The developmental change in strategies parents employ to settle young children to sleep,and their relationship to infant sleeping problems,as assessed by a new questionnaire: the Parental Interactive Bedtime Behaviour Scale

The development of a new parental self‐report questionnaire, the Parental Interactive Bedtime Behaviour Scale (PIBBS) is described. The PIBBS was designed to capture a wide range of parental behaviours used to settle infants off to sleep. The commonest behaviours employed were giving a feed, talking softly to the child, cuddling in the arms, and stroking. A factor analysis revealed five settling strategies; ‘active physical comforting’ (e.g. cuddling in arms); ‘encouraging infant autonomy’ (e.g. leaving to cry); ‘movement’ (e.g. car rides), ‘passive physical comforting’ (e.g. standing next to the cot without picking the infant up), and ‘social comforting’ (e.g. reading a story). Excessive ‘active physical comforting’ and reduced ‘encourage autonomy’ strategy use was associated with infant sleeping problems. Regarding developmental change in strategy between 1 and 2 years, the later the onset at which ‘encourage autonomy’ became the principal strategy used, the more likely that persistent infant sleeping problems would be present. Factors accounting for the change in strategy use over time were: (i) parental adaptation to infant developmental maturation; (ii) the interaction between maternal cognition and strategy, and, to a lesser extent; (iii) the interaction between infant temperament and parental strategy. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effects of level of academic training on client-perceived rapport and use of verbal response modes in counselling dyads

The Standardized Client procedure was used with 22 fifth-year counselling psychology trainees in 1 -hour interviews to assess the impact of counsellor verbal response modes upon client-perceived rapport in 1-minute segments collected during the entire interviews. In addition, the effects of level of academic training on client-perceived rapport and verbal response mode usage were investigated via comparisons with previous data collected from 10 fourth-year counselling psychology trainees. Data indicated that the higher level trainees produced higher mean levels of client-perceived rapport per minute than the lower level trainees, and that there were also different distributions of verbal response mode usage across rapport ratings for the two trainee groups. Implications for training programmes are discussed.     

Marital systems of agoraphobic women: contributions of husbands' denial and projection

The problems of measuring psychological concepts such as repression and denial are discussed in the context of the marital systems of agoraphobic women and the credibility of a couples approach to treatment. Repression, denial and projection in husbands were inferred from systematic measurement of mood, hostility and symptom changes after intensive behaviour therapy for the agoraphobia. The results suggested that the agoraphobic symptoms of about half of the women were reinforced by their husbands' habitual denial of affect and of personal problems; in this group, worthwhile symptomatic improvement occurred only in those women whose husbands relinquished repression and denial as major defence mechanisms, acknowledging their own personal problems, and allowing the patients to take more responsibility for their agoraphobia. The marital systems of the remaining couples were characterized by incompatible ways of dealing with hostility, with husbands' abnormal extrapunitiveness reinforcing patients' self-blame, which inhibited problem-solving and hence indirectly perpetuated the agoraphobia.     

The effect of spatial order on piecemeal shape recognition: A developmental study

Stationary shapes were displayed piecemeal by moving an aperture from one place to another around their contours. Shape recognition was poorer with an unpredictable order of display. This result is more consistent with hypothesis-testing than with either eye-movement or visual information models of shape recognition. Shape recognition was poorer for 9- and 11-year-old children than for adults.     

Understanding supervisor-targeted aggression: a within-person, between-jobs design

The authors investigated predictors of supervisor-targeted workplace aggression among 105 "moonlighters" (employed adults who work 2 jobs, each with a different supervisor), as a way of examining the relative role played by within-subject situational differences and between-subjects individual differences. Individual difference variables (self-esteem, history of aggression) explained a similar level of variance in aggression across both jobs, whereas situational factors (interactional injustice, abusive supervision) were job specific and explained proportionally more variance than did individual differences.