A longitudinal examination of the relationship between teacher burnout and depression

This study investigates the longitudinal relationships between burnout and depression among teachers. Middle and high school teachers participated in a 3‐wave survey. The results of the latent growth modeling analysis revealed that there was a significant relationship between the initial status of burnout and the initial status of depression. Results also indicated a significant relationship between the change rate of burnout and the change rate of depression. Moreover, the autoregressive cross‐lagged modeling revealed a causal relationship such that teacher's burnout leads to subsequent depression symptoms, not vice versa.     

Child Pornography Offending Seen Through Three Theoretical Lenses

Understanding the complex issues surrounding child pornography offending is still in its infancy, and questions regarding the etiological underpinnings of sexually deviant interests and behaviors for these offenders remain both salient and unanswered. This article considers these questions through the lenses of three psychological theories of behavior: (1) social learning theory, (2) courtship disorder theory, and (3) behavioral economics. The development and maintenance of child pornography offending, as well as the potential for off-line escalation of those behaviors, from each theoretical perspective is discussed and the implications for theoretically grounded clinical practice is explored.     

Strengthening Family Resilience

Abstract

Researchers in the field of marriage and family therapy have largely ignored the effect of gender bias on clinical decision making. The purpose of this study was to explore if patient gender influenced prognostic judgments and if male and female therapists utilized different client characteristics when formulating prognostic judgments. Prognostic judgments were based on clinical profiles of couples seeking marital therapy for inhibited sexual desire. The multidimensional scaling procedure, KYST, was utilized to analyze the data. The findings indicated that the identified patient's gender did not influence prognostic judgments. However, therapist gender did influence the client characteristics used to formulate prognostic judgments.     

Toward a Social Psychology of Social Support

An analysis of social psychological aspects of social support examined several stages of the interaction between provider and recipient. In the first stage, the provider may offer support, respond positively to requests for support, or decline requests for support, whereas the recipient may seek, accept, or reject support. In the second stage, after support is exchanged, attributions about its effect may occur for each member, which in turn affects the extent to which the support is continued and the nature of its effect. Attributional errors about the effect may occur, especially if factors other than support—such as external factors—alter the problem status. The final stage follows the resolution of the problem and may involve reciprocation of support when roles are reversed, although such reciprocity may not be a necessary condition for social support. Possible mechanisms for both positive as well as negative effects of support were postulated. Assessing the effects of support is complicated by factors such as individual differences, the degree of match between social support beliefs held by provider and recipient, type of problem, and the timing of support.     

An analysis of information visualisation

Philosophers have relied on visual metaphors to analyse ideas and explain their theories at least since Plato. Descartes is famous for his system of axes, and Wittgenstein for his first design of truth table diagrams. Today, visualisation is a form of ‘computer-aided seeing’ information in data. Hence, information is the fundamental ‘currency’ exchanged through a visualisation pipeline. In this article, we examine the types of information that may occur at different stages of a general visualization pipeline. We do so from a quantitative and a qualitative perspective. The quantitative analysis is developed on the basis of Shannon’s information theory. The qualitative analysis is developed on the basis of Floridi’s taxonomy in the philosophy of information. We then discuss in detail how the condition of the ‘data processing inequality’ can be broken in a visualisation pipeline. This theoretic finding underlines the usefulness and importance of visualisation in dealing with the increasing problem of data deluge. We show that the subject of visualisation should be studied using both qualitative and quantitative approaches, preferably in an interdisciplinary synergy between information theory and the philosophy of information.     

The Best Friend and Friendship Group Influence on Adolescent Nonsuicidal Self-injury

This study examined associations of peer socialization and selection, over time, with nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) among 5,787 (54.2 % females) Chinese community adolescents. Both effects were tested using two aspects of adolescents’ friendship networks: the best friend and the friendship group. Participants completed questionnaires assessing NSSI, depressive symptoms and maladaptive impulsive behaviors at two waves of time over a 6-month period. Results showed that even after controlling for the effects of depressive symptoms and maladaptive impulsive behaviors, the best friends’ engagement in NSSI still significantly predicted adolescents’ own engagement in NSSI. Adolescents’ friendship groups’ NSSI status also significantly predicted their own NSSI status and frequency. Additionally, adolescents with NSSI tended to join peer groups with other members also engaging in NSSI.     

Effect of strain rate on the compressive behaviour of a Zr56Al10.9Ni4.6Cu27.8Nb0.7 bulk metallic glass

We report the study of the effect of strain rate on the compressive behaviour of a Zr₅₆Al_10.9Ni_4.6Cu_27.8Nb_0.7 bulk metallic glass. The results indicated that both the strength and plasticity of the glass increase with increasing the strain rate up to 10^?5 s^?1, above which the strength and plasticity start to decrease. The enhanced mechanical properties under a strain rate of 10^?5 s^?1 are due to the emission/propagation rate of the shear bands being consistent with the strain rate.     

A unified approach to multiple‐set canonical correlation analysis and principal components analysis

Multiple‐set canonical correlation analysis and principal components analysis are popular data reduction techniques in various fields, including psychology. Both techniques aim to extract a series of weighted composites or components of observed variables for the purpose of data reduction. However, their objectives of performing data reduction are different. Multiple‐set canonical correlation analysis focuses on describing the association among several sets of variables through data reduction, whereas principal components analysis concentrates on explaining the maximum variance of a single set of variables. In this paper, we provide a unified framework that combines these seemingly incompatible techniques. The proposed approach embraces the two techniques as special cases. More importantly, it permits a compromise between the techniques in yielding solutions. For instance, we may obtain components in such a way that they maximize the association among multiple data sets, while also accounting for the variance of each data set. We develop a single optimization function for parameter estimation, which is a weighted sum of two criteria for multiple‐set canonical correlation analysis and principal components analysis. We minimize this function analytically. We conduct simulation studies to investigate the performance of the proposed approach based on synthetic data. We also apply the approach for the analysis of functional neuroimaging data to illustrate its empirical usefulness.     

The Effect of Interactivity on Learning Physical Actions in Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) offers new possibilities for learning, specifically for training individuals to perform physical movements such as physical therapy and exercise. The current article examines two aspects of VR that uniquely contribute to media interactivity: the ability to capture and review physical behavior and the ability to see one's avatar rendered in real time from third person points of view. In two studies, we utilized a state-of-the-art, image-based tele-immersive system, capable of tracking and rendering many degrees of freedom of human motion in real time. In Experiment 1, participants learned better in VR than in a video learning condition according to self-report measures, and the cause of the advantage was seeing one's avatar stereoscopically in the third person. In Experiment 2, we added a virtual mirror in the learning environment to further leverage the ability to see oneself from novel angles in real time. Participants learned better in VR than in video according to objective performance measures. Implications for learning via interactive digital media are discussed.