Self-concept differentiation across the adult life span.

This study used 2 measures to examine 158 adults' (80 men, 78 women; ages 20 to 88 years) self-concept differentiation (SCD) across 5 role-specific self-representations. Findings revealed that the 2 measures did not assess SCD in similar ways and that they showed different associations with age. Specifically, the 1st measure was not significantly related to age, whereas the 2nd measure showed a curvilinear, U-shaped association with age. The 2nd SCD index also showed significant associations with several measures of emotional adjustment and 6 dimensions of psychological well-being. Additional analyses showed that age moderated the associations between SCD and positive and negative psychological well-being. A high level of SCD was associated with lower positive and higher negative psychological well-being for both young and older adults. However, this effect was significantly more pronounced in older adults.     

Rated helpfulness and partner-reported smoking cessation support across the pregnancy-postpartum continuum.

Support interventions have not changed smoking cessation rates significantly. The pregnancy-postpartum continuum presents a unique opportunity to examine patterns of support. Expectant couples (N = 477) were surveyed twice during pregnancy and 3 times postpartum. Partners reported positive and negative smoking-specific support; women reported the helpfulness of partner support. Linear trends suggest that women viewed support as more helpful during pregnancy than during postpartum. Partners' provision of positive support across the continuum depended on their smoking; provision of negative support depended on women's smoking. Partners who smoked provided lower levels of both positive and negative support, especially postpartum. Women who smoked throughout the pregnancy perceived their partner's negative support as helpful. Implications are that partners who smoke may need help staying engaged in the support process. Partners may provide negative support in response to women's smoking cues. Women who are struggling with cessation may not view negative support as negative.     

Stress and reproduction: introduction to the special section.

This special section on stress and reproduction is devoted to an emerging frontier in interdisciplinary research that merits the attention of health psychologists. The majority of the studies concern the role of stress and emotion on birth outcomes such as low birth weight, fetal growth and preterm delivery, or mechanisms underlying these findings. The implications of this research extend from maternal and infant health to life-span development and adult health and mortality.     

A new twist on old ideas: how sitting reorients crawlers

Traditionally, crawling and sitting are considered distinct motor behaviors with different postures and functions. Ten‐ to 12‐month‐old infants were observed in the laboratory or in their homes while being coaxed to crawl continuously over long, straight walkways (Study 1; N = 20) and during spontaneous crawling during free play (Study 2; N = 20). In every context, infants stopped crawling to sit 3–6 times per minute. Transitions from crawling to sitting frequently turned infants' bodies away from the direction of heading; subsequent transitions back to crawling were offset by as much as 180° from the original direction of heading. Apparently, body reorientations result from the biomechanics of transitioning between crawling and sitting. Findings indicate that sustained, linear crawling is likely an epiphenomenon of how gait is studied in standard paradigms. Postural transitions between crawling and sitting are ubiquitous and can represent a functional unit of action. These transitions and the accompanying body reorientations likely have cascading effects for infants' exploration, visual perception, and spatial cognition.     

Online Victimization,Womanism, and Body Esteem among Young Black Women: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach

Digital media use represents a central part of young adults’ daily life, within which social interactions increasingly center on visual content. While visual content, such as representations of self, may facilitate positive social interactivity, it may also increase susceptibility to harmful social interactions, such as appearance-related online victimization. Black women’s bodies are often the target of gendered racial microaggressions and sexual victimization which can contribute to body image concerns. Still, the online victimization–body esteem link among Black women remains unexamined. This study used structural equation modeling to examine the associations between four categories of online victimization (i.e., general online victimization, online individual racial victimization, online vicarious racial victimization, online sexual victimization) and body esteem. We further examined whether womanism, an identity-based factor, moderated the relationship between online victimization and body esteem. A sample of 1,595 young Black women completed an online survey. Results showed that online sexual victimization was significantly negatively associated with body esteem and that high levels of womanism buffered the harmful impact of general online victimization on body esteem. Future research is needed to examine Black women’s and gender expansive people’s experiences with online gendered racial victimization along with other forms of online intersectional oppression.

     

Risk-taking behavior and adolescent suicide attempts

This study examined the overall rates of common risk-taking behaviors in a sample of 109 adolescents, aged 13 to 18 years, who made a suicide attempt, compared to a matched control sample of 218 adolescents in the community. No differences in either the total number of risk-taking behavior or the frequency of individual risk-taking behaviors were found. These findings suggest that suicide attempts in adolescents are not a function of risk-taking behavior.     

Explicating the Dispositional Basis of the OCRDs: a Hierarchical Perspective

We examined the dispositional component of the obsessive-compulsive and related disorders (OCRDs) in a large adult sample. Our battery included two hierarchical measures of personality, which allowed us to examine relations with both higher-order domains and lower-order facets of the five-factor model. In addition, our study included multiple indicators of each OCRD, which enabled us to model them as latent factors. Principal factor analyses of these indicators revealed six dimensions: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Hoarding, Excoriation, Body Dissatisfaction, Trichotillomania, and Body Preoccupation. Body Dissatisfaction, OCD, and Hoarding showed the strongest links to personality, with the other symptoms displaying more moderate associations. Neuroticism was the strongest and broadest predictor of the OCRDs at the domain level, exhibiting significant positive relations with every symptom dimension except Body Preoccupation in both bivariate and multivariate analyses. Conscientiousness showed negative associations with Body Dissatisfaction and Hoarding, and was positively related to Body Preoccupation. Finally, openness was negatively linked to OCD at both the bivariate and multivariate level. In comparison to domain-level analyses, the lower-order facets jointly contributed an additional 11.8% (Excoriation) to 17.6% (OCD) of the criterion variance, with a mean increment of 14.2%. Three neuroticism facets—anger, self-consciousness, and impulsiveness—displayed robust positive associations with two or more OCRD symptom factors, but no lower-order trait contributed significantly in every analysis. Overall, our results indicate that—similar to most other forms of psychopathology—OCRD symptoms have a common component of elevated neuroticism.