Stress and coping in mothers caring for a child with severe learning difficulties: A test of Lazarus' transactional model of coping

The literature on psychological stress among women consistently points to the adverse effects of child rearing on mothers, particularly those caring for children with physical or mental handicaps. Early studies of the effects on family functioning of caring for a child with severe learning difficulties adopted a pathological approach in which it was assumed that psychological distress was inevitable among family members, particularly mothers. Recent research has emphasised that many families cope with and adapt to the stress they experience, and seeks to discover how they do so. The paper reports on a study of 166 mothers caring for a child with severe learning difficulties. The aim of the study was to investigate both the factors associated with maternal stress and those which might mediate or buffer the effects of stress. The study used the Folkman and Lazarus' (1979) transactional model of stress. Stress is the condition that results when person/environment transactions lead the individual to perceive a discrepancy between the demands of a situation and his/her resources or ability to cope with those demands. The nature and type of coping generated by a person will be determined by the coping resources in the person's environment. The model identifies five categories of coping resource: utilitarian resources, health/morale, social networks, general and specific beliefs, and problem solving skills. In our study, the five coping resources were represented by the mother's social class and appraisal of her financial worries, physical health, social support, acceptance of and adjustment to the child, and assessment of coping skills. Stress was measured by the Malaise Inventory (Rutter, 1970). Four of the five coping resources were found to be significant contributors in a hierarchical regression analysis of stress scores, contributing additional variance beyond that of behavioural and other child characteristics. Altogether, 55% of the variance in stress scores was explained.     

The Strelau Temperament Inventory—Revised (STI-R): Validity studies

This study examines the construct validity of the revised version of the Strelau Temperament Inventory (STI-R) and the short scale (STI-RS), which were introduced by Strelau, Angleitner, Bantelmann and Ruch (1990). Hypotheses about the relationship between the content scales of the STI-R, viz. Strength of Excitation (SE), Strength of Inhibition (SI), and Mobility (MO) of CNS properties, and (a) other personality/temperament dimensions referring to the level of arousal, (b) selected temperament inventories, and (c) selected personality scales are derived and tested in a total of four samples with altogether 420 Ss. The inventories investigated include, among others, the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire—Revised (EPQ-R), Zuckerman's Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS), the I.7 Impulsiveness Questionnaire (I.7), the Affect-Intensity-Measure (AIM), the EASI, the Structure of Temperament Questionnaire (STQ), and the Revised Dimensions of Temperament Survey (DOTS-R). In general, the hypotheses regarding the place of the STI-R in the temperament and personality domain were confirmed. A factor analysis of the STI-R, EASI, and DOTS-R yielded five factors: Emotional Stability, Rhythmicity, Activity/Tempo, Sociability, and Impulsivity versus Impulse Control.     

Are psychophysiological/psychophysical scores good candidates for diagnosing temperament/personality traits and for a demonstration of the construct validity of psychometrically measured traits?

The aim of this paper is to examine the use of psychophysiological and/or psychophysical measures employed as (a) tools aimed at diagnosing personality/temperament traits and (b) criteria for estimating the construct validity of personality/temperament inventories. The exploration is based on three diferent sources: (1) data collected mainly within the neo-Pavlovian approach on CNS properties; (2) selected examples of studies in the domain of sensation-seeking, neuroticism, and extraversion; and (3) theoretical considerations regarding the specificity of phenomena being measured by means of psychometric and psychophysiological/psychophysical scores. It is concluded that psychophysiological and psychophysical measures may be used for the assessment of personality/temperament traits or for estimating the construct validity of psychometric tools applied in personality (temperament) research under very strict requirements and limited circumstances only. In most of the studies conducted up to now, these circumstances and requirements have not been fulfilled.     

Vibrotactile frequency discrimination

Thresholds for vibrotactile discrimination of pulse interval were determined for pulse frequencies between 1 and 384 Hz. The results point to a temporal resolution significantly more accurate than that demonstrated in earlier studies. Although touch as a vibratory sensor is in general much inferior to audition, the present results show a striking resemblance to those obtained on auditory pitch. The neurophysiological implications for the tactile as well as for the auditory system are discussed.     

Distraction effects in tasks of varying difficulty: Methodological issues in measuring development of distractibility

Effects of distraction on 5- and 8-year-old children's performance on a short-term memory task were examined. Tasks at three difficulty levels were employed to determine whether a floor effect could account for the lack of an age difference reported in an earlier study. A floor effect does not appear to be a key factor; the absolute amount of performance decrement was roughly equal for the two ages here regardless of task difficulty, and performance was well above chance under all conditions. The children adapted somewhat to the presence of distraction as shown in greater performance impairment for the first trial under distraction than for remaining trials. Use of a proportional, rather than an absolute, decrement index was considered, and the relevance of the present data to this issue was discussed.     

Nonmetric individual differences multidimensional scaling: An alternating least squares method with optimal scaling features

A new procedure is discussed which fits either the weighted or simple Euclidian model to data that may (a) be defined at either the nominal, ordinal, interval or ratio levels of measurement; (b) have missing observations; (c) be symmetric or asymmetric; (d) be conditional or unconditional; (e) be replicated or unreplicated; and (f) be continuous or discrete. Various special cases of the procedure include the most commonly used individual differences multidimensional scaling models, the familiar nonmetric multidimensional scaling model, and several other previously undiscussed variants.The procedure optimizes the fit of the model directly to the data (not to scalar products determined from the data) by an alternating least squares procedure which is convergent, very quick, and relatively free from local minimum problems.The procedure is evaluated via both Monte Carlo and empirical data. It is found to be robust in the face of measurement error, capable of recovering the true underlying configuration in the Monte Carlo situation, and capable of obtaining structures equivalent to those obtained by other less general procedures in the empirical situation.This project was supported in part by Research Grant No. MH10006 and Research Grant No. MH26504, awarded by the National Institute of Mental Health, DHEW. We wish to thank Robert F. Baker, J. Douglas Carroll, Joseph Kruskal, and Amnon Rapoport for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Portions of the research reported here were presented to the spring meeting of the Psychometric Society, 1975. ALSCAL, a program to perform the computations discussed in this paper, may be obtained from any of the authors.Jan de Leeuw is currently at Datatheorie, Central Rekeninstituut, Wassenaarseweg 80, Leiden, The Netherlands. Yoshio Takane can be reached at the Department of Psychology, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.