Social Control in Marital Relationships: Effect of One's Partner on Health Behaviors1

The present study examined the role that health‐related social control plays in promoting health‐enhancing behavioral reactions among married couples. Health‐related social control refers to interactions entailing influence and regulation of health practices. A sample of 109 couples answered questions about their social control interactions during structured phone interviews. Analyses maintaining the couple as the unit of analysis indicated that spouses' reports of more frequent social control overall and the use of positive, bilateral, and direct social control tactics predicted their partners' reports of health‐enhancing behavioral reactions.     

Listen to the Children: Elementary School Students' Perspectives on a Mindfulness Intervention

Journal of Child and Family Studies - In recent years, mindfulness-based practices in grade schools have been associated with students’ improved cognitive skills and general classroom...     

the experience of change and its impact on workers who self‐identify as doing well with change that affects their work

This study sought to understand more about the experience of workers who self‐identified as doing well within the context of volatile and changing work situations. The research results indicate that even those workers who report doing well with change experience a myriad of work‐related, personal life, attitude and approach, and professional life changes. The impacts of these changes can be categorized by theme: psychological, professional/work, emotional, personal/family life, physical, and cultural. Results are framed within the psychological thriving literature. Implications for organizations, counselors, and future research are discussed.     

what helps and hinders workers in managing change

This research responds to calls for increased understanding of workers' experiences of their work and work contexts. Informed by positive psychology, this study focused on a seldom‐studied subset of working individuals who self‐identified as doing well with change affecting their work and on strategies that helped or hindered them in doing well, factors that would have helped, and their experiences of change within the context of volatile and changing work situations. Using the enhanced critical incident technique methodology, the authors extracted 790 incidents from 45 participant interviews. These data were organized into the following 10 categories: support from friends and family, support from colleagues, support from professionals, personal attitudes/traits/emotional set, self‐care, internal framework and boundaries, taking action, skill/role competence, management style and work environment, and personal life changes/issues. The implications of these categories for research, theory, practice, and organizations are discussed.     

Errors committed with high confidence are hypercorrected.

The relation between people's confidence in the accuracy of an erroneous response and their later performance was investigated. Most models of human memory suggest that the higher a person's confidence, the stronger the item (in the context of the eliciting cue) that is retrieved from memory. In recall, stronger associates to a cue interfere with competing associates more than do weaker associates. This state of affairs implies that errors endorsed with high, rather than low, confidence should be more difficult to correct by learning the correct response feedback. In contrast to the authors' expectations, highly confident errors were the most likely to be corrected in a subsequent retest. Participants nearly always endorsed the correct response in cases in which both the correct response and the original erroneous response were generated at retest, suggesting that people possess a refined metacognitive ability to know what is correct and incorrect.     

Focusing on the Gap: A Better Approach to the Ethics of Humor

The Journal of Value Inquiry -