Predictors of Stress Generation in Adolescents in Mainland China

The current longitudinal study examined whether the personality vulnerabilities of self-criticism and dependency prospectively predicted stress generation in Chinese adolescents. Participants included 1,116 adolescents (588 girls and 528 boys), aged 15 to 18 years from rural, urban and ultra-urban mainland China. Participants completed self-report measures of personality, depressive and anxious symptoms and participated in a clinical interview assessing lifetime history of depression. The occurrence of negative life events was measured using a contextual-threat interview every 6-months for a total period of 18-months. Logistic regression analyses showed that after controlling for past depressive episodes and current depressive and anxious symptoms, self-criticism was prospectively associated with the occurrence of interpersonal stress generation, but not noninterpersonal stress generation. Dependency also predicted interpersonal stress generation, although only in girls and not boys. In line with previous Western findings, girls reported more interpersonal stress generation. Analyses across 3 levels of urbanization revealed several significant differences including higher reported interpersonal stress generation in urban girls than urban boys and overall higher levels of negative life events in ultra-urban youth. In sum, findings from the current study suggest that the stress generation process may be generalizable to Chinese youth.     

Publishing Action Research in Counseling Journals

The increased use of action research in counseling training and professional publications provides an opportunity to bridge the research‐practitioner gap that has plagued the profession for decades. In this article, action research is defined, and special considerations that counselor researchers need to address when designing, conducting, and reporting action research are presented. Suggestions are included throughout the article to assist counseling action researchers in publishing their studies in American Counseling Association journals.     

Relative quantity judgments in South American sea lions (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Otaria flavescens</Emphasis>)

There is accumulating evidence that a variety of species possess quantitative abilities although their cognitive substrate is still unclear. This study is the first to investigate whether sea lions (Otaria flavescens), in the absence of training, are able to assess and select the larger of two sets of quantities. In Experiment 1, the two sets of quantities were presented simultaneously as whole sets, that is, the subjects could compare them directly. In Experiment 2, the two sets of quantities were presented item-by-item, and the totality of items was never visually available at the time of choice. For each type of presentation, we analysed the effect of the ratio between quantities, the difference between quantities and the total number of items presented. The results showed that (1) sea lions can make relative quantity judgments successfully and (2) there is a predominant influence of the ratio between quantities on the subjects’ performance. The latter supports the idea that an analogue representational mechanism is responsible for sea lions’ relative quantities judgments. These findings are consistent with previous reports of relative quantities judgments in other species such as monkeys and apes and suggest that sea lions might share a similar mechanism to compare and represent quantities.     

Use of factor mixture modeling to capture Spearman's law of diminishing returns

Spearman's law of diminishing returns (SLODR) posits that at higher levels of general cognitive ability the general factor (g) performs less well in explaining individual differences in cognitive test performance. Research has generally supported SLODR, but previous research has required the a priori division of respondents into separate ability or IQ groups. The present study sought to obviate this limitation through the use of factor mixture modeling to investigate SLODR in the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children-Second Edition (KABC-II). A second-order confirmatory factor model was modeled as a within-class factor structure. The fit and parameter estimates of several models with varying number of classes and factorial invariance restrictions were compared. Given SLODR, a predictable pattern of findings should emerge when factor mixture modeling is applied. Our results were consistent with these SLODR-based predictions, most notably the g factor variance was less in higher g mean classes. Use of factor mixture modeling was found to provide support for SLODR while improving the model used to investigate SLODR.     

The Relationship of Differentiation,Family Coping Skills,and Family Functioning with Optimism in College-Age Students

The marriage and family therapy (MFT) field would benefit from new research about positive subjective experiences, such as optimism, in order to construct and nurture strengths for developing more positive emotions. Through a better understanding of optimism, marriage and family therapists (MFTs) can explore which strategies might help families and individuals better cope with distressing emotions by building buffering strengths. In this study we address the relationship of differentiation, family coping, and family functioning to optimism. We found that differentiation, family coping, and family functioning each have a significant effect on attributional style. The results of this study also indicated that encouraging clients to take an I-position and to reframe problems, in particular, may lead to greater optimism. This study contributes to the lack of research regarding strength-based theories in the MFT field.     

Alternative settings for liberal‐conservative exchange: Examining an undergraduate dialogue course

Given the polarization of the early 21st century political atmosphere in the U.S., intergroup dialogue has emerged as a unique alternative setting, with intentions of facilitating a more productive and thoughtful citizen engagement. Although cross‐partisan dialogue efforts are underway in community contexts, they have been slower to reach academic settings. This paper is an exploratory study of our own liberal‐conservative dialogue course at the University of Illinois–the first of its kind, to our knowledge. After describing basic features of the course, we identify themes from student journals and final evaluations suggesting both dialogue benefits and challenges. Finally, we discuss the growing literature around dialogue, questions of its long‐term impact, and larger potential barriers to participation in liberal‐conservative dialogue, specifically. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Semantic interference in a delayed naming task: evidence for the response exclusion hypothesis

In 2 experiments participants named pictures of common objects with superimposed distractor words. In one naming condition, the pictures and words were presented simultaneously on every trial, and participants produced the target response immediately. In the other naming condition, the presentation of the picture preceded the presentation of the distractor by 1,000 ms, and participants delayed production of their naming response until distractor word presentation. Within each naming condition, the distractor words were either semantic category coordinates of the target pictures or unrelated. Orthogonal to this manipulation of semantic relatedness, the frequency of the pictures' names was manipulated. The authors observed semantic interference effects in both the immediate and delayed naming conditions but a frequency effect only in the immediate naming condition. These data indicate that semantic interference can be observed when target picture naming latencies do not reflect the bottleneck at the level of lexical selection. In the context of other findings from the picture-word interference paradigm, the authors interpret these data as supporting the view that the semantic interference effect arises at a postlexical level of processing.