Parent and Adolescent Depressive Symptoms: The Role of Parental Attributions

This study examined whether negative parental attributions for adolescent behaviour mediate the association between parental and adolescent depressive symptoms, and whether this relationship is moderated by adolescent gender. Mothers and fathers and 124 adolescents (76 girls and 48 boys; ages 14 to 18) participated. Adolescents were primarily Caucasian, and varied in the level of depressive symptoms (with 27% of the sample meeting diagnostic criteria for a current unipolar depressive disorder). Parents and adolescents completed measures of depressive symptoms, and participated in a videotaped problem-solving discussion. After the discussion, each parent watched the videotape and, at 20 s intervals, offered attributions for their adolescent’s behaviour. Adolescent gender moderated the relation between parental attributions and adolescent depressive symptoms, with stronger associations for female adolescents. For both mothers and fathers, both parental depressive symptoms and negative attributions about the adolescent’s behaviour made unique contributions to the prediction of depressive symptoms in adolescent females. There also was evidence that negative attributions partially mediated the link between depressive symptoms in mothers and adolescent daughters. The results are interpreted as consistent with parenting as a partial mediator between parental and adolescent depressive symptoms, and suggest that adolescent girls may be particularly sensitive to parents’ negative interpretations of their behaviour.     

An Island in a Sea of Development: An Examination of Place Attachment,Activity Type,and Crowding in an Urban National Park

ABSTRACT

As more people move to urban areas there will be increased pressure on existing green spaces to offer places for recreation, contemplation, historic interpretation, exercise, and nature appreciation. Development and a rise in population has led to too few public recreation sites available in many regions of the world resulting in unsustainable pressure being applied to parks. The objective of this study was to examine how place attachment may be related to type and frequency of park use and management issues regarding crowding. Data for this study were obtained via intercept survey of a random sample of visitors (N = 1088) at a park in the Metro Atlanta area, Georgia. Results suggest that place attachment had a significant relationship with frequency of visits and types of activities that visitors engaged in. There was, however, no significant relation between place attachment and crowding. First-time visitors and less frequent visitors felt most crowded, which may support the idea that the most frequent visitors expect it to be crowded and are, therefore, less sensitive to it. This study sheds light on how visitors to an urban park view their experience while recreating, and may inform policies and regulations that will help mitigate the unique management situations that urban parks present.     

Intending to Leave But No Place to Go: An Examination of the Behaviors of Reluctant Stayers

We extend recent conceptual work on withdrawal states and develop a framework to examine behavioral tendencies of reluctant stayers (i.e., employees who desire to leave but cannot). Although principles of self-interest suggest that these employees ought to behave appropriately to maintain employment, reactance theory suggests that the combination of high turnover intentions and low job alternatives may result in lower performance and greater deviance. Contrary to conventional wisdom but consistent with reactance theory, low perceived job alternatives strengthened the positive relationship between turnover intentions and deviance, as well as the negative relation between intentions to quit and task performance. Moderated-mediation analyses revealed that the indirect effect of work frustration (via turnover intentions) was stronger on task performance and deviance when perceived job alternatives were low rather than high.     

Response competition: a major source of interference in a tactile identification task.

Two experiments investigated the ability of subjects to identify a moving, tactile stimulus. In both experiments, the subjects were presented with a target to their left index fingerpad and a nontarget (also moving) to their left middle fingerpad. Subjects were instructed to attend only to the target location and to respond "1" if the stimulus moved either to the left or up the finger, and to respond "2" if the stimulus moved either right or down the finger. The results showed that accuracy was better and reaction times were faster when the target and nontarget moved in the same direction than when they moved in different directions. When the target and nontarget moved in different directions, accuracy was significantly better and reaction times were significantly faster when the two stimuli had the same assigned response than when they had different responses. The results provide support for the conclusion that movement information is processed across adjacent fingers to the level of incipient response activation, even when subjects attempt to focus their attention on one location on the skin.     

AGGRESSION AS POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT IN MICE UNDER VARIOUS RATIO‐ AND TIME‐BASED REINFORCEMENT SCHEDULES

There is evidence suggesting aggression may be a positive reinforcer in many species. However, only a few studies have examined the characteristics of aggression as a positive reinforcer in mice. Four types of reinforcement schedules were examined in the current experiment using male Swiss CFW albino mice in a resident—intruder model of aggression as a positive reinforcer. A nose poke response on an operant conditioning panel was reinforced under fixed‐ratio (FR 8), fixed‐interval (FI 5‐min), progressive ratio (PR 2), or differential reinforcement of low rate behavior reinforcement schedules (DRL 40‐s and DRL 80‐s). In the FR conditions, nose pokes were maintained by aggression and extinguished when the aggression contingency was removed. There were long postreinforcement pauses followed by bursts of responses with short interresponse times (IRTs). In the FI conditions, nose pokes were maintained by aggression, occurred more frequently as the interval elapsed, and extinguished when the contingency was removed. In the PR conditions, nose pokes were maintained by aggression, postreinforcement pauses increased as the ratio requirement increased, and responding was extinguished when the aggression contingency was removed. In the DRL conditions, the nose poke rate decreased, while the proportional distributions of IRTs and postreinforcement pauses shifted toward longer durations as the DRL interval increased. However, most responses occurred before the minimum IRT interval elapsed, suggesting weak temporal control of behavior. Overall, the findings suggest aggression can be a positive reinforcer for nose poke responses in mice on ratio‐ and time‐based reinforcement schedules.     

Mindfulness predicts less texting while driving among young adults: Examining attention- and emotion-regulation motives as potential mediators

Many young adult drivers read and send text messages while driving despite clear safety risks. Understanding predictors of texting-while-driving may help to indentify relevant targets for interventions to reduce this dangerous behavior. The present study examined whether individual differences in mindfulness are associated with texting-while-driving in a sample of young-adult drivers. Using path analysis, we tested whether this relationship would be mediated by the degree to which individuals use text-messaging as a means of reducing unpleasant emotions (emotion-regulation motives) and the degree to which individuals limit texting in order to focus on present-moment experiences (attention-regulation motives). Individuals lower in mindfulness reported more frequent texting-while-driving and this relationship appeared to be mediated primarily by emotion-regulation motives. Results may help inform the development of mindfulness-based interventions to prevent texting-while-driving.     

Eye Movements and Lexical Access in Spoken-Language Comprehension: Evaluating a Linking Hypothesis between Fixations and Linguistic Processing

A growing number of researchers in the sentence processing community are using eye movements to address issues in spoken language comprehension. Experiments using this paradigm have shown that visually presented referential information, including properties of referents relevant to specific actions, influences even the earliest moments of syntactic processing. Methodological concerns about task-specific strategies and the linking hypothesis between eye movements and linguistic processing are identified and discussed. These concerns are addressed in a review of recent studies of spoken word recognition which introduce and evaluate a detailed linking hypothesis between eye movements and lexical access. The results provide evidence about the time course of lexical activation that resolves some important theoretical issues in spoken-word recognition. They also demonstrate that fixations are sensitive to properties of the normal language-processing system that cannot be attributed to task-specific strategies.     

The Relation of Perceived Neighborhood Danger to Childhood Aggression: A Test of Mediating Mechanisms

In the current study, two mediational mechanisms, parenting practices and children's beliefs about aggression, were hypothesized to account for the relationship between perceived neighborhood danger and childhood aggression. Using structural equation modeling, data were analyzed from an inner-city school-based sample of 732 predominantly African American 5th graders. Results suggested that perceived neighborhood danger was associated with strong positive beliefs about aggression, which in turn was associated with high levels of aggression. The hypothesized mediating role of parenting practices (restrictive discipline, parental monitoring, and parental involvement) on the relation between perceived neighborhood danger and child aggression was not supported. However, the current findings suggest that children's positive beliefs about aggression mediated the relationship between restrictive discipline and aggression. Directions for future research are discussed.