Resilient Adolescent Adjustment Among Girls: Buffers of Childhood Peer Rejection and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Examined a risk-resilience model of peer rejection and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in a 5-year longitudinal study of 209 ethnically and socioeconomically diverse girls aged 6-13 at baseline and 11-18 at follow-up. Risk factors were childhood ADHD diagnosis and peer rejection; hypothesized protective factors were childhood measures of self-perceived scholastic competence, engagement in goal-directed play when alone, and popularity with adults. Adolescent criterion measures were multi-informant composites of externalizing and internalizing behavior plus indicators of academic achievement, eating pathology, and substance use. ADHD and peer rejection predicted risk for all criterion measures except for substance use, which was predicted by ADHD only. ADHD and peer rejection predicted lower adolescent academic achievement controlling for childhood achievement, but they did not predict adolescent externalizing and internalizing behavior after controlling for baseline levels of these constructs. Regarding buffers, self-perceived scholastic competence in childhood (with control of academic achievement) predicted resilient adolescent functioning. Contrary to hypothesis, goal-directed play in childhood was associated with poor adolescent outcomes. Buffers were not found to have differential effectiveness among girls with ADHD relative to comparison girls.     

LEARNED HELPLESSNESS ATTRIBUTIONAL STYLE AND EXAMINATION PERFORMANCE: ENHANCEMENT EFFECTS ARE NOT NECESSARILY MODERATED BY PRIOR FAILURE

Studies have replicated both negative and positive associations between helpless attributional style and academic performance. Laboratory studies indicate that when enhancement effects occur, they may be moderated by the degree of failure individuals experience prior to task performance. In a longitudinal study of 96 college students who completed four examinations in two introductory psychology courses, we examined the relationship between helpless attributional style and examination performance across the semester, and whether prior examination failure moderated this association. Correlational analyses revealed that helpless attributional style was unrelated to exam performance in the first half of the semester and was positively related to improvements in performance in the second half. Regression analyses indicated that these enhancement effects were not moderated by previous performance on examinations in the course. The present findings underscore the need for longitudinal studies that investigate the pattern of associations between helpless attributional style and performance across time in real-life contexts.     

Critical Issues in Cross‐Cultural Counseling Research: Case Example of an Ongoing Project

Cross‐cultural counseling practice is characterized by a proliferation of opinions without empirical substantiation. Most research in this area is based on survey or analog studies that do not address practice issues in terms of outcome or actual clinical process. The authors examine issues in cross‐cultural counseling and research, using illustrations from an ongoing study. El consejo intercultural se caracteriza por medio de la generación de opiniones proliferas sin justificación empírica. Muchos estudios en este campo se basan en encuestas or estudios analógicos que no se dirigen a las cuestiones de la práctica, en cuanto a los resultados o al verdadero proceso clínico. Los autores examinan temas en las investigaciones del consejo intercultural, utilizando ejemplos de un proyecto actual.     

ROLE PERCEPTIONS IN PERU1

Perception des râles au Pérou. — Le Différentiateur de Rôle (RD) a été utilisé pour étudier comment les Péruviens (N = 161) perçoivent les rôles. Les analyses factorielles font apparaître cinq facteurs de comportement identiques pour chacune des deux formes de l'instrument qui ont été utilisées. Une analyse factorielle (two-mode factor analysis) à 6 types de sujets pour chacune des deux formes, mais il n'y a pas de différences majeures dans les structures de réponses par rapport aux facteurs de comportement. Les échantillons sont supposés provenir de la même population. Les résultats sont cohérents avec l'hypothèse selon laquelle des normes de conduite clairement définies sont liées aux différences dans le statut social des paires de rôles qui reflètent le caractère hiérarchique de la société. l'hypothèse d'une invariance interculturelle de la structure factorielle des normes de conduite est confirmée. Les AA. résument brièvement les différences essentielles qui apparaissent dans la perception des rôles chez les Américains, les Grecs et les Péruviens.     

Social Quality and Happiness—An Analysis of the Survey Data from Three Chinese Cities

Over the last two decades, the focus of happiness research has shifted from the measurement of life quality with an emphasis on material well-being to subjective well-being. This article follows this direction of development, but moves further into social well-being. Utilizing the method of social quality analysis, this study developed an analysis of happiness by looking into the influence of social factors on happiness. The study was established on the basis of empirical data collected from a social quality survey done in Hangzhou, Xiamen, and Shenzhen during 2011–2012. The purpose of this study is to expose the relationships between social quality analysis and happiness studies. The study demonstrates a strong correlation of social quality factors with happiness, although each set of these factors has a different impact on happiness in different factor domains.     

The modified star graph and the petal diagram: two new visual aids for discrete alternative multicriteria decision making

Many studies have looked into the provisions of visual aids to multicriteria decision making. However, most of them have separated the display of alternative profiles and criteria weight information into two displays. This makes the analysis of the relationship between the criteria and alternatives and the effect of changing the criteria weights on the decision difficult. In this study, displays that can incorporate the display of both alternative profiles and criteria weight information for discrete alternative multicriteria decision-making problems are examined. The simple additive model is the multicriteria analysis method used. The result is two new visual aids for representing data of multicriteria decision-making problems, the modified star graph and the petal diagram. This paper discusses the two displays and compares their strengths and weaknesses. The results of a preliminary test conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the displays are also included. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Perspectives on Psychology and Law

The past decade saw an explosive growth in psychological research on law (particularly the judicial process) that continues unabated. This article presents an intellectual history of this research and a critical assessment of its contemporary developments. It begins by tracing four stages in the relations between psychology and law that serve to place present scholarship in perspective. Then follow two sections consisting of conceptual, methodological, and jurisprudential critiques of two topics, respectively, that traditionally have been and still remain at the center of research attention: the pretrial phase of the criminal process (eyewitness identifications) and the criminal trial itself (jury selection, jury decision making, and presentations of evidence and law to the jury). Finally, some themes are culled from past and present experience that capture the mood, difficulties, and prospects of applying psychology to the law. The purpose of this theoretical overview of the field is to suggest some insights into two recurrent questions: why has psychological research not had more of an impact on the judicial process, and what can be done about it?     

Coordinating cognitive information: task effects and individual differences in integrating information from several sources.

In many tasks people have to coordinate the information from several sources. An example would be driving a car while listening to directions. The driver has to establish a correspondence between a visual picture and verbal instructions. This paper addresses two questions concerning information coordination. Is there an ability to coordinate information received from several sources that is different from the ability to deal with information from each source, alone? Does coordination simply involve allocating resources to deal with the component tasks, or does the act of coordination itself constitute a separate task? Four experiments examined the coordination of a verbal component task with a visual-spatial and with an auditory component task. The results showed that the ability to coordinate perceptual and verbal information is separate from the ability to deal with either perceptual or verbal information, alone. A simple resource sharing model was not adequate in explaining how coordination occurred. We relate our results to a model in which perceptual reasoning occurs independently of verbal processing, but transforming perceptual information into a propositional form is affected by concurrent verbal processing.     

Brain bases of morphological processing in Chinese‐English bilingual children

Can bilingual exposure impact children's neural circuitry for learning to read? To answer this question, we investigated the brain bases of morphological awareness, one of the key spoken language abilities for learning to read in English and Chinese. Bilingual Chinese‐English and monolingual English children (N = 22, ages 7–12) completed morphological tasks that best characterize each of their languages: compound morphology in Chinese (e.g. basket + ball = basketball) and derivational morphology in English (e.g. re + do = redo). In contrast to monolinguals, bilinguals showed greater activation in the left middle temporal region, suggesting that bilingual exposure to Chinese impacts the functionality of brain regions supporting semantic abilities. Similar to monolinguals, bilinguals showed greater activation in the left inferior frontal region [BA 45] in English than Chinese, suggesting that young bilinguals form language‐specific neural representations. The findings offer new insights to inform bilingual and cross‐linguistic models of language and literacy acquisition.