The impact of stress on the life history strategies of African American adolescents: cognitions, genetic moderation, and the role of discrimination

The impact of 3 different sources of stress--environmental, familial (e.g., low parental investment), and interpersonal (i.e., racial discrimination)--on the life history strategies (LHS) and associated cognitions of African American adolescents were examined over an 11-year period (5 waves, from age 10.5 to 21.5). Analyses indicated that each one of the sources of stress was associated with faster LHS cognitions (e.g., tolerance of deviance, willingness to engage in risky sex), which, in turn, predicted faster LHS behaviors (e.g., frequent sexual behavior). LHS, then, negatively predicted outcome (resilience) at age 21.5 (i.e., faster LHS → less resilience). In addition, presence of the risk ("sensitivity") alleles of 2 monoamine-regulating genes, the serotonin transporter gene (5HTTLPR) and the dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4), moderated the impact of perceived racial discrimination on LHS cognitions: Participants with more risk alleles (higher "sensitivity") reported faster LHS cognitions at age 18 and less resilience at age 21 if they had experienced higher amounts of discrimination and slower LHS and more resilience if they had experienced smaller amounts of discrimination. Implications for LHS theories are discussed.     

Does the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption Adequately Protect Orphaned and Vulnerable Children and Their Families?

The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, designed to protect the best interests of the child in intercountry adoption, has been signed by 83 nations. We evaluate both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Convention in achieving this purpose and also in protecting a second vulnerable population, birth families. A case study example of the United States’ implementation of the Hague requirements reveals several weaknesses with respect to non-Convention countries as sending nations, financial oversight, and oversight of foreign collaborators. International birth families, especially birth mothers giving consent to an adoption, are often vulnerable because of a lack of power and resources, as well as different cultural understandings of the nature of family and adoption. We conclude that in order to protect vulnerable children and birth families, individual sending and receiving countries need to supplement the Hague Convention with specific, contextually appropriate laws and regulations.     

Social‐Psychological Theories and Adolescent Health Risk Behavior

This paper reviews several psychosocial theories that have been applied to the study of adolescent health behavior. Some of these theories have existed for several decades and, though not originally intended for this purpose, have proven quite useful in predicting and explaining many different types of health‐relevant behaviors. During the last 10–15 years, however, there has been a significant increase in the application of social psychological theories to the examination of what is increasingly being seen as a social‐psychological phenomenon: health risk behavior among adolescents. This interest has been prompted, in part, by an appreciation of the value of dual‐processing principles in explaining these behaviors, and, in particular, a recognition that much adolescent health risk behavior: a) is not always planful or premeditated, and b) involves both heuristic and analytic processing. The paper includes discussion of how dual‐processing principles and social‐psychological theories can inform intervention efforts.     

A Censored Mixture Model for Modeling Risk Taking

Psychometrika - Risk behavior has substantial consequences for health, well-being, and general behavior. The association between real-world risk behavior and risk behavior on experimental tasks is...     

Acculturation,self‐construal,mental and physical health: An explorative study of East Asian students in Germany

The present study explores acculturation and its associated aspects of two East Asian student groups with different levels of exposure to German culture (100 international students from East Asian countries [IS]; 61 second generation students of East Asian descent [SGS]). First, we investigated the relationships between acculturation, self‐construal, depressive and somatic symptoms, and differences between the student groups in these variables. Second, the four acculturation types (integration, assimilation, separation and marginalization) were examined regarding their relationship to self‐construal and health outcomes. The results showed that the acculturation dimensions (mainstream, heritage) were relevant to the level of depressive symptoms for IS which was not the case for SGS. Furthermore, IS reported more somatic symptoms whereas there was no difference between the two groups in the level of depressive symptoms. In the analysis of acculturation types, assimilated and integrated students were characterized by high independent self‐construal, while separated and integrated students showed high interdependent self‐construal. Assimilated students displayed the least depressive symptoms of all acculturation groups. This study highlights different characteristics of East Asian students in acculturation, self‐construal and health outcomes, and discusses the complexity of the relationships between acculturation types and health.     

Self-Report and Observer Ratings of Personality Functioning: A Study of the OPD System

Recent considerations around DSM–5 criteria of personality disorders (PDs) demand new concepts of assessing levels of personality functioning. Of special interest are multiperspective approaches accounting for clinicians’ as well as patients’ points of view. The study investigates observer-rated and self-assessed levels of personality functioning measured by the level of structural integration as defined by the Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnosis System (OPD). Both perspectives were positively related. The combination of both measures was most efficient in discriminating among 3 diagnostic groups of varying degrees of personality dysfunction. Future studies should take into account expert ratings as well as self-report data.     

The more you ignore me the closer I get: An ERP study of evaluative priming

We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the various mental processes contributing to evaluative priming—that is, more positive judgments for targets preceded by affectively positive, as opposed to negative, prime stimuli. To ensure ecological validity, we employed a priori meaningful landscape pictures as targets and emotional adjectives as visual primes and presented both primes and targets for relatively long durations (>1 s). Prime-related lateralized readiness potentials (LRPs) revealed response priming as one source of the significant evaluative priming effect. On the other hand, greater right-frontal positive slow wave in the ERP for pictures following negative, as compared with positive, primes indicated altered impression formation, thus supporting automatic spreading activation and/or affect misattribution accounts. Moreover, target LRPs suggested conscious counter-control to reduce the evaluative priming net effect. Finally, when comparing prime ERPs for two groups of participants showing strong versus weak evaluative priming, we found strong evidence for the role of depth of prime processing: In the weak-effect group, prime words evoked an increased visual P1/N1 complex, a larger posterior P2 component, and a greater left-parietal processing negativity presumably reflecting semantic processing. By contrast, a larger medial-frontal P2/N2 complex in the strong-effect group suggested top-down inhibition of the prime’s emotional content. Thus, trying to ignore the primes can actually increase, rather than decrease, the evaluative priming effect.     

The Effect of Social Disclosure on the Intensity of Affect Provoked by Autobiographical Memories

Affect associated with negative autobiographical memories fades faster over time than affect associated with positive autobiographical memories (the fading affect bias). Data described in the present article suggest that this bias is observed when people use their own words to describe both the emotions that they originally felt in response to events in their lives and the emotions that they feel when they recall those events. The data also suggest that the fading affect bias is not a consequence of distortion in memory for the emotions experienced at event occurrence, but instead reflects current affective responses to memories for those events. Moreover, this bias has a social component. Frequently disclosed memories evince a stronger fading affect bias than less frequently disclosed memories. Memories disclosed to many types of people evince a stronger fading affect bias than memories disclosed to few types of people. Finally, the relation between social disclosure and fading affect appears to be causal: the results of an experiment demonstrate that social disclosure decreases the fading of pleasant affect and increases the fading of unpleasant affect associated with autobiographical memories.     

Levels of visuo-spatial selection: An ERP study of negative priming

Usually, a probe target appearing in a recently ignored distractor location is less efficiently processed. This robust phenomenon is called (visuo-) spatial negative priming (SNP). Among other explanations, concepts of persisting or retrieved spatial inhibition play a major role. Two relevant issues were investigated using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). The first pertains to context sensitivity of inhibition: Is a probe distractor necessary for SNP? The second concerns levels of processing at which spatial inhibition operates: Does SNP affect perception, selection, and/or stimulus classification? A localization task with and without probe distractors was employed while 64-channel EEG was recorded. Obviously, SNP does not require a probe distractor; the distractor-absent SNP effect was larger than the distractor-present SNP effect. Distractor-present SNP had two lateralized ERP effects, N1pc amplitude reduction and N2pc amplitude increase. Smaller N1pc may indeed reflect perceptual decrement, but was inversely related to size of behavioral SNP. By contrast, only strong-SNP participants showed N2pc increase, which points to selection disadvantage due to persisting inhibition of higher-level spatial representations. Distractor-absent SNP had no N1pc/N2pc correlates; instead, reduced amplitude of a broadly distributed P300 component suggests impaired stimulus classification due to episodic retrieval of inappropriate prime information. Overall, SNP seems to emerge from relatively late stages of processing, thus challenging the idea of context-free persisting inhibition of low-level spatial representations. Furthermore, distractor-present and distractor-absent SNP are qualitatively different from each other.     

Personality Correlates of Assessment Center Consensus Competency Ratings: Evidence from Russia

Controversy has revolved around whether assessment center ratings have construct validity to measure intended dimensions of managerial performance. In contrast to much recent research on the internal structure of assessment center ratings, the present studies investigated the relationship of final competency ratings derived by consensus discussion with external questionnaire measures of personality characteristics. Expanding on previous studies showing correlations of dimension scores in relation to individual trait measures, this study investigated the relationship of complex competencies with both single personality traits and with composites of personality traits. Evidence from two samples of managers in Russia shows that final competency ratings are related to predicted composites of personality factors more consistently than to single factors. Taken together, these findings provide evidence that assessment center ratings derived by consensus discussion show construct validity in relationship with predicted composites of personality characteristics.