Dogmatism, Locus of Control of Reinforcement, Importance of Issues, and Relationships to Political Activity

This study examined the cumulative and interaction effects of dogmatism, I-E, and issue salience on political activity. Indexes of the variables were developed from factor-analytic results based on personal, group, and mail interviews with 212 adults in the Detroit area. The three psychological variables were then dichotomized at the median and related to political activity, utilizing multiple regression and a step-wise interaction procedure. The multiple r was .41 ( p <.01) with issue salience contributing the greatest amount of variance. Comparisons to multiple-regression predictions indicated interaction effects with low-issue importance reducing political activity and high-issue importance increasing political activity. Split-half analyses indicated substantial stability in the findings. A broader conceptualization for relating psychological variables to political activity was discussed.     

Exposure to parental and community violence and the relationship to bullying perpetration and victimization among early adolescents: A parallel process growth mixture latent transition analysis

This study examined heterogeneity in parental and community violence exposure during middle school and its association with bullying perpetration and victimization in high school. Youth (N = 1,611) in four Midwestern middle schools participated. Parallel process growth mixture latent transition analysis was used to understand how trajectory profiles of middle school violence exposure was associated with high school bullying profiles. Impulsivity, depression, school belonging, and delinquency were assessed as moderators of the transition probabilities. A three class solution was found for violence exposure: decreasing parental violence/increasing community violence (n = 103; 6.4%), stable high parental violence and low community violence (n = 1,027; 63.7%), and increasing parental violence and stable high community violence (n = 481; 29.8%). Similarly, a three class solution was found for high school bullying: High Bullying Perpetration and High Victimization class (n = 259; 16%), Victimization only (n = 1145; 71%), and low all class (n = 207; 13%). The largest proportion of youth transitioning into the high bullying and high victimization class were from the decreasing parental violence/increasing community violence. Depression, impulsivity, school belonging, and delinquency all had various moderating effects on transition probabilities. Our findings make it apparent that early forms of parental and community violence are associated with aggressive behaviors and experiences with victimization during high school. Prevention and intervention efforts should target individuals who display early and chronic patterns of exposure to violence as these individuals have the greatest risk of later aggressive and victimization in high school.     

Functional equivalence classes in rats: Repeated olfactory discrimination reversals and delayed stimulus probes

The simultaneous matching-to-sample procedures that are widely used to study stimulus equivalence in human participants have generally been unsuccessful in animals. However, functional equivalence classes have been demonstrated in pigeons and sea lions using a concurrent repeated reversal discrimination procedure. In this procedure, responding to one set of stimuli is reinforced but responding to a different set is not and the set associated with reinforcement is changed with multiple reversals during the experiment. The experiments reported here were designed to assess whether functional equivalence classes could be demonstrated in rats using similar techniques. Rats were initially trained with two sets of olfactory stimuli (six odors/set). Following many reversals, probe reversal sessions were conducted in which rats were exposed to a subset of the members of each set and, later in the session, the withheld stimuli were introduced. Responding to these delayed probe trials in accord with the reversed contingencies constituted transfer of function. There was some evidence of transfer in Experiment 1, but the effects were relatively weak and variable. Experiment 2 introduced procedural changes and found strong evidence of transfer of function consistent with the formation of functional equivalence classes. These procedures offer a promising strategy to study symbolic behavior in rodents.     

Sex differences in developmental trends of suicide ideation, plans, and attempts among European American adolescents

Although suicide ideation, plans, and attempts increase during adolescence, it remains unclear whether boys' and girls' risk for these outcomes peaks at different ages. We used longitudinal categorical data (never, once, 2+ times) from the Family Transitions Project (N = 1,248 rural European Americans, ages 11-19) to investigate whether yearly prevalence rates of adolescent suicidal episodes follow different patterns by sex. Multiple-group growth models revealed that peak levels of past-year ideation and plans occurred during mid adolescence for girls, but slowly increased through late adolescence for boys. We found that prevalence patterns for attempts were very similar for boys and girls, with both increasing through mid adolescence and then declining, although girls' risk declined slightly more rapidly. This information may help alert gatekeepers to developmental periods during which boys and girls are particularly vulnerable to suicide-related experiences, and also may help inform the timing of preventive efforts.     

Clinic-Referred Mothers’ Autobiographical Narratives as Markers of Their Parenting Styles

Forty clinic-referred mothers completed questionnaires describing their children’s problems and the mothers’ parenting styles. In addition, each mother told three stories about their personal experiences in child care and one story about being cared for in their families of origin. Each story was transcribed and rated for coherence on six dimensions describing narrative clarity and richness. Results showed the narrative ratings to be fairly reliable and internally consistent, and the questionnaires proved to be psychometrically sound except for one of the parenting style scales that we dropped from further data analyses. Results showed the two remaining scales (authoritative and authoritarian styles) covaried with mothers’ reports about problems with their children. Correlations between mothers’ narrative coherence scores and their parenting style scores showed mixed results: authoritative style was not correlated with narrative coherence, but authoritarian style was negatively correlated with this narrative measure. Regression analyses using the six coherence scales and the authoritarian style scale showed the causality scale to account for most of the variance in authoritarian style. We speculated on the nature of this latter covariation.     

Internalization of the thin and muscular body ideal and disordered eating in adolescence: the mediation effects of body esteem

This study investigates body esteem factors (weight-esteem and appearance-esteem) as mediators of the relationship between ‘internalization of the ideal body figure’ and disordered eating behaviors (restrained, emotional and external eating) in a community sample of adolescent males (n = 810) and females (n = 1137) from the Ontario Research on Eating and Adolescent Lifestyles (REAL) study. Mediation models were examined using a bootstrapping approach to test indirect effects and indirect contrasts. In males, weight-esteem partially mediated the relationship between muscular ideal and restrained eating; appearance-esteem partially mediated effects in the emotional and external eating regressions. In females, both weight-esteem and appearance-esteem partially mediated the relationship between thin ideal and all three forms of disordered eating; weight-esteem was a stronger mediator for restrained eating, and appearance-esteem a stronger mediator for emotional and external eating. Body esteem is important to consider for prevention and treatment of disordered eating in both genders.     

Content-embedded tasks beat complex span for predicting comprehension

Discourse comprehension requires one to process information that is actively maintained in working memory (WM). Therefore, we hypothesized that individual differences in comprehension would be predicted better by working memory tasks that capture the concurrent demands of processing and maintenance of the same memory elements (i.e., content-embedded tasks) than by WM tasks that require the maintenance of an extraneous memory load during processing (e.g., complex span tasks). Two hundred sixty-one undergraduates completed three content-embedded tasks, three complex span tasks, and three measures of comprehension. Results of structural equation modeling indicated that the content-embedded tasks accounted for a greater amount of variance in comprehension than did complex span tasks. Thus, tasks that require one to coordinate the processing and maintenance of task-specific memory elements are preferable for capturing the relationship between WM and comprehension.