Impact of Workplace Bullying on Emotional and Physical Well-Being: A Longitudinal Collective Case Study

Bullying and mobbing are occupational safety hazards pervasive in developed and developing countries. Our study aim was to determine whether bullying and mobbing caused poor health for a victim and a witness from the same workplace in western Canada. Longitudinal semistructured interviews were conducted in 2007 and 2008 with both parties. The interviews were transcribed, analyzed, and arranged into arrays using chronological ordering and time sequencing. The victim felt targeted because she represented a threat to the bully, with victim and witness experiencing negative health outcomes. The authors suggest that wellness programs should place greater emphasis on mental health promotion to discourage workplace bullying.     

Relational Security Moderates the Effect of Serotonin Transporter Gene Polymorphism (5-HTTLPR) on Stress Generation and Depression among Adolescents

Previous research demonstrates that carriers of the short allele of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR) show both greater susceptibility to depression in response to stressful life events and higher rates of generation of stressful events in response to depression. The current study examines relational security (i.e., self-reported beliefs about attachment security) as a moderator of these effects, building on emerging research suggesting that the short allele acts as a marker of sensitivity to the social environment. Participants were 354 Caucasian adolescents oversampled for maternal depression (137 male, 217 female), assessed at ages 15 and 20. Results indicated that the short allele predicted increased stress generation at age 20 among those with low age 15 security but decreased stress generation among those with high security, and revealed a three-way interaction between age 15 depression, age 15 security, and genotype, where depression predicted stress generation only among short allele carriers with low security. Further, among boys only, security interacted with genotype to predict longitudinal changes in depression diagnosis, with the s-allele predicting relative increases in probability of depression among boys with low security but decreases among boys with high security. Results support the notion of the short allele as a marker of social reactivity, and suggest that attachment security may buffer against the genetic vulnerability introduced by the short allele, in line with predictions of the differential susceptibility theory.     

Femininity and Dominance Across the Lifespan: Longitudinal Findings from Two Cohorts of Women

The Intergenerational Studies (IGS) began in 1929 designed with the overarching goal of describing and predicting normal human development. Here we focus on original IGS participant women and daughters of original participants, with respect to development in femininity and dominance, as measured by the CPI. Three-level HLM indicates older cohort women are higher in femininity than younger cohort women in early adulthood; both cohorts show an equivalent linear decrease with age. In contrast, the two cohorts show equivalent levels of dominance in early adulthood, but the younger cohort women show a greater increase with age than the older cohort women. Results illustrate both cohort and developmental movement toward less femininity and more dominance in women.     

Revisiting von Restorff’s early isolation effect

An item that is conceptually or physically different from other items in a series is often remembered well. This isolation effect has been found independent of the position of the isolated item in the list, suggesting that special attention to or processing of the isolated item is not a necessary precondition of the effect. Three experiments are reported that challenge this conclusion. In Experiment 1a, we compared memory for conceptually isolated items to memory for the same items in unrelated and homogeneous lists. Under moderately distracting conditions, isolation effects were observed with midlist but not with early isolates. In fact, early isolation impaired memory for the conceptually distinct items relative to the same items in homogeneous lists. Experiment 1b replicated this memory impairment for early conceptual isolates and extended it to nondistracting conditions. In Experiment 2, we focused on early isolation, manipulating the type of isolation and whether or not participants performed judgments of learning (JOLs). An early isolation effect was observed for numbers isolated in lists of words (and vice versa), but not for conceptual isolates. Performing the JOL task reduced the size of the early isolation effect. These results suggest that number/word stimulus contrasts are coded automatically and support an isolation effect independent of list position. However, conceptual contrasts require relational processing and will only support an early isolation effect when such processing occurs. The results of Experiments 1a, 1b, and 2 suggest that attentional resources during list presentation and a favorable retrieval environment combine to support good memory for distinctive events.     

The Influence of Counselor Epistemology on the Helping Interview: A Qualitative Study

The relationship between certain personal qualities of a counselor and the outcomes of counseling has been well established. In this qualitative study, the authors sought to extend this understanding by examining the relationship between the personal epistemologies of counselor trainees and their interview behaviors. Five distinguishing themes emerged.     

Narcissism,identification, and longitudinal change in psychological health: Dynamic predictions

The narcissist has been described as “dependent on others to provide confirmation of the grandiose ego ideal” (American Psychiatric Association. (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.). The present study shows how the combination of dependent identification and unhealthy narcissism leads to decreasing psychological health across 42 years of adulthood. Change in psychological health is studied in 156 participants of the Intergenerational Studies, Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley. We predicted that longitudinal decline in psychological health, as assessed by longitudinal hierarchical linear modeling analyses of the California Personality Inventory v3 scale [Gough, H. G., & Bradley, P. (1996). California Psychological Inventory. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press], would be predicted by the joint presence in early adulthood of maladaptive narcissism [Wink, P. (1992). Three narcissism scales for the California Q-set. Journal of Personality Assessment, 58, 51–66] and defensive identification [Cramer, P. (1991a). The development of defense mechanisms: Theory, research and assessment. New York: Springer-Verlag]. In contrast, we predicted healthy narcissism would be positively related to psychological health throughout adulthood. Predictions were confirmed via regression analyses including interaction terms, and are explained by the insoluble conflict that occurs when narcissistic gratification is dependent on the admiration of others, but the tie to others interferes with independent growth and accomplishment.     

Expectations of Psychotherapy Duration by Disorder: A Comparison Between Professional and Young Adult Expectations

Using more precise methodology, the current study investigated expectations of psychotherapy duration for specific disorders. Duration expectations were obtained for young adults and compared to those obtained from psychotherapists as reported by Lowry and Ross (Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training 34:272–277, 1997). Results revealed that expected duration for young adults by disorder was quite similar to the psychotherapists, where less severe psychological disorders and problems were expected to require shorter treatment durations than moderate and severe disorders and problems. For disorders and problems with which young adults were familiar, their expectations were essentially the same as psychotherapists. A meaningful difference was found for suicidal ideation, with young adults expecting significantly longer treatment duration.     

The role of spatial integration in the perception of surface orientation with active touch

Vision research has shown that perception of line orientation, in the fovea area, improves with line length (Westheimer & Ley, 1997). This suggests that the visual system may use spatial integration to improve perception of orientation. In the present experiments, we investigated the role of spatial integration in the perception of surface orientation using kinesthetic and proprioceptive information from shoulder and elbow. With their left index fingers, participants actively explored virtual slanted surfaces of different lengths and orientations, and were asked to reproduce an orientation or discriminate between two orientations. Results showed that reproduction errors and discrimination thresholds improve with surface length. This suggests that the proprioceptive shoulder-elbow system may integrate redundant spatial information resulting from extended arm movements to improve orientation judgments.     

Fathering activities during early infancy

Fathering activities of 16 fathers of firstborns were surveyed via questionnaire to assess their involvement in physical caretaking, affective interaction and support of mother through participation in household tasks. Results indicated that student fathers who had previous infant care experience, whose infants were unplanned and whose wives were either employed or attending school spent the most time interacting with their infants. Other variables explored which had little effect on father's interaction time included: formal education, attendance at prenatal clases, infant's sex and method of feeding, family isolation. Fathers spent more time in affective interaction than in physical caretaking. Time spent by fathers in affective interaction was nearly equal to that of mothers, while time spent in physical caretaking was much greater for mothers.