Maternal Meta-Emotion Philosophy Moderates Effect of Maternal Symptomatology on Preschoolers Exposed to Domestic Violence

Exposure to domestic violence in the preschool years is consistently associated with children’s heightened risk for developing behavior problems. Maternal meta-emotion philosophy (awareness, acceptance, and coaching of children’s emotions) has been identified as an important protective factor in children’s development of internalizing and externalizing behaviors following exposure to domestic violence. However, mothers who are victims of domestic violence often experience symptoms of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress, which may undermine their capacity to respond to their children’s negative emotions. The present study examines the protective role of maternal meta-emotion philosophy among mothers and preschool-aged children exposed to domestic violence. Participants were 95 mothers (mean age?=?31.78) and their preschool-aged children (mean age?=?4.11) who had witnessed domestic violence involving their mothers. Multiple regression analyses, controlling for family socioeconomic status and child exposure to interpersonal violence in the family, indicated that maternal symptomatology was positively associated with children’s internalizing problems. In addition, maternal awareness and coaching of children’s negative emotions was found to moderate relations between maternal symptomatology and children’s internalizing behaviors, and maternal awareness of children’s negative emotions was found to moderate relations between maternal symptomatology and children’s externalizing behaviors. These findings expand our understanding of maternal meta-emotion philosophy as a protective factor for preschoolers who have witnessed domestic violence.     

Women's responses to stereotypical media portrayals: An fMRI study of sexualized and domestic images of women

Women tend to be portrayed in a sexualized or domestic manner in mainstream advertising; importantly this trend holds not only for ads targeting men but also for those targeting women themselves. Such a focus on sexualized portrayals in particular may not seem strategic given a wealth of evidence suggesting that women evaluate these portrayals quite negatively. Consumer attitudes toward domestic portrayals are more mixed but, unsurprisingly, vary according to how much a woman identifies as traditional. If female consumers do not evaluate these common portrayals positively, why might they persist? Past work suggests a disconnect between reported attitudes toward general visual sexual stimuli and physiological and neural responses; therefore, it is plausible that neural responses to stereotypical female portrayals in advertising may be at odds with reported attitudes and may have a bigger impact on consumer behavior. The current study exposed women to sexualized, domestic, and control images in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner as an initial test of this idea. We found that participants reported liking both domestic and control images more than sexualized images. In contrast, they showed more activity in regions associated with reward and arousal (ventral striatum and amygdala, respectively) while viewing sexualized images relative to both control and domestic images. Surprisingly, ventral striatum response to sexualized ads was stronger for women who endorsed traditional attitudes than those who reported less traditional attitudes. These results suggest that despite reporting negative attitudes toward sexualized portrayals, women may in fact have a favorable response to these images. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Workplace mistreatment and emotional labor: A latent profile analysis

Motivation and Emotion - By adopting a person-centered approach, this research explored emotional labor latent profiles based on employees’ levels of surface acting and deep acting. Further,...     

Neural bases of moderation of cortisol stress responses by psychosocial resources

Psychosocial resources have been tied to lower psychological and biological responses to stress. The present research replicated this relationship and extended it by examining how differences in dispositional reactivity of certain neural structures may underlie this relationship. Two hypotheses were examined: (a) psychosocial resources are tied to decreased sensitivity to threat and/or (b) psychosocial resources are associated with enhanced prefrontal inhibition of threat responses during threat regulation. Results indicated that participants with greater psychosocial resources exhibited significantly less cortisol reactivity following a stress task, as predicted. Analyses using functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that psychosocial resources were associated with greater right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and less amygdala activity during a threat regulation task but were not associated with less amygdala activity during a threat sensitivity task. Mediational analyses suggest that the relation of psychosocial resources to low cortisol reactivity was mediated by lower amygdala activity during threat regulation. Results suggest that psychosocial resources are associated with lower cortisol responses to stress by means of enhanced inhibition of threat responses during threat regulation, rather than by decreased sensitivity to threat.     

The lasting effect of words on feelings: words may facilitate exposure effects to threatening images

Previous studies have shown that mere words, particularly affective words, can dampen emotional responses. However, the effect of affective labels on emotional responding in the long term is unknown. The authors examined whether repeated exposure to aversive images would lead to more reduction in autonomic reactivity a week later if the images were exposed with single-word labels than without labels. In Experiment 1, healthy individuals were exposed to pictures of disturbing scenes with or without labels on Day 1. On Day 8, the same pictures from the previous week were exposed, this time without labels. In Experiment 2, participants were spider fearful and were exposed to pictures of spiders. In both experiments, although repeated exposure to aversive images (without labels) led to long-term attenuation of autonomic reactivity, exposure plus affective labels, but not nonaffective labels, led to more attenuation than exposure alone. Thus, affective labels may help dampen emotional reactivity in both the short and long terms. Implications for exposure therapy and translational studies are discussed.     

Why do the effects of delaying reinforcement in animals and delaying feedback in humans differ? A working-memory analysis

Animal research has shown that reinforcement is substantially less effective when it is delayed, but in studies of human motor learning delays in providing feedback typically have much less effect. One possible explanation is that in human research participants know the response to be learned and can thus focus on it during the delay; that is not the case in experiments on animals. We tested this hypothesis using a task in which participants had minimal information on what movement was correct and found that, as in animal experiments, participants learned only when feedback was immediate. A second experiment confirmed that the effects of the delay depended on how many responses had to be held in working memory: the greater the memory load, the poorer the learning. The results point to the importance of activity during a delay on learning; implications for the teaching of motor skills are discussed.     

A comparison of performance feedback procedures on teachers' treatment implementation integrity and students' inappropriate behavior in special education classrooms

This study examined the extent to which treatment integrity of 4 special education teachers was affected by goal setting, performance feedback regarding student or teacher performance, and a meeting cancellation contingency. Teachers were trained to implement function-based treatment packages to address student problem behavior. In one condition, teachers set a goal for student behavior and received daily written feedback about student performance. In a second condition, teachers received daily written feedback about student performance as well as their own accuracy in implementing the intervention and would be able to avoid meeting with a consultant to practice missed steps by implementing the intervention with 100% integrity. This latter package increased treatment integrity the most above baseline levels. Higher levels of treatment integrity were significantly correlated with lower levels of student problem behavior for 3 of the 4 teacher-student dyads. Three of the 4 teachers also rated both feedback procedures as highly acceptable. Implications for increasing and maintaining treatment integrity by teachers via a consultation model are discussed.     

Spatio-temporal constraints on upright children's coordination when hitting a moving target

To determine if the spatial and/or temporal context affected the coordination patterns of children under five in upright interceptive tasks, 3-year-olds hit a ball dropped from a ramp from five heights (1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, and 3.5 m) to control drop time. We studied the initiation time of hitting a ball with a cinematic analysis of the different joint movements (foot, knee, hip, shoulder, and hand). Two patterns of joint coordination were observed according to the rolling height of the ball: a de-synchronized pattern for heights of 2 m or above where the foot was the first to move and the hand the last, and a “synchronized” pattern, for the lowest height (1.5 m) where all joints started moving at the same time due to a strong temporal pressure. These two coordination patterns highlight a functional adaptation of body joints according to the spatio-temporal constraints among children from the age of three.