The mediational role of adolescents' friends in relations between activity breadth and adjustment

This investigation addresses the mediational role of friends' characteristics between adolescents' activity breadth (i.e., variety in activity participation) and their later adjustment. Data were drawn from 2 longitudinal studies: the Childhood and Beyond (CAB; N = 925) study and the Maryland Adolescent Development in Context Study (MADICS; N = 1,338). Adolescents at Time 2 in each study (8th, 9th, and 11th graders in CAB and 8th graders in MADICS) reported on the breadth of their participation across 5 activity settings: sports, religious, volunteering, community, and school. Friends' characteristics and adolescent adjustment were reported by adolescents at Times 1 and 3. Friends' positive characteristics significantly mediated relations between activity breadth and adolescent depressive affect, self-worth, alcohol use, and problem behavior in both studies. Friends' negative characteristics significantly mediated these relations in CAB, but not in MADICS.     

Time course of selective attention in clinically depressed young adults: an eye tracking study

Depressed individuals display biased attention for emotional information when stimuli are presented for relatively “long” (e.g., 1 s) durations. The current study examined whether attentional biases are sustained over a much longer period. Specifically, clinically depressed and never depressed young adults simultaneously viewed images from four emotion categories (sad, threat, positive, neutral) for 30 s while line of visual gaze was assessed. Depressed individuals spent significantly more time viewing dysphoric images and less time viewing positive images than their never depressed counterparts. Time course analyses indicated that these biases were maintained over the course of the trial. Results suggest that depressed participants' attentional biases for dysphoric information are sustained for relatively long periods even when other emotional stimuli are present. Mood congruent information-processing biases appear to be a robust feature of depression and may have an important role in the maintenance of the disorder.     

Tic Tac Toe: effects of predictability and importance on acoustic prominence in language production

Importance and predictability each have been argued to contribute to acoustic prominence. To investigate whether these factors are independent or two aspects of the same phenomenon, na?ve participants played a verbal variant of Tic Tac Toe. Both importance and predictability contributed independently to the acoustic prominence of a word, but in different ways. Predictable game moves were shorter in duration and had less pitch excursion than less predictable game moves, whereas intensity was higher for important game moves. These data also suggest that acoustic prominence is affected by both speaker-centered processes (speaker effort) and listener-centered processes (intent to signal important information to the listener).     

Meaning matters in children's plural productions

The English plural is about the number of individuals in a set of like kinds. Two-year-old children use the plural but do not do so in all obligatory contexts. The present report asks whether the limitations on their production of the plural are related to aspects of meaning. In two Experiments plural productions were elicited from 2-year-old children for sets of size two and four and for instances of basic-level categories that were either similar or identical. Children were much more likely to produce the plural of these well-known nouns when there were four rather than two and when the instances were identical rather than merely similar. The results provide new evidence on children's acquisition of the English plural, showing that children's early productions are not just limited by knowledge of the noun and its plural form but also is limited by properties of the labeled sets in ways that are relevant to the underlying meaning of the plural.     

Managers’ and Subordinates’ Evaluations of Feedback Strategies: The Critical Contribution of Voice1

This study investigated 87 managers’ and 91 subordinates’ evaluations of a range of strategies for delivering performance feedback in the workplace. The managers and subordinates rated 8 written vignettes describing different feedback strategies on a number of variables (perceived effectiveness, perceived risk, level of enactment demand, and congruence of strategy for managers). Feedback strategies that used an invitation for the subordinate to reply to the negative feedback were evaluated as more effective and managerially congruent, and less risky than were the other strategies. However, strategies requiring bidirectional communication (e.g., invitations to reply), as opposed to unidirectional communication (e.g., praise), were generally perceived as more demanding to enact.     

Integrating Social Information Processing and Attachment Style Research with Cognitive-behavioral Couple Therapy

The majority of the empirically validated interventions for relational distress focus primarily upon improving behavioral functioning, particularly couples’ communication patterns in conflict situations. However, although communication is highly predictive of relationship distress and later divorce, research on the effectiveness of premarital and marital interventions based on communication training has shown limited results. Therefore, although the skills-based approaches can be effective in treating relational discord and instability, they also often neglect another potentially powerful mechanism in the development of relational distress: the social cognitions and/or schemata regarding relationships that individuals carry into their marriages that stem from negative attachment experiences. Thus, this article describes how blending information gleaned from attachment style research with the body of literature addressing social information processing can enhance current methods for the treatment of relational discord. The existing research on adult romantic attachment styles is placed within a social-cognitive information processing framework and a case study demonstrating the utility of this approach with difficult couples is described.     

Children's false memory and true disclosure in the face of repeated questions

The current study was designed to investigate children's memory and suggestibility for events differing in valence (positive or negative) and veracity (true or false). A total of 82 3- and 5-year-olds were asked repeated questions about true and false events, either in a grouped order (i.e., all questions about a certain event asked consecutively) or in a nongrouped order (i.e., questions about a certain event were interspersed with questions about other events). Interviewer gender was also varied. Individual differences, including attachment style, inhibition, and behavioral adjustment, were examined as potential predictors of memory and suggestibility. Results revealed significant age, valence, and veracity effects on children's memory reports. Path analysis demonstrated that individual differences in behavioral problems and inhibitory ability predicted children's provision of inaccurate information. Implications for psychological theory and legal application are discussed.     

Let’s talk about race, Baby! When Whites’ and Blacks’ interracial contact experiences diverge

The present study investigated whether the conditions that make interracial contact anxiety-provoking for Whites differ from those that make it anxiety-provoking for Blacks. Specifically, the present work examined interracial anxiety as a function of discussant race (i.e., White or Black) and discussion topic (i.e., race-related or race-neutral). To that end, we examined the nonverbal behavior of White and Black participants during brief interpersonal interactions. Consistent with previous research, White participants behaved more anxiously during interracial than same-race interactions. Additionally, White participants of interracial interaction behaved more anxiously than their Black interaction partners. Furthermore, whereas White participants of interracial interactions found race-related discussions no more stressful than race-neutral discussions, Black participants of interracial interactions found race-related discussions less stressful than race-neutral discussions. The implications of these racial and contextual differences in interracial anxiety for improving interracial contact and race relations, more broadly, are discussed.     

Balancing concern for other with concern for self: links between unmitigated communion, communion, and psychological well-being

Previous research has demonstrated the importance of distinguishing between positive (communion) and negative (unmitigated communion) characteristics when investigating the relation between traditional feminine gender roles and psychological adjustment. However, previous work has relied on cross-sectional analysis of self-reported unmitigated communion and self-reported emotional distress. The present series of studies was designed to address this limitation by using multiple methodologies to examine the relation between unmitigated communion (UC) and psychological adjustment. Study 1 examined the relation between self- and peer reports in a sample of 102 college students. Study 2 examined the relation between communion, UC, and adjustment in a community sample of 94 adults using a 10-year longitudinal design. Study 3 used a daily diary methodology to examine the relation between these constructs, social functioning, and depressed mood in a sample of 78 college women. Results from the three studies converged to demonstrate that unmitigated communion is an important factor that impacts negatively on the psychological adjustment of men and women.     

Eye movements drive steering: reduced eye movement distribution impairs steering and driving performance

On a winding open road, a driver consistently looks to the inside of each bend before turning the steering wheel. When researchers disrupt this coordination by instructing drivers not to move their eyes, drivers' performance is impaired and their completion time during racing increases. The present authors examined whether changing internal states in a way that also restricts eye movements reduces coordination and affects performance. Participants (N = 24) completed a simulated rally stage under manipulation of their anxiety state through ego threat. Performance decreased under pressure, and the decrement was associated with a narrowing of the range of eye movements and a reduced correlation of eye movements with steering. The authors discuss the possibility that the deterioration in performance is a cost of maintaining steering when eye-movement driving input to the steering controller is reduced.