Withdrawal From Coparenting Interactions During Early Infancy

This study examines early withdrawal in the coparenting system, and the utility of a brief problem‐solving discussion about coparenting responsibilities as a means for evaluating such withdrawal. One hundred and fifteen couples were evaluated both prenatally and at 3 months postpartum. During prenatal assessments, parents rated their personalities and completed marital assessments. After the baby arrived, they completed a negotiation task in which they discussed disputes about parenting roles and responsibilities, and interacted together with the baby in a triadic play assessment. Fathers' but not mothers' withdrawal during coparenting negotiations was associated with greater disengagement and less warmth during triadic play and with fathers' feelings that mothers did not respect their parenting. Fathers' but not mothers' withdrawal during coparenting negotiations was also forecast by low ego resilience and by an increase in depressive symptomatology during the postpartum. As the negotiation task appeared to be an effective provocateur of withdrawal when confronting coparenting disagreement, it may prove useful for eliciting this aspect of coparental process in work with couples.     

Stress, depressive symptoms, and smoking cessation among pregnant women.

Perceived stress and depressive symptoms were examined as correlates and predictors of smoking cessation during pregnancy in a sample of 819 pregnant smokers (454 baseline smokers and 365 baseline quitters). Women who quit early in pregnancy had lower levels of stress and depressive symptoms than baseline smokers. Adjusting for level of addiction and other demographic factors related to stress and depressive symptoms eliminated the significant association between depressive symptoms and smoking cessation. Lower levels of stress and depressive symptoms were not predictive of cessation in later pregnancy. Prenatal healthcare providers should continue to assess level of addiction and provide targeted intensive cessation interventions. Interventions that reduce stress and depression may also be of benefit to women who are continuing smokers in early pregnancy.     

Integrating Motivating and Constraining Forces in Deviance Causation: A Test of Causal Chain Hypotheses in Control Balance Theory

ABSTRACT

A major innovation in control balance theory is the integration of motivating and constraining forces into a “causal chain” explanation of deviance. To test these relationships, this research presents a parsed model of the causal chain that focuses on the associations among control ratios, deviant motivation, situational provocations, constraint, and deviant behavior. Results from a first-person scenario testing hypotheses from this model show that, as predicted, control ratios affect deviance both directly and indirectly through motivating and constraining variables. While the full model explains about 39% of the variation in deviance, control ratios do not, however, show great explanatory power regarding variation in motivation and constraint.     

Academic Course Combining Psychological Skills Training and Life Skills Education for University Students and Student-Athletes

In Part II, we present two case studies of erotic transference and countertransference in sport psychology service delivery. We interviewed two seasoned practitioners, both with long histories of working with athletes. These sport psychologists represent two extremes of the spectrum when encountering the erotic in service delivery. One participant's story is about denial, suppression, and repression of anything that hints of the erotic in practitioner-client relationships. The other sport psychologist's story is about a nearly unbridled reveling in the erotic with a client. The practitioners are easy to condemn, one for ignorance and lack of awareness of self and others, the other for adolescent fantasies and objectification of his client. But those responses are facile and uncharitable. We present these two cases as examples, albeit extreme ones, of how truly complex the erotic is in service delivery. Their stories illustrate, in sometimes painful and graphic ways, what it is to be human, all-too-human, in our encounters with the people we serve.     

DIMENSIONS AND CORRELATES OF THE PERSONNEL AUDIT AS AN ORGANIZATIONAL ASSESSMENT TOOL

This study analyzes the measurement properties of the personnel audit as an organizational assessment tool and the extent to which audit results relate to important organizational criteria. The findings reported here indicate that nine dimensions can effectively summarize 37 audit measures. The composite factor scores for these dimensions predict executive perceptions of "overall organizational performance" and "overall contribution of Personnel Function," employee "overall satisfaction with personnel services," and to a lesser extent, "profitability per capita." The personnel budget allotted per capita is in turn related to executive perceptions of Personnel's contributions.     

Implementation of nonparametric multivariate statistics with S

Multivariate nonparametric statistical methods have not been widely used by psychologists. One reason for this may have been that the usual general-purpose packages do not provide easy implementation of these methods. In this article, we briefly describe the multivariate extensions of the sign, signed-rank, and rank-sum tests and use S, a programming environment for data analysis, to implement these statistical procedures. Three numerical examples are used to illustrate the flexibility and efficiency of these computations in S.