Very Young Child Well-being in Military Families: A Snapshot

Since the September 11th attacks on the U.S., more than 2 million children have experienced parental deployment during their early years, with potentially lasting impact. When a parent is deployed, a number of factors may affect the well-being of the service member and his/her family. One parental factor—posttraumatic stress disorder or distress—might be particularly powerful in its effect on young children and the family system. We analyzed baseline data from an intervention development project which focused on supporting military families with very young children during post-deployment. The purpose of this research is to understand the relationships between parental mental health status, parenting stress, couple functioning, and young child well-being. The effects of mental health status of home-front and service member parents and the role of couple functioning on parent–child interactions and behavioral problems of young children were examined in a sample of military families during the post-deployment period. Findings suggest that service member posttraumatic stress symptoms are associated with higher parental report of child behavior problems. Higher quality of the couple relationship appears to lessen the impact of parental posttraumatic stress but is not related to parent perceptions of child behavior concerns. Implications for future research with military families are discussed.     

Predictive Relationship Between Parental Beliefs and Accommodation of Pediatric Anxiety

Behavior performed by parents to assist a youth in avoiding or alleviating anxiety, known as accommodation, is ubiquitous among pediatric anxiety disorders and strongly related to poor treatment outcome. According to cognitive-behavioral theory, the beliefs parents hold regarding accommodation should predict parental accommodating behavior. Unfortunately, little is known about the beliefs parents hold regarding accommodation, as there exists no validated measure of this construct. First, the psychometric properties were examined for the Parental Accommodation Scale (PAS), a novel measure of parental accommodating behavior frequency (PAS-Behavior scale) and parental beliefs about accommodation (PAS-Belief scale). Second, the relationship between parental beliefs about accommodation and accommodation frequency was examined. Results provide preliminary evidence of the internal consistency and convergent validity of the PAS. Stronger positive beliefs about accommodation significantly predicted accommodation frequency, even after controlling for youth anxiety severity. Specifically, beliefs that accommodation prevents youth from losing behavioral and emotional control significantly predicted accommodation frequency. Therefore, efforts to decrease accommodation in clinical settings should involve correcting maladaptive parental beliefs about accommodation, with a particular emphasis on beliefs regarding the necessity of accommodation in preventing a youth from losing behavioral and emotional control.     

Emotional distress and positive and negative memories from military deployment: the influence of PTSD symptoms and time

During military deployment, soldiers are confronted with both negative and positive events. What is remembered and how it affects an individual is influenced by not only the perceived emotion of the event, but also the emotional state of the individual. Here we examined the most negative and most positive deployment memories from a company of 337 soldiers who were deployed together to Afghanistan. We examined how the level of emotional distress of the soldiers and the valence of the memory were related to the emotional intensity, experience of reliving, rehearsal and coherence of the memories, and how the perceived impact of these memories changed over time. We found that soldiers with higher levels of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms were more affected by both their negative and positive memories, compared with soldiers with lower levels of PTSD symptoms. Emotional intensity of the most negative memory increased over time in the group with highest levels of PTSD symptoms, but dropped in the other groups. The present study adds to the literature on emotion and autobiographical memory and how this relationship interacts with an individual’s present level of emotional distress and the passage of time.     

Who was that masked man? Conjoint representations of intrinsic motions with actor appearance

Motion plays an important role in recognising animate creatures. This research supports a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motions in their relationship to identifying information about the characters performing the motions. Participants viewed events involving costumed human characters. Intrinsic motions involved relative movements of a character’s body parts, whereas extrinsic motions involved movements with respect to external landmarks. Participants were later tested for recognition of the motions and who had performed them. The critical test items involved familiar characters performing motions that had previously been performed by other characters. Participants falsely recognised extrinsic conjunction items, in which characters followed the paths of other characters, more often than intrinsic conjunction items, in which characters moved in the manner of other characters. In contrast, participants falsely recognised new extrinsic motions less often than new intrinsic motions, suggesting that they remembered extrinsic motions but had difficulty remembering who had performed them. Modelling of receiver operating characteristics indicated that participants discriminated old items from intrinsic conjunction items via familiarity, consistent with conjoint representations of intrinsic motion and identity information. In contrast, participants used recollection to distinguish old items from extrinsic conjunction items, consistent with separate but associated representations of extrinsic motion and identity information.     

Superheroes for change: Physical safety promotes socially (but not economically) progressive attitudes among conservatives

Across two studies, we find evidence for our prediction that experimentally increasing feelings of physical safety increases conservatives' socially progressive attitudes. Specifically, Republican and conservative participants who imagined being endowed with a superpower that made them invulnerable to physical harm (vs. the ability to fly) were more socially (but not economically) liberal (Study 1) and less resistant to social change (Study 2). Results suggest that socially (but not economically) conservative attitudes are driven, at least in part, by needs for safety and security.     

Cognitive reappraisal reduces perceived exertion during endurance exercise

Emotion regulation may influence psychological responses to exercise. We examined whether the emotion regulation strategies, cognitive reappraisal and distraction, influenced psychological state and prefrontal cortex oxygenation during endurance exercise. Twenty-four endurance runners ran for 90 min at 75–85% maximum heart rate in three separate sessions with no instruction or with instructions to use cognitive reappraisal or distraction. Participants rated their emotional arousal, emotional valence, and perceived exertion before, every 30 min during, and after exercise. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy quantified changes in prefrontal cortex oxygenation. Participants felt lower emotional arousal and physical exertion when instructed to utilize cognitive reappraisal than when given no emotion regulation instruction. Such responses to distraction did not differ from the other conditions. Emotion regulation strategies did not influence emotional valence or prefrontal cortex oxygenation. Participants’ analytical interpretation of the cognitive reappraisal instruction could contribute to small effect sizes and limited effects. Further research should determine contexts under which emotion regulation strategies most benefit endurance exercise experience.     

Problem Clarity as a Moderator between Trait Affect and Self‐Perceived Creativity

Empirical studies on the relationship between affect and creativity often produce conflicting results. This inconsistency has led us to believe that the relationship between affect and creativity may be better understood by looking at potential moderators. Our study looked specifically at trait affect and self‐perceived creativity. Using the Affect Infusion Model (AIM) theory with problem clarity as the potential moderator, we hypothesized that when individuals are faced with problems that lack clarity, trait affect has greater sway over their self‐perceived creativity. Our results provided evidence that problem clarity moderated the relationship between positive trait affect and self‐perceived creativity; the positive relationship between positive trait affect and self‐perceived creativity is stronger when problem clarity is low and weaker when problem clarity is high. No moderating effect was found in the relationship between negative trait affect and self‐perceived creativity.     

Lexical processing in children and adults during word copying

Copying text may seem trivial, but the task itself is psychologically complex. It involves a series of sequential visual and cognitive processes, which must be co-ordinated; these include visual encoding, mental representation and written production. To investigate the time course of word processing during copying, we recorded eye movements of adults and children as they hand-copied isolated words presented on a classroom board. Longer and lower frequency words extended adults' encoding durations, suggesting whole word encoding. Only children's short word encoding was extended by lower frequency. Though children spent more time encoding long words compared to short words, gaze durations for long words were extended similarly for high- and low-frequency words. This suggested that for long words children used partial word representations and encoded multiple sublexical units rather than single whole words. Piecemeal word representation underpinned copying longer words in children, but reliance on partial word representations was not shown in adult readers.     

Opacity,Transparency, and the Paradox of the Accessibility Requirement

Key issues in epistemology for the most part have to do with epistemic values such as justification, truth, and knowledge—that is, values related to the epistemic status of our propositional attitudes, mental events, and states. However, another important issue that is worth examining is the extent to which a subject is in a position to evaluate the strength of her epistemic position. In this paper, I wish to emphasize two properties of our mental states that play a decisive part in that respect: their opacity and transparency. In the following, I will assume that a mental state is opaque whenever it presents itself with no underlying reason, whereas states that are supported by apparent reasons are transparent. One main argument that I will defend is that even when the opacity and transparency of our mental states are not reliable cues, still they remain highly informative. Notably, I draw some implications relative to the externalist/internalist debate in epistemology. I examine the claim that only mental states that are justified are well grounded or justification conferring and the idea that often stands behind, that is, that only states whose reasons are accessible are justified—namely, the Accessibility Requirement. I also examine the source of a recent debate in epistemology: the epistemic status of our intuitive states, as these are perfect instances of opaque mental states. I conclude that intuitive states in some respect are less misleading than states that are supported by apparent reasons.