Parental Involvement and Adolescents’ Academic Achievement: Latent Profiles of Mother and Father Warmth as a Moderating Influence

Parental involvement in their adolescents’ education plays an important role in promoting their children's academic outcomes. Yet, more research is needed to examine the relationship between parenting practices and parental warmth as well as to consider the potential joint contribution of warmth from both fathers and mothers. Thus, the primary purpose of the current study is to examine the extent to which patterns of parental warmth across fathers and mothers moderate the association between parental involvement and adolescents’ grade point average (GPA) and school engagement behaviors. Latent profile analysis was conducted to identify disparate profiles of fathers’ and mothers’ warmth within a nationally representative sample of 2,306 youths (51% male; mean age = 15.31 years, SD = 1.50; 77% non-Hispanic White) residing in opposite-sex, two-parent families from Wave I and II of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Latent-class enumeration processes support a five-profile solution characterized by differences in levels of parental warmth and congruency across parents: (a) Congruent High Warmth, (b) Congruent Moderate Warmth, (c) Congruent Low Warmth, (d) Incongruent High Mother/Low Father Warmth, and (e) Incongruent Low Father/Lower Mother Warmth. Subsequent multiple linear regression analyses reveal a moderating effect for Congruent Low Warmth on the relationship between parental involvement and adolescents’ GPA. Ultimately, the results show that variation in parental warmth exists across fathers and mothers with differing impact on adolescents’ outcomes. Excluding one parent without considering the joint effects of both parents will not produce an accurate and precise understanding of parenting in research or practice.     

Pavlov's legacy to behavioral psychology,physiology, and psychiatry: A program about Pavlov

A program about Pavlov was held at the Countway Library as part of the “Leaders in American Medicine” series on 12 March 1980. A film (Pavlov Himself) was shown; it was produced by USSR Central Television and the Soviet Academy of Science and obtained from Films for the Humanities, P.O. Box 2053, Princeton, N.J. 08540. Three distinguished scholars discussed Pavlov's influence on psychology (Professor B. F. Skinner), physiology (Professor John Pappenheimer), and psychiatry (Dr. Peter Dews).     

The Santa Fe style in American anthropology: Regional interest,academic initiative,and philanthropic policy in the first two decades of the Laboratory of Anthropology,Inc.

During the 1920s the American Southwest, an area rich in ethnographic and archelogical resources, became an important focus of interest on the part of both eastern academic anthropologists and the Rockefeller philanthropies. Successfully coopting or overriding previously established regional anthropological interests, nationally oriented anthropologists were instrumental in establishing a Laboratory of Anthropology modelled in part on the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. When Rockefeller funding was terminated in the middle 1930s, the Laboratory was left to forage in the economic desert of the depression Southwest and was unable to find either adequate financial support or a clearly defined mission. In 1947, it was incorporated into the State Museum system, where it functions today as a coordinating center for archeological research in the Rio Grande Basin.     

Effects of Gender and Appearance Comparisons on Associations Between Media-Based Appearance Pressure and Disordered Eating: Testing a Moderated Mediation Model

Sex Roles - Appearance pressure from mass media and appearance social comparisons have been implicated in theory and research on disordered eating. However, mediating effects of upward and downward...     

Antenatal caregiving representations and perinatal behavior in mothers with severe lifetime psychopathology

Psychopathology poses a risk for optimal parenting. The current study explored antenatal caregiving representations as markers for later risk of nonoptimal maternal behavior among mothers with severe mental illness. Sixty-five mothers diagnosed with psychosis, bipolar disorder, depression (psychopathology group), and nonclinical controls participated in a longitudinal study from pregnancy to 16 weeks after birth. Mental health diagnoses and caregiving representations were assessed during pregnancy. Maternal behavior was assessed during the 5-min recovery phase of the still-face paradigm at 16 weeks. Mothers with psychopathology reported significantly higher levels of “heightened” caregiving representations (i.e., separation anxiety from the child) than did controls. The only significant diagnostic group difference in perinatal maternal behavior was that mothers diagnosed with depression exhibited more overriding-intrusive behavior than did nonclinical control mothers. Regression modeling results showed that antenatal caregiving representations of “role reversal” predicted significantly lower levels of sensitivity and higher levels of overriding-intrusive behavior independent of the effect of psychopathology. The findings can be interpreted in the context of representational transformation to motherhood during pregnancy. The results provide preliminary evidence for the potential of a new questionnaire measure of caregiving representations as a screening instrument for antenatal representational risk.     

The effects of gormone manipulations on aggressive target-biting in mice

Aggressive biting of an inanimate target by mice was studied. Males attacked the bite-target more frequently than females, but this difference disappeared after castration when the response rate of the males approached that of the females. Ovariectomizing the females had little effect on their bite-attack frequencies. Subsequent androgen injections restored the biting-attack frequency of the castrated males to preoperative levels but had little effect on the intact males. Estrogen had little effect on the response frequency of the females, whereas androgen produced a slight increase in their bite-attack frequency. Results indicate that androgen is critical for the maintenance of this aggressive response and that the single subject paradigm utilized in this study was a sensitive measure of aggressive tendencies in mice.     

Thought-shape fusion in anorexia nervosa: an experimental investigation

Cognitive biases and cognitive distortions have been implicated as important factors in the development and maintenance of many disorders. The concept of thought-shape fusion (TSF) in eating disorders was developed by Shafran, Teachman, Kerry, and Rachman (British Journal of Clinical Psychology 38 (1999) 167) as a variant of thought-action fusion, described by Shafran, Thordarson and Rachman (Journal of Anxiety Disorders 10 (1996) 379). TSF occurs when thinking about eating certain types of food increases a person's estimate of their shape and/or weight, elicits a perception of moral wrongdoing, and/or makes the person feel fat. Shafran et al. (1999) examined both the psychometric and experimental properties of TSF in an undergraduate sample. This paper reports an extension of this work to a clinical group (N=20) of patients with anorexia nervosa. After completing a set of relevant questionnaires, participants were asked to think about a food which they considered extremely fattening. They were then asked to write out the sentence, "I am eating--.", inserting the name of the fattening food in the blank. After being asked to rate their anxiety, guilt, feelings about their weight, morality, etc., participants were given the opportunity to neutralize their statement in any way they chose. The majority of the participants neutralized in ways consistent with the findings of Shafran et al. (1999). The results are discussed in terms of cognitive-behavioural formulations of eating disorders, and of the influence of cognitive biases and cognitive distortions on the processing of information relevant to food, weight and shape in anorexia nervosa.     

Conceiving of entities as objects and as stuff

What is the difference between conceiving of an entity as an object of some kind and conceiving of it as an amount of solid stuff? We propose that the difference lies in how one thinks about the entity's structure. Object construals require thinking of the structure as being nonarbitrary, whereas substance construals require thinking of the structure as being arbitrary. We report six experiments that provide empirical support for this proposal. Regularity of structure, repetition of structure, and the existence of structure-dependent functions, all of which provide reasons to consider the structure of an entity to be nonarbitrary, were shown to bias participants towards object construals. We also discuss how the proposed account of what it means to construe an entity as an object or as some stuff can account for a range of findings in the literature on lexical development. These include the relation between cohesiveness and ontological category, shape and ontological category, and complexity of shape and ontological category. Finally, we discuss the nature of construals and the relation of object and substance construals to the physical, design, and intentional stances.