Does Problem Focused Coping Buffer the Effects of Trait Anxiety on Depressive Symptoms of Chronic Urticaria Patients?

The present study examined the moderating role of problem-focused coping in trait anxiety—depressive symptoms' relationship in patients with chronic urticaria (CU). Eighty-eight CU patients, who applied to an outpatient clinic of Clinical Immunology and Allergic Diseases, filled out a questionnaire set including State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, Ways of Coping Inventory, and Beck Depression Inventory. The results suggested that CU patients high on trait anxiety reported more depressive symptoms, and the ones using more problem-focused coping (PFC) strategies reported less depressive symptoms. Also, PFC strategies moderated trait anxiety-depressive symptoms relation. Accordingly, PFC strategies did not lead to any significant difference in CU patients who were low on trait anxiety in terms of the level of depressive symptoms. However, CU patients with high trait anxiety experienced significantly less depressive symptoms if they used more PFC strategies. The findings were discussed in the light of the relevant literature.     

Mentoring in-service chemistry teachers: acquirements as mentees

The aim of this study is to identify a group of chemistry teachers’ (mentees) acquirements of mentoring program by analyzing their reflective journals. Four mentees participated in this study and they met with their mentors once a week for eight consecutive weeks. The mentees devised lesson plans as well as activities during the mentoring sessions. After each mentoring session, the mentees were asked to reflect the process and their gains to their journals. The journals were analyzed in two stages; content analysis of the journals and the analysis of the mentees level of reflections. The analysis of the mentees’ journals showed that the mentorship program supported the mentees to improve their pedagogical content knowledge; allow them to utilize various methods, techniques, and materials in their lessons. Besides, the mentees indicated that they performed chemistry courses more effectively with the help of the acquirements from the mentoring sessions. The result of this study showed also that mentors can play key roles in supporting professional developments of teachers. It is suggested that rehearsing lesson plans before going into the classroom would make the mentoring sessions more beneficial.     

Alignment in Multimodal Interaction: An Integrative Framework

When people are engaged in social interaction, they can repeat aspects of each other’s communicative behavior, such as words or gestures. This kind of behavioral alignment has been studied across a wide range of disciplines and has been accounted for by diverging theories. In this paper, we review various operationalizations of lexical and gestural alignment. We reveal that scholars have fundamentally different takes on when and how behavior is considered to be aligned, which makes it difficult to compare findings and draw uniform conclusions. Furthermore, we show that scholars tend to focus on one particular dimension of alignment (traditionally, whether two instances of behavior overlap in form), while other dimensions remain understudied. This hampers theory testing and building, which requires a well-defined account of the factors that are central to or might enhance alignment. To capture the complex nature of alignment, we identify five key dimensions to formalize the relationship between any pair of behavior: time, sequence, meaning, form, and modality. We show how assumptions regarding the underlying mechanism of alignment (placed along the continuum of priming vs. grounding) pattern together with operationalizations in terms of the five dimensions. This integrative framework can help researchers in the field of alignment and related phenomena (including behavior matching, mimicry, entrainment, and accommodation) to formulate their hypotheses and operationalizations in a more transparent and systematic manner. The framework also enables us to discover unexplored research avenues and derive new hypotheses regarding alignment.     

Coping and Post-traumatic Growth Among COVID-19 Patients: A Qualitative Study

Journal of Adult Development - Pandemic diseases have caused dramatic changes in people’s lives throughout history. Today, the COVID-19 virus spreads rapidly and affects human beings around...     

INTRAORGANIZATIONAL EMPLOYEE NAVIGATION AND SOCIALLY DERIVED OUTCOMES: CONCEPTUALIZATION,VALIDATION, AND EFFECTS ON OVERALL PERFORMANCE

Intraorganizational employee navigation (IEN) is conceptualized as a means of better understanding how the organizational actor proactively works across their firm's internal environment in the execution of their jobs. Navigation is argued to be a precursor to the employee's overall performance through a class of mediating variables labeled “socially derived outcomes,” which are variables inside the organization that are bestowed upon the employee as a result of them first engaging in proactive behavior (e.g., IEN). Two studies are reported. Study I sees IEN psychometrically validated versus a range of existing proactive behaviors and individual traits (discriminant, nomological, and criterion‐related validity) with a heterogeneous sample of 704 employees. Study II then tests a model relating IEN to performance through six mediating “socially derived outcomes” by leveraging data from 2 Fortune 500 firms. The results of Study II show that IEN significantly impacts multiple measures of the employee's overall performance through mediating effects brought about by key socially derived outcomes, such as the employee's “manager alignment.” The contributions, broader implications, and limitations of the research are then put into context.     

Examining Positive Performance Implications of Role Stressors by the Indirect Influence of Positive Affect: A Study of New Business Managers

This article examines whether managers' performance in new businesses improves when they are exposed to role stressors. In a 3‐year longitudinal survey, we drew on the challenge–hindrance framework and Karasek's (1979 ) job demand‐control model to acknowledge direct and interaction effects of role stressors (i.e., role conflict, role ambiguity, role overload) on positive affect. In addition to finding support for such influences, our results support that positive affect facilitates performance, thus suggesting that role stressors can be indirectly positive for performance. This study encourages research to go beyond the traditional stressor–strain perspective, to incorporate positive affect in role‐stress models, and pay more attention to interaction effects between role stressors.     

Women Assimilate Across Gender,Men Don't: The Role of Gender to the Own‐Anchor Effect in Age,Height, and Weight Estimates1

This paper reports 2 studies of the own‐anchor effect (i.e., assimilation in age, height, and weight estimates) in same‐ and cross‐gender age, height, and weight estimates. The own‐anchor effect is believed to be stronger for same‐gender estimates, but the investigation reported here is the first to test this hypothesis with participants and target persons of both genders. Several own‐anchor effects were found in females' same‐ and cross‐gender estimates, whereas males only showed own‐anchor effects in same‐gender estimates. These results lean toward the possibility that women assimilate across gender, whereas men do not. Explanations of these results with reference to Krueger's ( Krueger & Zeiger, 1993 ; Robbins & Krueger, 2005 ) theory of social projection and the consequences for witness reliability are discussed.     

Word fluency performance and strategies in children with cochlear implants: age‐dependent effects?

Löfkvist, U., Almkvist, O., Lyxell, B. & Tallberg, I.‐M. (2012). Word fluency performance and strategies in children with cochlear implants: age‐dependent effects? Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 53, 467–474. Word fluency was examined in 73 Swedish children aged 6–9 years divided into two age groups, 6–7 and 8–9 years; 34 deaf children with cochlear implants (CI) (15 girls/19 boys) and 39 age‐matched children with normal hearing (NH) (20 girls/19 boys). One purpose was to compare the ability to retrieve words in two different word fluency tasks; one phonemically based (FAS letter fluency) and one semantically based (animal fluency). A second purpose was to examine retrieval strategies in the two tasks by conducting an analysis of clustering and switching of word sequences. In general we found that age was an important factor for word fluency ability, in both the CI and the NH groups. It was also demonstrated that children with CI aged 8–9 years retrieved significantly fewer words and used less efficient strategies in the retrieval process, especially on the phonemically based task compared to children with NH of the same ages, whereas children 6–7 years performed similarly in both groups regarding number of retrieved words and use of strategies. The results are discussed with respect to factors such as age differences in performance for children with CI, especially for the phonemically based task.     

The effects of cognitive behavior therapy delivered by students in a psychologist training program: an effectiveness study

Relatively little is known about the efficacy of clinically inexperienced student therapists carrying out cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) under supervision during a professional, psychologist training program. The current study evaluated this by collecting pre- and posttreatment data on 591 consecutive patients receiving treatment at the Psychotherapy Clinic of the Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Sweden, over an 8-year period. The patients had mainly anxiety disorders or depression with a mean duration of 15 years, and received individual CBT for a mean of 18 sessions. They improved significantly on both general measures (Beck Anxiety Inventory [BAI], Beck Depression Inventory [BDI], and Quality of Life Inventory [QOLI]) and disorder-specific self-report scales. The proportions of recovered patients on the BAI (63%) and the BDI (60%) were higher than those of a comparison effectiveness study. On the specific self-report scales the current sample improved as much as the samples in extant efficacy trials. We conclude that clinically inexperienced student therapists who receive supervision from experienced supervisors can achieve treatment effects that are on a par with those of experienced licensed psychotherapists.