Parental Depressive Symptoms as a Predictor of Outcome in the Treatment of Child Depression

Child depression is an impairing condition for which psychotherapies have shown modest effects. Parental depression is a risk factor for development of child depression and might also be negatively associated with child depression treatment outcomes. To explore this possibility, we analyzed data from a study in which children were treated for depression after parental depressive symptoms had been assessed at baseline. Among children treated for depression in a randomized controlled trial, we identified 31 who had child- and parent-report pre- and post-treatment data on child symptoms and parent-report of pre-treatment parental depressive symptoms. Children were aged 8–13, 77% boys, and 52% Caucasian, 13% African-American, 6% Latino, and 29% multi-racial. Analyses focused on differences in trajectories of change (across weekly measurements), and post-treatment symptoms among children whose parents did (n = 12) versus did not (n = 19) have elevated depressive symptoms at baseline. Growth curve analyses showed markedly different trajectories of change for the two groups, by both child-report (p = 0.03) and parent-report (p = 0.03) measures: children of parents with less severe depression showed steep symptom declines, but children of parents with more severe depression showed flat trajectories with little change in symptoms over time. ANCOVAs showed lower post-treatment child symptoms for children of parents with less severe depression versus parents with more severe depression (p = 0.05 by child report, p = 0.01 by parent report). Parental depressive symptoms predict child symptom trajectories and poorer child treatment response, and may need to be addressed in treatment.     

Playing with fire: effects of negative mood induction and working memory on vocabulary acquisition

We investigated the impact of emotions on learning vocabulary in an unfamiliar language to better understand affective influences in foreign language acquisition. Seventy native English speakers learned new vocabulary in either a negative or a neutral emotional state. Participants also completed two sets of working memory tasks to examine the potential mediating role of working memory. Results revealed that participants exposed to negative stimuli exhibited difficulty in retrieving and correctly pairing English words with Indonesian words, as reflected in a lower performance on the prompted recall tests and the free recall measure. Emotional induction did not change working memory scores from pre to post manipulation. This suggests working memory could not explain the reduced vocabulary learning in the negative group. We argue that negative mood can adversely affect language learning by suppressing aspects of native-language processing and impeding form-meaning mapping with second language words.     

Narratives About Specific Romantic Conflicts: Gender and Associations With Conflict Beliefs and Strategies

Using a sample of 145 predominantly heterosexual emerging adults, the authors examined constructive and destructive interpretations of romantic conflict via narratives and studied how gender affected conflict interpretations and relationship functioning. Destructive interpretations were related to negative conflict beliefs for women and dating aggression for men. Across gender, constructive interpretations were related to more problem solving but were more strongly related to less aggression for men. Understanding conflict interpretations through narratives may enhance relationships skills training for emerging adults.     

Serial dependence in face attractiveness judgements tolerates rotations around the yaw axis but not the roll axis

Once a face is detected, its retinal image will be continually distorted by changes in eye position, noise, lighting and many other factors. Yet from one moment to the next our perception of a face is stable. Recent advances have indicated there is a mechanism for achieving the continuous perception of a person’s identity that pools across prior and present visual inputs. There is still debate as to whether the perception of face attractiveness is also serially dependent. Here we investigate continuity in the perception of attractiveness using a one back [t?1] effect as a marker of serial dependence. Our results show that face attractiveness is biased towards the attractiveness of the previous face, and that this effect is robust despite changes in viewpoint involving rotations around the yaw axis. However, face attractiveness perception is released from this form of rapid adaption when the previously seen face differed in orientation due to a rotation around the roll axis.     

Intended persistence: comparing academic and creative challenges in high school

How do high school students approach academic and creative challenges? This study compares the content of academic and creative challenges for 190 high school students, and examines students’ intentions to persist. Students reported experiencing academic and creative challenges in different areas: academic challenges were described primarily in math/science and English, with themes related to time management and striving to improve, while creative challenges were described overwhelmingly in art and music and concerned problem solving difficulties. Students reported more interest and intention to persist in the creative than academic challenges. Interest was the strongest predictor of persistence across both academic and creative challenges. The divergent perceptions of creative and academic challenges suggest that capitalizing on the creative elements of academic assignments could boost student interest and subsequent persistence.     

Learning What to Remember: Vocabulary Knowledge and Children's Memory for Object Names and Features

Although young children can map a novel name to a novel object, it remains unclear what they actually remember about objects when they initially make such a name–object association. In the current study we investigated (1) what children remembered after they were initially introduced to name–object associations and (2) how their vocabulary size and vocabulary structure influenced what they remembered. As a group, children had difficulty remembering each of the features of the original novel objects. Further analyses revealed that differences in vocabulary structure predicted children's ability to remember object features. Specifically, children who produced many names for categories organized by similarity in shape (e.g. ball, cup) had the best memory for newly‐learned objects' features—especially their shapes. In addition, the more features children remembered, the more likely they were to retain the newly learned name–object associations. Vocabulary size, however, was not predictive of children's feature memory or retention. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that children's existing vocabulary structure, rather than simply vocabulary size, influences what they attend to when encountering a new object and subsequently their ability to remember new name–object associations. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Biased Facial Expression Interpretation in Shy Children

The relationship between shyness and the interpretations of the facial expressions of others was examined in a sample of 123 children aged 12 to 14 years. Participants viewed faces displaying happiness, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise, as well as a neutral expression, presented on a computer screen. The children identified each expression by pressing a button on an external keyboard. For each expression, children also rated (a) the degree to which they felt the child displaying the expression would like them, (b) the probability that someone at school would look at them with that expression, and (c) their own emotional reaction to interacting with a child displaying the expression. Participants also completed the Children's Shyness Questionnaire and the Children's Rejection Sensitivity Questionnaire. We hypothesized that shyness in children would be related to negatively biased interpretations of facial expressions. Although the accuracy with which the children could identify the facial expressions was not related to their degree of shyness, negative biases were found in their interpretations of the meanings of the expressions. Furthermore, rejection sensitivity significantly mediated many of these biased interpretations. These findings may have implications for interventions for children experiencing shyness and social anxiety, especially social‐skills training approaches. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The View from Inside the System: How Police Explain Their Response to Sexual Assault

Prior research has documented the problematic community response to sexual assault: the majority of sexual assaults reported to police are never prosecuted. Social dominance theory suggests that this response is a form of institutional discrimination, intended to maintain existing social structures, and that police personnel likely draw upon shared ideologies to justify their decision‐making in sexual assault case investigations. This study drew upon social dominance theory to examine how police justified their investigatory decisions to identify potential leverage points for change. The study revealed that the likelihood of a case referral to the prosecutor increased with each additional investigative step completed; of the different types of justifications provided by police for a less‐than‐thorough investigative response and stalled case, blaming the victim for the poor police investigation proved to be the most damaging to case progression; and the type of explanation provided by police was impacted by specific case variables. As suggested by social dominance theory, the study demonstrates that police rely on several different mechanisms to justify their response to sexual assault; implementing criminal justice system policies that target and interrupt these mechanisms has the potential to improve this response, regardless of specific case factors.     

Performance,incentives, and needs for autonomy,competence, and relatedness: a meta-analysis

Although self-determination theory (SDT) is one of the most widely cited theories of human motivation and function, critics have questioned the practical utility of its three needs (i.e., autonomy, competence, and relatedness) in performance contexts. We conduct a meta-analysis (k = 108, N = 30,648) to explore the magnitude and boundary conditions of need satisfaction and performance. As expected, autonomy (ρ = .28), competence (ρ = .37), and relatedness (ρ = .25) predict performance. Incentivization per se has little impact on need-satisfaction: instead, the need satisfaction → performance relationship is moderated by incentive salience. Consistent with a crowding-out hypothesis, need satisfaction matters less to performance when incentives are directly salient (ρ = .22) and more when indirectly salient (ρ = .45). Our meta-analysis demonstrates that indirectly salient incentives and need-satisfaction are indeed compatible, providing a direct response to criticisms of SDT in performance contexts. Additional unexpected findings and future directions are discussed.