A Review of Childrearing in African American Single Mother Families: The Relevance of a Coparenting Framework

Clinical research on African American single mother families has focused largely on mother-child dyads, with relatively less empirical attention to the roles of other adults or family members who often assist with childrearing. This narrow definition of “family” fails to take into account the extended family networks which often provide support for African American single mother families and the influence of these other adults on maternal parenting and youth adjustment. Our review integrates the literature on the role of extended family members, highlights the strengths and limitations of this work, and proposes the use of theory and methods from the coparenting literature to guide future study in this area. The relevance of the study of coparenting for family-based intervention efforts targeting African American youth from single mother homes is addressed.     

Predicting emotional reactions after being harmed by another

Being harmed by others is a frequent and disturbing experience in normal social life, resulting in the arousal of two emotional complexes, anger and worry. The present research developed a model to predict these two dimensions of emotional response to being harmed. It was argued that in addition to being driven by judgments of blame, anger is also enhanced by assessments that one's social face has been damaged. The victim's judgment of this face loss also contributes to feelings of worry, as one's social credibility has been compromised in the eyes of others by being harmed. Worry is further augmented by the victim's concern about the damage done to his or her relationship with the perpetrator by the harm-doing. As hypothesized, both perceived image loss and blame judgments were found to predict the emotional complex of anger, while image loss and the perceived harm to the relationship predicted the emotional complex of worry. This research supplemented the well-researched Western construct of blame in response to harm by incorporating the more salient collectivist concerns of image loss and relationship damage, pushing our models of social processes to be more comprehensive and ultimately universal in their scope.     

Interindividual‐intergroup discontinuity as a joint function of acting as a group and interacting with a group

An experiment assessed the prisoner's dilemma game (PDG) choices of a set of three persons who interacted with another supposed set of three persons. There were four conditions: (1) group‐on‐group (both three‐person sets constrained by a majority vote), (2) group‐on‐one (only own three‐person set constrained by a majority vote), (3) one‐on‐group (only other three‐person set constrained by a majority vote), (4) one‐on‐one (neither three‐person set constrained by a majority vote). The four conditions were compared with three orthogonal contrasts. Consistent with the assumption that interindividual interactions are less competitive than interactions involving groups, the first contrast indicated that there were fewer competitive choices in the one‐on‐one condition than in the other three conditions pooled. Consistent with the assumption that competitiveness can flow either from acting as a group or interacting with a group, the second contrast found no significant difference between the group‐on‐one and one‐on‐group conditions. Finally, consistent with the assumption that the interindividual‐intergroup discontinuity effect is a joint function of acting as a group and interacting with a group, the third contrast revealed that there were more competitive choices in the group‐on‐group condition than in the one‐on‐group and group‐on‐one conditions pooled. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Online counselling: a descriptive analysis of therapy services on the Internet

This study investigated the emerging practice of online counselling. Although the traditional practice of counselling involves face-to-face interaction between counsellor and client, a growing number of practitioners are providing counselling or therapy services via the Internet. In the present study, a total of 67 online counsellors completed a questionnaire exploring the backgrounds, services, fees, and communication technologies of practitioners offering online counselling to the public. Results suggest that online counselling is conducted by relatively experienced, primarily Western-based practitioners and is characterised by the use of email. Online clients are mainly female and receive relatively short-term interventions. Although the field appears to be evolving as its popularity increases, some ethical concerns raised by early research remain inadequately addressed.     

Does Mother Know Best? An Actor–Partner Model of College‐Age Women's Human Papillomavirus Vaccination Behavior

This study examined the associations of perceived threat, perceived efficacy, and parent–child communication with the extent to which college‐age women received the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. Daughters and their mothers completed a survey about the HPV vaccine (N = 182 dyads). The results showed that mothers' perceived self‐efficacy to talk to their daughters and mothers' response efficacy of the vaccine were indirectly related to mother–daughter communication about HPV. Further, mother–daughter communication mediated the relation between mothers' intention to talk to their daughters and daughters' HPV vaccination behavior. This study demonstrates the importance of the social context of health behavior and the role of communication in understanding maternal influence on the HPV vaccination behavior of young adult women.