Parental Invalidation and the Development of Narcissism

Parenting behaviors and childhood experiences have played a central role in theoretical approaches to the etiology of narcissism. Research has suggested an association between parenting and narcissism; however, it has been limited in its examination of different narcissism subtypes and individual differences in parenting behaviors. This study investigates the influence of perceptions of parental invalidation, an important aspect of parenting behavior theoretically associated with narcissism. Correlational and hierarchical regression analyses were conducted using a sample of 442 Australian participants to examine the relationship between invalidating behavior from mothers and fathers, and grandiose and vulnerable narcissism. Results indicate that stronger recollections of invalidating behavior from either mothers or fathers are associated with higher levels of grandiose and vulnerable narcissism when controlling for age, gender, and the related parenting behaviors of rejection, coldness, and overprotection. The lowest levels of narcissism were found in individuals who reported low levels of invalidation in both parents. These findings support the idea that parental invalidation is associated with narcissism.     

The links between self-determined motivations and behavioral automaticity in a variety of real-life behaviors

The different motivations postulated by the Self-Determination Theory have proved to be meaningful to predict the level of engagement in a wide variety of life domains. The present research examines the relation between the different forms of self-determined motivation and behavioral automaticity of 12 behaviors associated with different life domains. Following 1743 measurements of self-determination (using a short version of the situational motivational scale, SIMS8), behavioral automaticity (using the self-reported behavioral automaticity index, SRBAI), and behavioral frequency (self-reported number of executions in a unit of time) for 12 various common behaviors collected on 315 young adults (M_age = 20.60?±?2.87 years) through an online survey, the results of crossed linear mixed models indicated that self-determined motivations are more associated with behavioral automaticity than non-self-determined motivations (intrinsic motivation: β?=?0.13, p?<?.001, identified extrinsic motivation: β?=?0.13, p?<?.001; external extrinsic motivation : β?=?0.08, p?<?.001; amotivation: β?=?0.02, p?=?.433). Furthermore, self-determination played a moderating role between the repetition of behaviors and behavioral automaticity (β?=?0.06, p?<?.002) suggesting that self-determination facilitated automatization, as high level of behavioral automaticity was achieved with less frequent behaviors when behaviors were performed for highly self-determined (β?=?0.41, p?<?.001) than weakly self-determined reasons (β?=?0.29, p?<?.001). The applications of these findings for learning and habit formation are discussed.     

Keep your eyes open: dispositional vigilance moderates the relationship between operational police stress and stress symptoms

Background: Vigilant coping is characterized by a deep processing of threat-related information. In many cases, vigilant coping increases stress symptoms, whereas avoidant coping decreases negative affect. However, vigilance may be beneficial when stress-eliciting situations involve a risk of injury or escalation as is usually the case in police operations. Design: We investigated the roles of vigilance and cognitive avoidance in police operations in a cross-sectional survey. Methods: The participants were 137 students (104?men, M_age?=?28.54, SD?=?8.04) from the Federal University of Applied Administrative Sciences; 76 of them were already police officers (work experience: M?=?12.59?years), and 61 were police officer candidates who had completed a 3- to 6-month police internship. Participants completed a paper-and-pencil survey and reported their operational stress, dispositional vigilance and cognitive avoidance in police operations, and stress symptoms. Results: We found that vigilance was negatively associated with stress symptoms and moderated the relationship between operational stress and stress symptoms. Cognitive avoidance, on the other hand, just missed the level of statistical significance in our test of whether it was positively associated with stress symptoms. Conclusions: Our findings demonstrate that vigilance may protect against the negative consequences of stress in police operations.     

Does Joining the EU Make You Happy? Evidence from Bulgaria and Romania

We examine the effect of joining the European Union on individual life satisfaction in Bulgaria and Romania in the context of the 2007 EU enlargement. Although EU membership is among the most important events in Bulgaria and Romania’s modern histories, there is no evidence on how it affected the subjective well-being of ordinary people in the two countries. Using a difference-in-differences strategy and Eurobarometer data, we provide some of the first evidence that joining the EU increased average life satisfaction in Bulgaria and had a positive but statistically insignificant effect in Romania. One explanation is that after both countries joined in 2007, trust towards the EU only increased in Bulgaria but not in Romania. Furthermore, Romania’s political war of 2007 may have mired the country’s positive life satisfaction experiences related to EU membership. We also show that the younger, the employed and those with a high-school education were the winners from EU integration. Our results are robust to two placebo tests, in which we use two fake entry dates to the EU, as well as an estimation using bootstrapped standard errors. Our findings have implications for EU integration policy and future enlargements.     

Innovative Ideas on How Work-Family Research Can Have More Impact

The commentaries on our focal article agreed with its main premise that work-family research should follow new strategies to improve its practical impact, and made suggestions clustering into three main themes. The first theme built on our suggestion to improve the research focus, terminology, and framing of work-family research. These essays offered additional ideas such as decoupling work-family from work-life research, and examining contextual factors more deeply. The second theme focused on how to better apply the findings from work family research. These commentaries provided social change approaches for making work-family issues more central to key stakeholders and to organizations. The third theme focused on broadening our scope to the societal level. These editorials advocated tactics supporting the development of basic rights of work-life balance within and across nations.     

Reliability of implicit self‐esteem measures revisited

This study investigated the internal consistencies and temporal stabilities of different implicit self‐esteem measures. Participants (N = 101) responded twice—with a time lag of 4 weeks—to five different tasks: the Implicit Association Test (IAT), the Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT), the Affective Priming Task (APT), the Identification‐Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (ID‐EAST) and the Name‐Letter Task (NLT). As expected, the highest reliability coefficients were obtained for the self‐esteem IAT. Importantly, the internal consistencies and the temporal stabilities of the APT, the ID‐EAST, and the NLT were substantially improved by using material, structural, and analytic innovations. In particular, the use of the adaptive response‐window procedure for the APT, the computation of error scores for the ID‐EAST, and the computation of a double corrected scoring algorithm for the NLT yielded reliability coefficients comparable to those of the established IAT. Implications for the indirect assessment of self‐esteem are discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Effect of Scopolamine in Older Rabbits Tested in the 750 ms Delay Eyeblink Classical Conditioning Procedure

We investigated the effect of several doses of scopolamine in older rabbits that were trained for 20 days in the 750 ms delay eyeblink classical conditioning procedure. Our aim was to determine if the scopolamine-injected older rabbit would be a useful model for testing drugs for cognition enhancement in Alzheimer's disease (AD). A total of 39 rabbits with a mean age of 31 months received classical eyeblink conditioning with daily injections of 0.25, 0.75, or 1.5 mg/kg scopolamine hydrobromide or sterile saline vehicle. Doses of 0.75 and 1.5 mg/kg scopolamine significantly impaired acquisition, whereas acquisition was not significantly impaired with 0.25 mg/kg scopolamine. Results exhibit parallels in performance on delay eyeblink classical conditioning between scopolamine-treated older rabbits and human patients diagnosed with AD.     

The effect of scopolamine in older rabbits tested in the 750 ms delay eyeblink classical conditioning procedure

We investigated the effect of several doses of scopolamine in older rabbits that were trained for 20 days in the 750 ms delay eyeblink classical conditioning procedure. Our aim was to determine if the scopolamine-injected older rabbit would be a useful model for testing drugs for cognition enhancement in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). A total of 39 rabbits with a mean age of 31 months received classical eyeblink conditioning with daily injections of 0.25, 0.75, or 1.5 mg/kg scopolamine hydrobromide or sterile saline vehicle. Doses of 0.75 and 1.5 mg/kg scopolamine significantly impaired acquisition, whereas acquisition was not significantly impaired with 0.25 mg/kg scopolamine. Results exhibit parallels in performance on delay eyeblink classical conditioning between scopolamine-treated older rabbits and human patients diagnosed with AD.     

The roles of static depth information and object-image relative motion in perception of heading

In a series of 6 experiments, two hypotheses were tested: that nominal heading perception is determined by the relative motion of images of objects positioned at different depths (R. F. Wang & J. E. Cutting, 1999) and that static depth information contributes to this determination. By manipulating static depth information while holding retinal-image motion constant during simulated self-movement, the authors found that static depth information played a role in determining perceived heading. Some support was also found for the involvement of R. F. Wang and J. E. Cutting's (1999) categories of object-image relative motion in determining perceived heading. However, results suggested an unexpected functional dominance of information about heading relative to apparently near objects.