Family climate of routine asthma care: associating perceived burden and mother-child interaction patterns to child well-being

This preliminary report links the literatures on family asthma management practices and on the characteristics of family interaction patterns thought to influence children's adjustment to a chronic physical illness. Specifically, this study of 60 families with a child with asthma examined the extent to which perceived burden of routine asthma care affected child mental health via its influence on parent-child interaction patterns. Mothers completed a measure of asthma management routine burden, mother and child were observed in a 15-minute interaction task, and children completed measures of child anxiety and asthma quality of life (QOL). Perceived routine burden significantly predicted child anxiety and QOL through its effect on mother-child rejection/criticism. The same pattern did not hold for mother intrusiveness/control. The results are discussed in terms of how overall family climate and regulation of routines affects child well-being. Implications for clinical practice and limitations of the study are provided.     

The event reconstruction method: An efficient measure of experience‐based job satisfaction

Job satisfaction is predominantly measured as global attitudinal judgment which requires employees to summarize their experiences across different job situations. In contrast, experience‐based measures assess momentary thoughts and feelings of the employees in specific job situations. This paper introduces the event reconstruction method (ERM) as an efficient measure of experience‐based job satisfaction that is less invasive and less time consuming compared with traditional experience sampling methods. An initial validation study is reported with N=193 employees from a German wholesale company. As expected, job satisfaction measured with the ERM was different from attitudinal job satisfaction. Also, consistent with expectations, experience‐based job satisfaction was a better predictor of self‐reported helping behaviour, whereas attitudinal job satisfaction was a better predictor of turnover intentions. Finally, comparing the ERM results with the results of a similar study using a traditional experience sampling method ( Fisher, 2002 ) revealed very similar patterns.     

Perceptual saliency of points along the contour of everyday objects: a large-scale study

The aim of this large-scale study was to find out which points along the contour of a shape are most salient and why. Many subjects (N=161) were asked to mark salient points on contour stimuli, derived from a large set of line drawings of everyday objects (N=260). The database of more than 200,000 marked points was analyzed extensively to test the hypothesis, first formulated by Attneave (1954), that curvature extrema are most salient. This hypothesis was confirmed by the data: Highly salient points are usually very close to strong curvature extrema (positive maxima and negative minima). However, perceptual saliency of points along the contour is determined by more factors than just local absolute curvature. This was confirmed by an extensive correlational analysis of perceptual saliency in relation to ten different stimulus factors. A point is more salient when the two line segments connecting it with its two neighboring salient points make a sharp turning angle and when the 2-D part defined by the triplet of salient points is less compact and sticks out more.     

How and when infants learn to climb stairs

Seven hundred and thirty-two parents reported when and how their infants learned to climb stairs. Children typically mastered stair ascent (mean age=10.97 months) several months after crawling onset and several weeks prior to descent (mean age=12.53 months). Most infants (94%) crawled upstairs the first time they ascended independently. Most infants (76%) turned around and backed at initial descent. Other descent strategies included scooting down sitting, walking, and sliding down face first. Children with stairs in their home were more likely to learn to ascend stairs at a younger age, devise backing as a descent strategy, and be explicitly taught to descend by their parents than children without stairs in their home. However, all infants learned to descend stairs at the same age, regardless of the presence of stairs in their home. Parents' teaching strategies and infants' access to stairs worked together to constrain development and to influence the acquisition of stair climbing milestones.     

Consumer credit card use: the roles of creditor disclosure and anticipated emotion

In response to federal legislative reform aimed, in part, at reducing consumer bankruptcy filings, the authors conducted 2 experiments examining the role of affect in purchasing behavior. In Experiment 1, they examined consumer debtors, and in Experiment 2, they examined nondebtors. In both experiments, they investigated purchasing decisions made during a simulated online shopping trip, with some participants receiving standard disclosures of interest rates and money owed and with other participants receiving information under the new enhanced disclosure regulations. Results demonstrated support for the influence of anticipated affect in credit card use among both debtors and nondebtors and indicated that anticipated emotion may moderate the impact of the enhanced disclosure regulations.     

The role of motivation, responsibility, and integrative complexity in crisis escalation: comparative studies of war and peace crises

Drawing on D. G. Winter's (1993) comparison of 1914 and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the author identified 8 paired crises (1 escalating to war, 1 peacefully resolved). Documents (diplomatic messages, speeches, official media commentary) from each crisis were scored for power, affiliation, and achievement motivation; text measures of responsibility and activity inhibition; and integrative complexity. Aggregated effect-size results show that war crises had significantly higher levels of power motivation and responsibility, whereas peace crises showed trends toward higher integrative complexity and achievement motivation. Follow-up analyses suggested that these results are robust with respect to both sides in a crisis, type of material scored, and historical time. The power motive results extend previous findings, but the responsibility results suggest that responsibility plays a paradoxical role in war. Future research directions are sketched, and the role of psychological content analysis in monitoring the danger of war is discussed.     

Compartmentalization and integration: the evaluative organization of contextualized selves

This article reviews research on the evaluative organization (compartmentalized or integrative) of contextualized selves. Evaluatively compartmentalized self-structures consist of multiple selves, each of which is either mostly positive or mostly negative. Evaluatively integrative self-structures represent each self with a mixture of positive and negative attributes. These different styles of organizing self-knowledge have been linked to current mood and self-esteem. More recently, studies of evaluative organization have examined self-esteem stability, coping styles (e.g., self-enhancement or resilience), change in self-organization, as well as psychopathology and psychological treatment. Findings suggest that compartmentalized self-structures, typically associated with the highest levels of self-esteem, may be vulnerable to instability. In contrast, the more moderate self-views of individuals with integrative self-structures may offer greater stability, increased resilience, and a means of coping with extreme stress.     

Situating social influence processes: dynamic, multidirectional flows of influence within social networks.

Social psychologists have studied the psychological processes involved in persuasion, conformity, and other forms of social influence, but they have rarely modeled the ways influence processes play out when multiple sources and multiple targets of influence interact over time. However, workers in other fields from sociology and economics to cognitive science and physics have recognized the importance of social influence and have developed models of influence flow in populations and groups-generally without relying on detailed social psychological findings. This article reviews models of social influence from a number of fields, categorizing them using four conceptual dimensions to delineate the universe of possible models. The goal is to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations to build models that incorporate the detailed, microlevel understanding of influence processes derived from focused laboratory studies but contextualized in ways that recognize how multidirectional, dynamic influences are situated in people's social networks and relationships.     

Cardiac modulation of startle: Effects on eye blink and higher cognitive processing

Cardiac cycle time has been shown to affect pre-attentive brainstem startle processes, such as the magnitude of acoustically evoked reflexive startle eye blinks. These effects were attributed to baro-afferent feedback mechanisms. However, it remains unclear whether cardiac cycle time plays a role in higher startle-related cognitive processes, as well. Twenty-five volunteers responded first by ’fast as possible’ button pushes (reaction time, RT), and second, rated perceived intensity of 60 acoustic startle stimuli (85, 95, or 105 dB; 50 ms duration; binaural; instantaneous rise time), which were presented either 230 or 530 ms after the R-wave, and eye blink responses were measured by EMG. RT was divided into evaluation and motor response time according to previous research. Increasing stimulus intensity enhanced startle eye blink, intensity ratings, and RT components. Eye blinks and intensity judgments were lower when startle was elicited at a latency of R + 230 ms, but RT components were differentially affected: the evaluative component was attenuated, and the motor component was accelerated when stimuli were presented 230 ms after the R-wave. We conclude that the cardiac cycle affects the attentive processing of acoustic startle stimuli.     

Explicating the Openness to Experience Construct and its Subdimensions and Facets in a Work Setting

Recent meta‐analyses (e.g. Barrick, Mount, & Judge, 2001 ) found openness to experience, a factor in the five‐factor model of personality, to be uncorrelated with job performance. We argue that, among others, insignificant validity is due to the broad and heterogeneous nature of the construct. In line with our hypotheses, we found internal structure of openness to be multidimensional. Further analyses on subdimensional and facet level revealed large differences in criterion‐ and construct‐related validity. It could be demonstrated that a subdimension labeled epistemic curiosity and, especially, the facet openness to ideas, which includes aspects like curiosity, flexibility, willingness to learn, and creativity, are highly relevant for work‐related criteria and so far understudied in organizational research.