Systemic Barriers Faced by Women Attempting to Leave Abusive Military Marriages

This narrative study features 8 women who shared their stories of systemic barriers faced in the process of leaving an abusive military marriage. The themes of power and control, protection of the service member, entitlement, infallibility, safe places are not safe, and cultural ideals of loyalty are presented and emphasized with excerpts from the women's narratives. Implications are identified for counselors in the roles of practitioner and advocate, along with suggestions of future directions for research.     

Does Parental Monitoring Moderate the Impact of Community Violence Exposure on Probation Youth’s Substance Use and Sexual Risk Behavior?

The present study examined whether parental monitoring buffers the negative effects of communtity violence exposure on probation youth’s substance use and sexual risk behaviors. Among a sample of 347 Chicago youth on probation, ages 13–17 years, parental monitoring did not moderate the relationship between community violence exposure and probation youth’s sexual risk and substance use. However, parental monitoring was independently associated with less engagement in sexual risk and substance use, and community violence exposure was independently associated with more risk behavior among probation youth. The present study contributes to the growing literature on the impact of community violence exposure and parenting on adjudicated youth risk.     

Chickadees discriminate contingency reversals presented consistently,but not frequently

Chickadees are high-metabolism, non-migratory birds, and thus an especially interesting model for studying how animals follow patterns of food availability over time. Here, we studied whether black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) could learn to reverse their behavior and/or to anticipate changes in reinforcement when the reinforcer contingencies for each stimulus were not stably fixed in time. In Experiment 1, we examined the responses of chickadees on an auditory go/no-go task, with constant reversals in reinforcement contingencies every 120 trials across daily testing intervals. Chickadees did not produce above-chance discrimination; however, when trained with a procedure that only reversed after successful discrimination, chickadees were able to discriminate and reverse their behavior successfully. In Experiment 2, we examined the responses of chickadees when reversals were structured to occur at the same time once per day, and chickadees were again able to discriminate and reverse their behavior over time, though they showed no reliable evidence of reversal anticipation. The frequency of reversals throughout the day thus appears to be an important determinant for these animals’ performance in reversal procedures.     

Assessing Biobehavioural Self‐Regulation and Coregulation in Early Childhood: The Parent‐Child Challenge Task

Researchers have argued for more dynamic and contextually relevant measures of regulatory processes in interpersonal interactions. In response, we introduce and examine the effectiveness of a new task, the Parent–Child Challenge Task, designed to assess the self‐regulation and coregulation of affect, goal‐directed behaviour, and physiology in parents and their preschoolers in response to an experimental perturbation. Concurrent and predictive validity was examined via relations with children's externalizing behaviours. Mothers used only their words to guide their 3‐year‐old children to complete increasingly difficult puzzles in order to win a prize (N = 96). A challenge condition was initiated midway through the task with a newly introduced time limit. The challenge produced decreases in parental teaching and dyadic behavioural variability and increases in child negative affect and dyadic affective variability, measured by dynamic systems‐based methods. Children rated lower on externalizing showed respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) suppression in response to challenge, whereas those rated higher on externalizing showed RSA augmentation. Additionally, select task changes in affect, behaviour, and physiology predicted teacher‐rated externalizing behaviours four months later. Findings indicate that the Parent–Child Challenge Task was effective in producing regulatory changes and suggest its utility in assessing biobehavioural self‐regulation and coregulation in parents and their preschoolers. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social likeability,conformity, and body talk: Does fat talk have a normative rival in female body image conversations?

Fat talk, dialogues among women involving negative body-focused discussions, was studied as a function of conformity and social likeability through the use of four vignettes depicting young women in conversation. Using a 2 (body presentation style of the group: negative or positive) × 2 (body presentation style of the target, Jenny: negative or positive) factorial design, 215 college women (92.1% non-Hispanic Caucasian) read one of four vignettes in a classroom setting and made ratings on a social likeability scale. Participants’ personal ratings of Jenny's likeability were higher when she spoke positively about her body, whereas they expected the other group members in the vignette to like Jenny more when she conformed to the group's body presentation style. This study is the first to support two competing norms for women's body image—the existing norm to fat talk versus a newly documented norm that some women like others who express body acceptance.     

Appeal of organizational values is in the eye of the beholder: The moderating role of employee identity

This study examined the effects of organizational values on employee attachment. Factor analytic results across two studies indicated that organizational values cluster into interdependent and independent factors. In Study 2, organizational values data were collected from supervisors, and identity and attachment data were collected from subordinates. As predicted, relationships involving interdependent and dependent values were contingent on employee identity. Specifically, interdependent organizational values predicted turnover cognition and organizational commitment for employees who reported strong collective identities. Independent organizational values, on the other hand, predicted the commitment of employees with strong individual identities. Implications of these results and directions for future research are discussed.     

The development of academic competence among adolescents who bully and who are bullied

Using data from the first three waves (Grades 5, 6, and 7) of the 4-H Study of Positive Youth Development, this study assessed if being a bully or being a victim accounts for an adolescent's academic competence, if selected contextual and individual variables impact an adolescent's academic competence, and if such impact differs in relation to an adolescent's bullying status. The results of random coefficient hierarchical regression analyses indicated that being a bully predicted lower grades across time, and that being a bully was more detrimental for girls than for boys. Being a bully and being a victim negatively predicted self-perceived academic competence, but these predictive effects did not change over time or differ by sex. Teacher support positively predicted grades and greater parent support and teacher support independently predicted higher self-perceive academic competence. Greater educational expectations and school engagement independently predicted higher self-reported grades, while these two predictors positively interacted in explaining self-perceived academic competence. Unexpectedly, peer support negatively predicted self-reported grades for victims, and negatively predicted self-perceived academic competence for bullies. We discuss the importance of addressing the issue of academic competence in bullying interventions, as well as the utility of capitalizing on developmental assets in promoting academic competence among adolescents who bully and who are bullied.     

Lethal Stereotypes: Hair and Eye Color as Survival Characteristics During the Holocaust1

In spite of many false negatives and false positives quite familiar to the people of Nazi‐dominated Europe, dark hair and eyes were salient among the physical stereotypes of Jews that the Nazis promulgated along with psychosocial ones. Many narratives of the Holocaust refer to someone surviving because he or she “did not look Jewish,” and others being caught and killed because they did. A quantitative test of the validity and impact of this attribution showed that a higher proportion of Holocaust survivors than of a North American Jewish control group had light‐colored hair, eyes, or both during the relevant period. The paper discusses possible reasons why these were survival characteristics under the conditions of the Holocaust, the possible short‐ and long‐term effects of such selectivity, and implications for stereotyping in other situations of ethnic persecution and genocide.