The Effect of Communication Change on Long‐term Reductions in Child Exposure to Conflict: Impact of the Promoting Strong African American Families (ProSAAF) Program

African American couples (n = 331) with children, 89% of whom were married, were assigned to either (a) a culturally sensitive couple‐ and parenting‐enhancement program (ProSAAF) or (b) an information‐only control condition in which couples received self‐help materials. Husbands averaged 41 years of age and wives averaged 39 years. We found significant effects of program participation in the short term on couple communication, which was targeted by the intervention, as well as over the long term, on self‐reported arguing in front of children. Long‐term parenting outcomes were fully mediated by changes in communication for wives, but not for husbands. For husbands, positive change depended on amount of wife reported change. We conclude that wives' changes in communication from baseline to posttest may be more pivotal for the couples' long‐term experience of decreased arguing in front of children than are husbands' changes, with wives' changes leading to changes in both partners' reports of arguments in front of children.     

Toward a Model-Based Approach to the Clinical Assessment of Personality Psychopathology

Recent years have witnessed tremendous growth in the scope and sophistication of statistical methods available to explore the latent structure of psychopathology, involving continuous, discrete, and hybrid latent variables. The availability of such methods has fostered optimism that they can facilitate movement from classification primarily crafted through expert consensus to classification derived from empirically based models of psychopathological variation. The explication of diagnostic constructs with empirically supported structures can then facilitate the development of assessment tools that appropriately characterize these constructs. Our goal in this article is to illustrate how new statistical methods can inform conceptualization of personality psychopathology and therefore its assessment. We use magical thinking as an example, because both theory and earlier empirical work suggested the possibility of discrete aspects to the latent structure of personality psychopathology, particularly forms of psychopathology involving distortions of reality testing, yet other data suggest that personality psychopathology is generally continuous in nature. We directly compared the fit of a variety of latent variable models to magical thinking data from a sample enriched with clinically significant variation in psychotic symptomatology for explanatory purposes. Findings generally suggested a continuous latent variable model best represented magical thinking, but results varied somewhat depending on different indexes of model fit. We discuss the implications of the findings for classification and applied personality assessment. We also highlight some limitations of this type of approach that are illustrated by these data, including the importance of substantive interpretation, in addition to use of model fit indexes, when evaluating competing structural models.     

Dash of Faith: A Faith-Based Participatory Research Pilot Study

The Dash of Faith pilot used a community-based participatory research approach to design an experiential dietary intervention based on two African-American churches, one intervention and one comparison. Congregation members identified components that were incorporated into 12 weekly and 4 monthly sessions, with a goal of increasing fruit and vegetable and lowering fat intake. At 2 months, a marginally significant (p = 0.07) increase in fruit and vegetable consumption was observed in the intervention group but was not maintained at study conclusion. We propose that these mixed findings may be attributable, in part, to bias introduced by the participatory nature of the design.     

The Self’s Symbolic Role in Implicit Approach/Avoidance: Movement Time Evidence

Theories of self-regulation emphasize the special role that the symbolic self may play in approach and avoidance movements, but experimental evidence is lacking. In two experiments (total N = 157), participants moved either a self-relevant (e.g., “me”) or non-self (e.g., “not me”) agent to one of two locations, one occupied by a positive word and the other occupied by a negative word. In both experiments, the movement agent interacted with the destination valence such that it was only the symbolic self that moved more quickly to positive rather than negative locations. These results established a role for the symbolic self in approach/avoidance that had been questioned, thereby supporting both classic and contemporary self-related theories of approach and avoidance.     

Religious Perspectives on the Use of Psychopharmaceuticals as an Enhancement Technology

The use of psychopharmaceuticals as an enhancement technology has been the focus of attention in the bioethics literature. However, there has been little examination of the challenges that this practice creates for religious traditions that place importance on questions of being, authenticity, and identity. We asked expert commentators from six major world religions to consider the issues raised by psychopharmaceuticals as an enhancement technology. These commentaries reveal that in assessing the appropriate place of medical therapies, religious traditions, like secular perspectives, rely upon ideas about health and disease and about normal human behavior. But unlike secular perspectives, faith traditions explicitly concern themselves with ways in which medicine should or should not be used to live a “good life”.     

Why do Managers Engage in Trustworthy Behavior? A Multilevel Cross‐Cultural Study in 18 Countries

Drawing on theories of generalized exchange and the norm of indirect reciprocity, we conceptualize subordinates’ organizational citizenship behavior directed toward the organization (OCBO) and directed toward peers (OCBI) as antecedents of managerial trustworthy behavior and examine how managers’ affective trust in subordinates mediates this relationship. We also investigate the extent to which this mediation is moderated by the level of collectivism in a society. Data were collected from 741 managers and 2,111 subordinates in 18 countries representing all major cultural regions of the world. We find support for our hypothesized moderated mediation in that managers’ affective trust in subordinates mediates the relationships between both subordinates’ OCBO and managerial trustworthy behavior, and subordinates’ OCBI and managerial trustworthy behavior across the different countries studied. Further, managers’ affective trust in subordinates only mediates the relationships between both types of citizenship behavior and managerial trustworthy behavior when collectivism is low to medium but not when it is high. Implications for research on cross‐cultural psychology, trust, and organizational citizenship behavior are discussed.     

Introduction

This introduction presents selected proceedings of a two‐day meeting on the regress problem, sponsored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and hosted by Vanderbilt University in October 2013, along with other submitted essays. Three forms of research on the regress problem are distinguished: metatheoretical, developmental, and critical work.     

Moderation Analysis Using a Two-Level Regression Model

Moderation analysis is widely used in social and behavioral research. The most commonly used model for moderation analysis is moderated multiple regression (MMR) in which the explanatory variables of the regression model include product terms, and the model is typically estimated by least squares (LS). This paper argues for a two-level regression model in which the regression coefficients of a criterion variable on predictors are further regressed on moderator variables. An algorithm for estimating the parameters of the two-level model by normal-distribution-based maximum likelihood (NML) is developed. Formulas for the standard errors (SEs) of the parameter estimates are provided and studied. Results indicate that, when heteroscedasticity exists, NML with the two-level model gives more efficient and more accurate parameter estimates than the LS analysis of the MMR model. When error variances are homoscedastic, NML with the two-level model leads to essentially the same results as LS with the MMR model. Most importantly, the two-level regression model permits estimating the percentage of variance of each regression coefficient that is due to moderator variables. When applied to data from General Social Surveys 1991, NML with the two-level model identified a significant moderation effect of race on the regression of job prestige on years of education while LS with the MMR model did not. An R package is also developed and documented to facilitate the application of the two-level model.     

Effects of deterrence on intensity of group identification and efforts to protect group identity

Group identification serves important functions such as motivating group members to work towards group goals and sustaining their efforts to maintain a positive group identity. Thus increasing or decreasing group identification has implications for group members’ commitment to achieving group goals. We propose that group identification and group-level efforts to protect group identity can be reduced or enhanced by deterrents to feeling identified with the ingroup. To test this idea, we exposed participants to different types of deterrents to group identification: a reason for not liking the ingroup (Study 1), difficulty of achieving an ingroup goal (Study 2), and a threat to ingroup positive identity (Study 3). Group identification and strength of efforts to achieve a group goal increased with the strength of deterrence, to the point where it decreased in the strong deterrent condition. Implications for intergroup motivation and social identity are discussed.     

Integrative Complexity Coding Raises Integratively Complex Issues

Conway, Conway, Gornick, and Houck (2014) report a major effort to automate integrative complexity coding. Judging this effort requires researchers to be more explicit in articulating key methodological assumptions about the coding process and theoretical assumptions about the construct. Unresolved issues include: (1) when, and on what basis, we should attribute divergences between human coders and algorithms to overestimations or underestimations by one or the other approach; and (2) to what extent second‐generation algorithms can yield Pareto improvements that reduce errors of both underestimation and overestimation. Further progress in developing natural language processing measures of this cognitive style will require sharper definitions of target constructs: in particular, different types of differentiation (dialectical and elaborative) and integration (hierarchical and flexible) and clearer guidelines for factoring context into assessments.