Behavioral and Nondirective Guided Self-Help for Parents of Children with Externalizing Behavior: Mediating Mechanisms in a Head-To-Head Comparison

Parent training (PT) delivered as a guided self-help intervention may be a cost- and time-effective intervention in the treatment of children with externalizing disorders. In face-to-face PT, parenting strategies have repeatedly been identified as mediating mechanisms for the decrease of children’s problem behavior. Few studies have examined possible mediating effects in guided self-help interventions for parents. The present study aimed to investigate possible mediating variables of a behaviorally oriented guided self-help program for parents of children with externalizing problems compared to a nondirective intervention in a clinical sample. A sample of 110 parents of children with externalizing disorders (80 % boys) were randomized to either a behaviorally oriented or a nondirective guided self-help program. Four putative mediating variables were examined simultaneously in a multiple mediation model using structural equation modelling. The outcomes were child symptoms of ADHD and ODD as well as child externalizing problems, assessed at posttreatment. Analyses showed a significant indirect effect for dysfunctional parental attributions in favor of the group receiving the behavioral program, and significant effects of the behavioral program on positive and negative parenting and parental self-efficacy, compared to the nondirective intervention. Our results indicate that a decrease of dysfunctional parental attributions leads to a decrease of child externalizing problems when parents take part in a behaviorally oriented guided self-help program. However, none of the putative mediating variables could explain the decrease in child externalizing behavior problems in the nondirective group. A change in dysfunctional parental attributions should be considered as a possible mediator in the context of PT.     

Cultural snapshots: Theory and method

Causal influences of culture on cognition are challenging to examine scientifically. We here introduce a method to address this challenge. Cultural snapshots enable scientists to (a) characterize the cultural information commonly and frequently encountered by a collective, (b) examine how such cultural information influences the cognitions of individuals, and (c) draw conclusions about the emergence of shared cognition. Specifically, cultural snapshots are recorded samples of public environments commonly encountered by many people. Television scenes, photographs of public spaces, magazine pages, and social media conversations are all examples of cultural snapshots. Representative sets of cultural snapshots can be coded to index the systematic patterns of information encountered by a collective (i.e., cultural patterns). These same materials can be used to experimentally manipulate those cultural patterns, allowing scientists to examine cultural influences on cognition and behavior. We here review and provide guidelines for cultural snapshots research, trace cultural snapshots to classic theories of culture, and describe how cultural snapshots balance the constraints of representative design (Brunswik, 1956 ) with those of causal inference. We then illustrate how this approach is used to address (a) questions of causality in cultural psychology and (b) questions of applicability in social cognition research. We conclude by evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the approach.     

Sexual Minority Stress and Social Support Explain the Association between Sexual Identity with Physical and Mental Health Problems among Young Lesbian and Bisexual Women

Bisexual women report more physical and psychological health problems than lesbian women do, which may be attributed to greater sexual minority stress and less social support. However, many studies combine lesbian and bisexual women into a single group. The current study examined if sexual minority stress and social support mediated the association between women’s sexual identity (lesbian or bisexual) and health-related outcomes. A total of 650 U.S. young adult lesbian (n?=?227) and bisexual (n?=?423) women completed an online survey about sexual minority stress, social support, and physical and mental health problems. Bisexual women reported more physical and mental health problems. A sequential mediation model showed that bisexual women reported greater sexual minority stress than lesbian women, which in turn was associated with less social support, which was associated with more physical and mental health problems. Greater sexual minority stress and lower social support may help explain why bisexual women report more health-related problems than lesbian women. The results of the present study support the importance of examining risk and protective factors for health problems separately for lesbian and bisexual women. Health-related intervention programs that target sexual minority women may need to be tailored differently for lesbian and bisexual women.

     

Compiling Measurement Invariant Short Scales in Cross-Cultural Personality Assessment Using Ant Colony Optimization

Examining the influence of culture on personality and its unbiased assessment is the main subject of cross-cultural personality research. Recent large-scale studies exploring personality differences across cultures share substantial methodological and psychometric shortcomings that render it difficult to differentiate between method and trait variance. One prominent example is the implicit assumption of cross-cultural measurement invariance in personality questionnaires. In the rare instances where measurement invariance across cultures was tested, scalar measurement invariance—which is required for unbiased mean-level comparisons of personality traits—did not hold. In this article, we present an item sampling procedure, ant colony optimization, which can be used to select item sets that satisfy multiple psychometric requirements including model fit, reliability, and measurement invariance. We constructed short scales of the IPIP-NEO-300 for a group of countries that are culturally similar (USA, Australia, Canada, and UK) as well as a group of countries with distinct cultures (USA, India, Singapore, and Sweden). In addition to examining factor mean differences across countries, we provide recommendations for cross-cultural research in general. From a methodological perspective, we demonstrate ant colony optimization's versatility and flexibility as an item sampling procedure to derive measurement invariant scales for cross-cultural research. © 2020 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology     

The worker scale: Developing a measure to explain gender differences in behavioral self-handicapping

Research has consistently found that men engage in more behavioral self-handicapping than do women. We first review evidence suggesting that these gender differences result from women placing more importance on displaying effort than do men. We then present the results of two studies seeking to develop measures of beliefs about effort that might explain these gender differences in behavioral self-handicapping. Women, across a wide range of measures, placed more importance on effort than did men. However, only a new measure of more personalized effort beliefs, dubbed the Worker scale, uniquely explained gender differences in dispositional tendency to behaviorally self-handicap. The Worker scale also predicted academic performance, consistent with the notion that these effort beliefs would predict engagement in actual behavioral self-handicaps that undermine performance.     

Baseline measurement of running away among youth in foster care

The current study evaluated the use of various behavioral measures of running away with regard to (a) the differential utility of interval- versus event-based measures, (b) the differential utility of rate versus duration measures, (c) the utility of correcting for occurrence opportunity, and (d) the influence of unit of analysis (i.e., single-subject vs. grouped data). Seven different baseline measures were calculated for 84 runaways, and a unit-size analysis was conducted by constructing groups of various sizes from the original sample. An expert panel evaluated the suitability of the baseline measures for treatment evaluation. Results demonstrate the utility of evaluating duration-based measures and correcting for occurrence opportunity. Results also indicate that single-subject baselines may often be unacceptable for treatment evaluations, regardless of the type of measure selected for use.     

An investigation of the effects of dog visits on depression,mood, and social interaction in elderly individuals living in a nursing home

The present study investigated the effects of weekly dog visits on depression scores, mood, and social interaction in elderly individuals living in a nursing home. Five elderly residents participated in baseline assessments for 4–8 weeks and then received weekly dog visits for 6 weeks. Assessments, consisting of weekly observations of social interaction and paper and pencil measures of mood and depression, continued during the dog visits. The effect of dog visits was evaluated in a multiple baseline across participants design. Dog visits did not improve depression scores, mood (with the exception of one resident), or social interaction (with the exception of one resident). Residents did interact with the dog during the visits, however, and reported that they enjoyed the visits. These results show that dog visits do not always have therapeutic effects and suggest the need for further research in the area before the beneficial effects of dog visits can be substantiated. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Young children's knowledge about the influence of thoughts on emotions in rule situations

Four‐year‐olds, 5‐year‐olds, and adults (N = 48) listened to stories featuring characters that experienced one of four types of thoughts after deciding to transgress or comply with a rule: thoughts about desires, rules, future negative outcomes, or future punishment. Participants predicted and explained the characters’ emotions. Results showed that young children, as with adults, predicted positive emotions for willpower and negative emotions for transgression at low rates for the think‐desire trials, and at high rates for the think‐rule and think‐future trials. They also modified their emotion explanations in line with the focus of characters’ thoughts. These data provide unprecedented evidence that young children can reason flexibly about emotions in rule situations when provided explicit, salient information about people's thoughts.     

Taboo,emotionally valenced,and emotionally neutral word norms

Although taboo words are used to study emotional memory and attention, no easily accessible normative data are available that compare taboo, emotionally valenced, and emotionally neutral words on the same scales. Frequency, inappropriateness, valence, arousal, and imageability ratings for taboo, emotionally valenced, and emotionally neutral words were made by 78 native-English-speaking college students from a large metropolitan university. The valenced set comprised both positive and negative words, and the emotionally neutral set comprised category-related and category-unrelated words. To account for influences of demand characteristics and personality factors on the ratings, frequency and inappropriateness measures were decomposed into raters’ personal reactions to the words versus raters’ perceptions of societal reactions to the words (personal use vs. familiarity and offensiveness vs. tabooness, respectively). Although all word sets were rated higher in familiarity and tabooness than in personal use and offensiveness, these differences were most pronounced for the taboo set. In terms of valence, the taboo set was most similar to the negative set, although it yielded higher arousal ratings than did either valenced set. Imageability for the taboo set was comparable to that of both valenced sets. The ratings of each word are presented for all participants as well as for single-sex groups. The inadequacies of the application of normative data to research that uses emotional words and the conceptualization of taboo words as a coherent category are discussed. Materials associated with this article may be accessed at the Psychonomic Society’s Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Cognitive processing of body and appearance words as a function of thin-ideal internalization and schematic activation

To better understand how women at risk of body image disturbance respond when their body concerns are activated, we examined attentional and memory biases in undergraduate women with high thin-ideal internalization, an identified risk factor for eating disorders, following priming of body and appearance concerns. Female undergraduates (N = 186) viewed photos of either sports cars or attractive swimsuit models, then completed the Lexical Decision Test, a word recall test, and questionnaires assessing thin-ideal internalization and eating disorder symptomatology. High thin-ideal internalizers did not exhibit cognitive biases predicted by cognitive models of eating disorders, even when their body and appearance concerns were primed by exposure to attractive models. Converging evidence suggests that high-risk non-clinical samples rarely exhibit cognitive biases characteristic of individuals with eating disorders, and, in fact, may actually incorporate ideal appearance into their schemas and preferentially attend to attractive stimuli.