Goal attainment, goal striving, and well-being during the transition to adulthood: a ten-year U.S. national longitudinal study

This study examines the relation between young adults' goal achievement, continued goal striving over time, and subsequent well-being. Analysis of a longitudinal subsample of a nationally representative U.S. study of 5,693 adolescents as they transition to adulthood revealed that individuals who met their goals had higher well-being, but that the relation between goal completion and well-being varied by goal content. Continued goal striving was related to well-being and maintained domain-specific self-efficacies, whereas goal disengagement was accompanied by declines in domain-specific self-efficacies. Overall, the results suggest that long-term goal striving is beneficial for well-being during the transition to adulthood.     

Professed impressions: What people say about others affects onlookers’ perceptions of speakers’ power and warmth

During a conversation, it is common for a speaker to describe a third-party that the listener does not know. These professed impressions not only shape the listener’s view of the third-party but also affect judgments of the speaker herself. We propose a previously unstudied consequence of professed impressions: judgments of the speaker’s power. In two studies, we find that listeners ascribe more power to speakers who profess impressions focusing on a third-party’s conscientiousness, compared to those focusing on agreeableness. We also replicate previous research showing that speakers saying positive things about third parties are seen as more agreeable than speakers saying negative things. In the second study, we demonstrate that conscientiousness-power effects are mediated by inferences about speakers’ task concerns and positivity-agreeableness effects are mediated by inferences about speakers’ other-enhancing concerns. Finally, we show that judgments of speaker status parallel judgments of agreeableness rather than of power, suggesting that perceivers use different processes to make inferences about status and power. These findings have implications for the literatures on person perception, power, and status.     

Participatory Action Research (PAR) in Middle School: Opportunities, Constraints, and Key Processes

Late childhood and early adolescence represent a critical transition in the developmental and academic trajectory of youth, a time in which there is an upsurge in academic disengagement and psychopathology. PAR projects that can promote youth's sense of meaningful engagement in school and a sense of efficacy and mattering can be particularly powerful given the challenges of this developmental stage. In the present study, we draw on data from our own collaborative implementation of PAR projects in secondary schools to consider two central questions: (1) How do features of middle school settings and the developmental characteristics of the youth promote or inhibit the processes, outcomes, and sustainability of the PAR endeavor? and (2) How can the broad principles and concepts of PAR be effectively translated into specific intervention activities in schools, both within and outside of the classroom? In particular, we discuss a participatory research project conducted with 6th and 7th graders at an urban middle school as a means of highlighting the opportunities, constraints, and lessons learned in our efforts to contribute to the high‐quality implementation and evaluation of PAR in diverse urban public schools.     

Behavior Problems in Children Adopted from Psychosocially Depriving Institutions

Behavior problems were investigated in 342 6- to 18-year-old children adopted from psychosocially depriving Russian institutions that provided adequate physical resources but not consistent, responsive caregiving. Results indicated that attention and externalizing problems were the most prevalent types of behavior problems in the sample as a whole. Behavior problem rates increased with age at adoption, such that children adopted at 18 months or older had higher rates than never-institutionalized children but younger-adopted children did not. There was a stronger association between age at adoption and behavior problems during adolescence than at younger ages at assessment. Children adopted from psychosocially depriving institutions had lower behavior problem rates than children adopted from severely depriving Romanian institutions in the 1990s. The implications of these results are that early psychosocial deprivation is associated with behavior problems, children exposed to prolonged early deprivation may be especially vulnerable to the developmental stresses of adolescence, and severe institutional deprivation is associated with a higher percentage of behavior problems after a shorter duration of exposure.     

Visuomotor binding in older adults

Action integration is the process through which actions performed on a stimulus and perceptual aspects of the stimulus become bound as a unitary object. This process appears to be controlled by the dopaminergic system in the prefrontal cortex, an area that is known to decrease in volume and dopamine functioning in older adults. Although the decline should lead to reduced action integration in older adults, we found equivalent integration in both young and older adults. This indicates that older adults may be able to compensate for their dopaminergic deficiencies by activating additional neural networks that are not used by young adults.     

Advances,Problems, and Challenges in the Study of Emotion Regulation: A Commentary

As observed by Zinbarg and Mineka (American Psychologist 62:259–261, 2007), the study of emotion regulation faces significant challenges that need to be addressed. In reviewing the articles in the present issue, we comment upon how researchers have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to meet these challenges. We suggest that the articles in the present volume demonstrate important conceptual and methodological advances in emotion regulation research, but that the most central problems noted by Zinbarg and Mineka have yet to be fully remedied. In highlighting both the progress made and problems faced by the field of emotion regulation, we suggest new directions for future research in this area.     

Predictors of multitasking performance in a synthetic work paradigm

This study investigated determinants of success in a ‘synthetic work’ task designed to reflect the requirement for multitasking that is common to many occupations. Participants were administered tests of working memory capacity (WMC) and processing speed (PS), and they reported experience with videogames, a type of activity presumed to involve multitasking. Results revealed that WMC was a strong predictor of multitasking in a ‘non‐emergency’ condition when the pace of the tasks was relatively slow, whereas PS was a weaker predictor. Additionally, there was evidence for the incremental validity of videogame experience (VGE), consistent with the possibility that multitasking is supported by a general, trainable skill. Finally, individual differences in strategy use accounted for a large proportion of the variance in multitasking, above and beyond other predictor variables, and WMC predicted use of an effective strategy. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Traumaadaptierte tiefenpsychologisch fundierte und analytische Psychotherapie

The authors discuss the question which criteria should apply to the depth psychologically oriented psychotherapy (TP) and to the analytic psychotherapy (AT) in order to guarantee a state-of-the-art treatment for traumatized patients on the basis of latest scientific research. Specific demands and modifications of the two guideline treatment methods arise from the scientific findings of interdisciplinary research projects bringing together psychobiological research results and models with concepts and results from empirical psychotherapy research.When TP and AP were conceived, an interdisciplinary concept was still out of reach. In the meantime there exist elaborated traumaspecific concepts for TP/AP and show promising empirical research findings.The adaptation of TP/AP to the demands of trauma patients should proceed in the opinion of the authors under the following term: “As much reform as necessary, as much tradition as possible”, so as not to endanger valuable and proven treatment principles of both methods.