The Mediating Roles of Adolescent Disclosure and Parental Knowledge in the Association Between Parental Warmth and Delinquency Among Korean Adolescents

The purpose of this study was to examine the association between parental warmth and adolescent delinquency, the potential mediating roles of adolescent disclosure and parental knowledge, and gender differences in such association among Korean adolescents. We hypothesized that (1) parental warmth would be significantly and negatively associated with delinquency, (2) adolescent disclosure and parental knowledge would mediate the association between parental warmth and adolescent delinquency, and (3) the association between parental warmth and adolescent delinquency mediated through adolescent disclosure and parental knowledge would be stronger for adolescent girls than boys. Using a sample of 3125 Korean adolescents from nationally representative and longitudinal data (Korea Youth Panel Survey), results from path analyses demonstrated that findings were consistent with US samples, suggesting a negative association between parental warmth and adolescent delinquency. Further, when Korean adolescents perceived parents to be warmer, they were more likely to disclose personal information to their parents. In turn, higher levels of disclosure were associated with higher levels of parental knowledge about their adolescent children’s activities. Finally, tests of gender differences suggested that parental warmth was more closely associated with adolescent disclosure among girls than boys. Results supported a process model through which parents may shape adolescent children’s delinquency.     

Sustaining and Expanding Systems of Care to Provide Mental Health Services for Children, Youth and Families Across America

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has been instrumental in supporting the development and implementation of systems of care to provide services to children and youth with serious mental health conditions and their families. Since 1993, 173 grants have been awarded to communities in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the District of Columbia, and 21 American Indian/Alaska Native communities. The system of care principles of creating comprehensive, individualized services, family-driven and youth-guided care and cultural and linguistic competence, supported by a well-trained and competent workforce, have been successful in transforming the field of children's mental health and facilitating the integration of child-serving systems. This approach has achieved positive outcomes at the child and family, practice and system levels, and numerous articles have been published using data collected from system of care communities, demonstrating the effectiveness of this framework. This article will describe lessons learned from implementing the system of care approach, and will discuss the importance of expanding and sustaining systems of care across the country.     

Distress and recurrence of intrusive thoughts in younger and older adults

The current study incorporated a life span perspective into existing theories of intrusive thoughts to examine age-related differences in the difficulty controlling intrusive thoughts, the distress following intrusive thought recurrences, and the meanings assigned to these recurrences. Younger (N = 51) and older (N = 49) community adults were randomly assigned to suppress (i.e., keep out of mind) or monitor an intrusive thought. Participants rated their positive and negative affect throughout engagement with the intrusive thought, and they also rated the meanings they gave to recurrences of their everyday intrusive thoughts. The results demonstrated that older adults tended to perceive greater difficulty with controlling the intrusive thought than younger adults despite the fact that they did not differ in the actual recurrence of the intrusive thought. With regard to distress, older adults experienced steadier levels of positive affect than younger adults throughout engagement with the intrusive thought. However, older adults also reported greater residual negative affect after engaging with the intrusive thought than younger adults. Finally, older and younger adults appeared to assign meanings to recurrences of intrusive thoughts in line with age-relevant concerns. Specifically, older adults were prone to interpret the recurrence of intrusive thoughts as a sign of cognitive decline, but they were less likely than younger adults to see intrusive thoughts as a sign of moral failure. Together, these results highlight a range of potential risk and protective factors in older adults for experiencing emotion dysregulation after intrusive thoughts.     

Self-affirmation moderates effects of unrealistic optimism and pessimism on reactions to tailored risk feedback

We examined whether self-affirmation would facilitate intentions to engage in colorectal cancer (CRC) screening among individuals who were off-schedule for CRC screening and who were categorised as unrealistically optimistic, realistic or unrealistically pessimistic about their CRC risk. All participants received tailored risk feedback; in addition, one group received threatening social comparison information regarding their risk factors, a second received this information after a self-affirmation exercise and a third was a no-treatment control. When participants were unrealistically optimistic about their CRC risk (determined by comparing their perceived comparative risk to calculations from a risk algorithm), they expressed greater interest in screening if they were self-affirmed (relative to controls). Non-affirmed unrealistic optimists expressed lower interest relative to controls, suggesting that they were responding defensively. Realistic participants and unrealistically pessimistic participants who were self-affirmed expressed relatively less interest in CRC screening, suggesting that self-affirmation can be helpful or hurtful depending on the accuracy of one's risk perceptions.     

Reconsidering the Equivalence of Multisource Performance Ratings: Evidence for the Importance and Meaning of Rater Factors

Purpose

The study specified an alternate model to examine the measurement invariance of multisource performance ratings (MSPRs) to systematically investigate the theoretical meaning of common method variance in the form of rater effects. As opposed to testing invariance based on a multigroup design with raters aggregated within sources, this study specified both performance dimension and idiosyncratic rater factors.

Design/Methodology/Approach

Data was obtained from 5,278 managers from a wide range of organizations and hierarchical levels, who were rated on the BENCHMARKS^® MSPR instrument.

Findings

Our results diverged from prior research such that MSPRs were found to lack invariance for raters from different levels. However, same level raters provided equivalent ratings in terms of both the performance dimension loadings and rater factor loadings.

Implications

The results illustrate the importance of modeling rater factors when investigating invariance and suggest that rater factors reflect substantively meaningful variance, not bias.

Originality/Value

The current study applies an alternative model to examine invariance of MSPRs that allowed us to answer three questions that would not be possible with more traditional multigroup designs. First, the model allowed us to examine the impact of paramaterizing idiosyncratic rater factors on inferences of cross-rater invariance. Next, including multiple raters from each organizational level in the MSPR model allowed us to tease apart the degree of invariance in raters from the same source, relative to raters from different sources. Finally, our study allowed for inferences with respect to the invariance of idiosyncratic rater factors.     

Identification of emotional facial expressions among behaviorally inhibited adolescents with lifetime anxiety disorders

The current study examined differences in emotion expression identification between adolescents characterised with behavioural inhibition (BI) in childhood with and without a lifetime history of anxiety disorder. Participants were originally assessed for BI during toddlerhood and for social reticence during childhood. During adolescence, participants returned to the laboratory and completed a facial emotion identification task and a clinical psychiatric interview. Results revealed that behaviorally inhibited adolescents with a lifetime history of anxiety disorder displayed a lower threshold for identifying fear relative to anger emotion expressions compared to non-anxious behaviorally inhibited adolescents and non-inhibited adolescents with or without anxiety. These findings were specific to behaviorally inhibited adolescents with a lifetime history of social anxiety disorder. Thus, adolescents with a history of both BI and anxiety, specifically social anxiety, are more likely to differ from other adolescents in their identification of fearful facial expressions. This offers further evidence that perturbations in the processing of emotional stimuli may underlie the aetiology of anxiety disorders.     

Attenuated Change Blindness for Exogenously Attended Items in a Flicker Paradigm

When two scenes are alternately displayed, separated by a mask, even large, repeated changes between the scenes often go unnoticed for surprisingly long durations. Change blindness of this sort is attenuated at “centres of interest” in the scenes, however, supporting a theory of change blindness in which attention is necessary to perceive such changes (Rensink, O'Regan, & Clark, 1997). Problems with this measure of attentional selection - via verbally described “centres of interest” - are discussed, including worries about describability and explanatory impotence. Other forms of attentional selection, not subject to these problems, are employed in a “flicker” experiment to test the attention-based theory of change detection. Attenuated change blindness is observed at attended items when attentional selection is realized via involuntary exogenous capture of visual attention - to late-onset items and colour singletons - even when these manipulations are uncorrelated with the loci of the changes, and are thus irrelevant to the change detection task. These demonstrations ground the attention-based theory of change blindness in a type of attentional selection which is understood more rigorously than are “centres of interest”. At the same time, these results have important implications concerning the nature of exogenous attentional capture.     

Are objects required for object-files? Roles of segmentation and spatiotemporal continuity in computing object persistence

Two central tasks of visual processing are (1) to segment undifferentiated retinal images into discrete objects, and (2) to represent those objects as the same persisting individuals over time and motion. Here we explore the interaction of these two types of processing in the context of object files—mid-level visual representations that “stick” to moving objects on the basis of spatiotemporal properties. Object files can be revealed by object-specific preview benefits (OSPBs), wherein a “preview” of information on a moving object speeds the recognition of that information at a later point when it appears again on the same object (compared to when it reappears on a different moving object), beyond display-wide priming. Here we explore the degree of segmentation required to establish object files in the first place. Surprisingly, we find that no explicit segmentation is required until after the previews disappear, when using purely motion-defined objects (consisting of random elements on a random background). Moreover, OSPBs are observed in such displays even after moderate (but not long) delays between the offset of the preview information and the onset of the motion. These effects indicate that object files can be established without initial static segmentation cues, so long as there is spatiotemporal continuity between the previews and the eventual appearance of the objects. We also find that top-down strategies can sometimes mimic OSPBs, but that these strategies can be eliminated by novel manipulations. We discuss how these results alter our understanding of the nature of object files, and also why researchers must take care to distinguish “true OSPBs” from “illusory OSPBs”.