal of Child and Family Studies - Adolescents’ information management is a fundamental topic for research on adolescence, with numerous studies using Kerr and Stattin’s (2000;...