Help Me Play! Parental Behaviors,Child Temperament,and Preschool Peer Play

Social competence is a critical developmental milestone for preschoolers. Because play is the primary activity through which preschoolers interact socially with peers, it serves as an excellent indicator of social competence. The development of social competence in preschoolers is complex and multifaceted. In order to capture this complexity, we used Belsky’s differential susceptibility hypothesis as a framework for examining the contributions of child temperament and parenting styles in the prediction of peer interactive play behaviors. Using parent ratings of a sample of 44 preschool-age children, we hypothesized that child temperament (specifically, reactivity and regulation) acts as a susceptibility factor in the relationship between parenting styles (authoritarian and authoritative) and child peer play behaviors (disruptive and interactive). Our findings indicated that child reactivity moderated the relationship between authoritarian parenting style and both play outcomes, suggesting that reactivity serves as a potential susceptibility factor. More specifically, children with high reactivity who had more authoritarian parents demonstrated higher levels of disruptive play and lower levels of interactive play. Regulation did not act as a susceptibility factor in our sample. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for practice and in terms of an approach that considers temperament (specifically reactivity) and parenting behaviors in preschool assessment and intervention efforts. Additionally, we discuss how our findings partially support the differential susceptibility hypothesis.     

Mandatory Cancer Risk Warnings on Alcoholic Beverages: What Are the Ethical Issues?

The link between alcohol consumption and cancer is well established, but public awareness of the risk remains low. Mandated warning labels have been suggested as a way of ensuring “informed choice” about alcohol consumption. In this article we explore various ethical issues that may arise in connection with cancer warning labels on alcoholic beverages; in particular we highlight the potentially questionable autonomy of alcohol consumption decisions (either with or without labels) and consider the implications if the autonomy of drinking behavior is substantially compromised. Our discussion demonstrates the need for the various ethical issues to be considered and addressed in any decision to mandate cancer warning labels.     

Caring for Aging Parents: The Influence of Family Coping,Spirituality/Religiosity,and Hope on the Marital Satisfaction of Family Caregivers

The goal of this study was to gain a more complete understanding of the marital satisfaction of family caregivers based on a strength-based framework of family resiliency. Previous research has identified a relationship between the caregiving experience and coping, spirituality/religiosity, and hope, but no study to date has investigated the effect of those three variables on the marital satisfaction of family caregivers. We hypothesized that family caregivers who are spiritual/religious, hopeful, and use effective family coping strategies would experience greater marital satisfaction. A hierarchical linear regression analyzing data from 191 family caregivers supported the hypotheses. Implications for clinicians are discussed.     

Effective 3-D shape discrimination survives retinal blur

A single experiment evaluated observers’ ability to visually discriminate 3-D object shape, where the 3-D structure was defined by motion, texture, Lambertian shading, and occluding contours. The observers’ vision was degraded to varying degrees by blurring the experimental stimuli, using 2.0-, 2.5-, and 3.0-diopter convex lenses. The lenses reduced the observers’ acuity from ?0.091 LogMAR (in the no-blur conditions) to 0.924 LogMAR (in the conditions with the most blur; 3.0-diopter lenses). This visual degradation, although producing severe reductions in visual acuity, had only small (but significant) effects on the observers’ ability to discriminate 3-D shape. The observers’ shape discrimination performance was facilitated by the objects’ rotation in depth, regardless of the presence or absence of blur. Our results indicate that accurate global shape discrimination survives a considerable amount of retinal blur.     

Attitudes Toward Prostitution and Acceptance of Rape Myths1

Rape myths and prostitution myths are a component of culturally supported attitudes that normalize violence against women. Prostitution myths justify the existence of prostitution, promote misinformation about prostitution, and contribute to a social climate that exploits and harms not only prostituted women, but all women. This study investigated the relationship between prostitution myth acceptance and rape myth acceptance in a sample of university undergraduates. Rape myth acceptance was positively correlated with prostitution myth acceptance among 783 university undergraduates from California, Iowa, Oregon, and Texas. College men were significantly more accepting of prostitution myths than were college women. Results suggest that acceptance of prostitution myths are a component of attitudes that justify violence against women.     

Impact of cognitive-behavioral therapy for panic disorder on comorbidity: a controlled investigation

This study examined the effects of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for principal panic disorder with or without agoraphobia, on comorbidity in 30 individuals (16 female). To test the hypothesis that improvements in co-existing conditions were not due to spontaneous fluctuations across time, patients receiving immediate CBT were compared to those assigned to wait list (n = 11). Results indicated clinician-rated severity of comorbid specific phobia declined significantly following immediate CBT compared to no change after wait list. The number of patients without comorbidity of any severity increased after immediate CBT, with no such increase following wait list. However, the groups did not differ in the frequency of additional diagnoses or overall severity of comorbidity. In the total sample, results indicated reductions in comorbidity by 9-month follow-up, with marked declines in the severity of comorbid generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), social and specific phobia. Our findings suggest that targeted CBT for panic disorder has beneficial effects on comorbidity over the longer term and that some of its immediate effects exceed those due to the passage of time alone.     

Fill-in and infill errors in order memory

Many current models of memory are specified with enough detail to make predictions about patterns of errors in memory tasks. However, there are often not enough empirical data available to test these predictions. We report two experiments that examine the relative frequency of fill-in and infill errors. In immediate serial recall tasks, subjects sometimes incorrectly recall item N too soon, placing it in position N-1. The error of interest is which item is recalled after this initial mistake. A fill-in error is the tendency to recall item N-1 next, whereas an infill error is the tendency to recall item N+1 next. Both experiments reveal more fill-in than infill errors, not only overall but at each possible error location throughout the list. The overall ratio is approximately 2:1. We conclude that none of the currently existing models adequately accounts for fill-in and infill errors.     

Perception of three-dimensional shape from specular highlights, deformations of shading, and other types of visual information

There have been numerous computational models developed in an effort to explain how the human visual system analyzes three-dimensional (3D) surface shape from patterns of image shading, but they all share some important limitations. Models that are applicable to individual static images cannot correctly interpret regions that contain specular highlights, and those that are applicable to moving images have difficulties when a surface moves relative to its sources of illumination. Here we describe a psychophysical experiment that measured the sensitivity of human observers to small differences of 3D shape over a wide variety of conditions. The results provide clear evidence that the presence of specular highlights or the motions of a surface relative to its light source do not pose an impediment to perception, but rather, provide powerful sources of information for the perceptual analysis of 3D shape.     

The relative influence of attitudes and subjective norms from childhood to adolescence: between-participant and within-participant analyses

Children and adolescents (ages 8-16) were asked to indicate their behavioral intentions, attitudes, and subjective norms for 34 behaviors. Between-participant and within-participant analyses demonstrated that attitudes and subjective norms were good predictors of behavioral intentions both singly and in combination. In addition, attitudes generally were better predictors than were subjective norms both across behaviors and across participants. Most importantly, however, there were no differences in the relative importance of attitudes and subjective norms in predicting behavioral intentions across age groups.