The First Man in Her Life: Father Emotional Responsiveness During Adolescence and College Women's Sexual Refusal Behaviors

Few empirical studies have examined how fathers influence daughters’ sexual interactions with male peers. We hypothesized that paternal emotional responsiveness would empower daughters to refuse unwanted sex. Female undergraduates (N = 144) and their fathers completed measures of paternal responsiveness during adolescence; daughters also reported their global self-worth, acceptance of male partner dominance, and sexual refusal behaviors. As expected, paternal responsiveness promoted daughters’ refusals of unwanted sex. Paternal responsiveness predicted daughters’ self-worth, partially explaining daughters’ increased sexual assertiveness. Perceived paternal responsiveness also negatively predicted daughters’ acceptance of male dominance. These results suggest that positive paternal relationships promote daughters’ sexual agency.     

Consistency in individual and family theoretical orientation from assessment to therapy: Its impact on the effectiveness of therapy

Abstract

The effect of consistency in theoretical orientation, whether individual or family, from assessment to therapy on the effectiveness of psychotherapy was examined in archival data. All identified patients (N=131) were ages 5-18 and comprised four groups according to the orientation of their assessment and therapy: the individual-individual (n=49) and family-family (n=49) groups and the individual-family (n=21) and family-individual (n=12) groups. Theoretical consistency was positively associated with therapy duration and participation, as well as with outcome. This association was attributable to the significant relation between family assessment prior to family therapy and the dependent variables of continuation in therapy, percent of sessions attended, nature of termination, and percent of missed sessions. Results support the theoretical position of family therapists that family assessment is the assessment method of choice.     

Are individual differences in appetitive and defensive motivation related? A psychophysiological examination in two samples

Appetitive and defensive motivation account for a good deal of variance in personality and mental health, but whether individual differences in these systems are correlated or orthogonal has not been conclusively established. Previous investigations have generally relied on self-report and have yielded conflicting results. We therefore assessed the relation between psychophysiological indices of appetitive and defensive motivation during elicitation of these motivational states: specifically, frontal electroencephalogram asymmetry during reward anticipation and startle response during anticipation of predictable or unpredictable threat of shock. Results in a sample of psychopathology-free community members (n=63), an independent sample of undergraduates with a range of internalising symptoms (n=64), and the combination of these samples (n=127) revealed that differences in responding to the two tasks were not significantly correlated. Average coefficients approached zero in all three samples (community: .04, undergraduate: ?.01, combined: .06). Implications of these findings for research on normal and abnormal personality are discussed.     

Parental meta-emotion structure predicts family and child outcomes

Abstract

Fifty-six families with a preschool child whose parents varied widely in parental marital satisfaction were studied at two time points: at time-I when the children were 5 years old and again at time-2 when the children were 8 years old. At time-1 each parent was separately interviewed about their “meta-emotion structure”, that is, their feelings about their own emotions, and their attitudes, and responses to their children's anger and sadness. Their behaviour during this interview was coded with a meta-emotion coding system. Two meta-emotion variables were studied for each parent, awareness of the parent's own sadness, and parental “coaching” of the child's anger. We termed the high end of these variables an “emotion coaching” (EC) meta-emotion structure. Meta-emotion structure was found to relate to time-1 marital and parent-child interaction. EC-type parents had marriages that were less hostile and they were less negative and more positive during parent-child interaction. Their children showed less evidence of physiological stress, greater ability to focus attention, and had less negative play with their best friends. At time-2 those children showed higher academic achievement in mathematics and reading had fewer behaviour problems, and were physically healthier than non-EC parents. The relations between child outcome and parental meta-emotion structure were not explained by social class variables, emotional expressiveness, or the greater happiness and stability of parents with an EC-type meta-emotion structure.     

“Clamber not you up to the casements”: On ghetto views and viewing

On 29 March 1516 the Venetian Senate ordered all Jews residing in the city to move behind the walls of the ghetto. The mandate stipulated that Jews would be watched by Christian guards twenty-four hours a day and restricted by a nighttime curfew. In such a surveilled space, Venice’s ghetto windows played an integral role in the complex and interactive networks constituting the city and its constituency. The singular status of ghetto architecture—especially the injunctions regarding its fenestration—provides an opportunity to explore the processes of ghettoization that partitioned a population and monitored the activities of Jews and Christians alike. Windows produced spatial occasions for looking and being looked at that reinforced social difference and created profound cultural fissures. This article studies the windows of the Venetian ghetto and the city’s ongoing claims to obstruct them in the early modern period. To study the window is to study the demarcation between public good and private plurality, between the citizen and the subordinated Other.     

Sammelreferat über Arbeiten aus dem Gebiet der Farbenwahrnehmung

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Influence of Church Attendance and Spirituality in a Randomized Controlled Trial to Increase Mammography Use Among a Low-Income, Tri-Racial, Rural Community

Background The influence of church attendance and spirituality on mammography use was studied among Native American, White, and African American women living in a rural county. Methods A randomized trial was conducted to increase mammography use. Women (n = 851) were randomly assigned to receive either an educational program delivered by a lay health advisor or a physician letter and brochure about cervical cancer screening (control group). Church attendance and spirituality were measured at baseline and mammography use was evaluated 12 months after enrollment using medical record review. Results Almost two-thirds of the women reported that they attended church at least once a week, and less than 4% were classified as having low spirituality. Church attendance (P = 0.299) or spirituality (P = 0.401) did not have a significant impact on mammography use. Conclusions Church attendance and spirituality did not impact mammography use.     

Matching-to-sample abstract-concept learning by pigeons

Abstract concepts--rules that transcend training stimuli--have been argued to be unique to some species. Pigeons, a focus of much concept-learning research, were tested for learning a matching-to-sample abstract concept. Five pigeons were trained with three cartoon stimuli. Pigeons pecked a sample 10 times and then chose which of two simultaneously presented comparison stimuli matched the sample. After acquisition, abstract-concept learning was tested by presenting novel cartoons on 12 out of 96 trials for 4 consecutive sessions. A cycle of doubling the training set followed by retraining and novel-testing was repeated eight times, increasing the set size from 3 to 768 items. Transfer performance improved from chance (i.e., no abstract-concept learning) to a level equivalent to baseline performance (>80%) and was similar to an equivalent function for same/different abstract-concept learning. Analyses assessed the possibility that item-specific choice strategies accounted for acquisition and transfer performance. These analyses converged to rule out item-specific strategies at all but the smallest set-sizes (3-24 items). Ruling out these possibilities adds to the evidence that pigeons learned the relational abstract concept of matching-to-sample.