Mediation of Mothers’ Anxiety and Parenting in Children’s Behavior Problems during COVID-19

The outbreak of COVID-19 is affecting the lives of millions of families around the world. The current study was carried out in Israel, following the pandemic’s initial outbreak and during the resulting enforced quarantine, confining parents and children to their homes. A sample of 141 Israeli mothers with at least one child between the ages of 3 and 12 (M?=?6.92, SD?=?2.55) participated as volunteers. About half the sample (50.7%) consisted of girls. Most mothers were cohabiting with a spouse (93%). Mothers completed online questionnaires about their perceptions about the health and economic threats of COVID-19, availability of social support, their anxiety symptoms, hostile/coercive and supportive/engaged parenting behavior, and their children’s behavior problems. Results showed expected significant associations between the mothers’ reports about having little social support, their anxiety symptoms, hostile/coercive and supportive/engaged parenting behavior, and children’s externalizing problems. Likewise, expected significant associations were found between mothers’ perceptions about the health and economic threats of COVID-19, their anxiety symptoms, hostile/coercive parenting behavior, and children’s internalizing and externalizing problems. Importantly, maternal anxiety and hostile/coercive parenting behavior mediated the associations between lack of support, negative perceptions about the health and economic threats of COVID-19, and children’s behavior problems. These findings stress the importance of mothers’ mental health and parenting behaviors for children’s socioemotional adaptation in the context of COVID-19. Implications of the findings for family interventions intended to help parents and children at this time are suggested.

     

Perceptions of Prolonged Occupation as Barriers to Conflict Resolution

The goal of this research was to examine whether a denial of a prolonged occupation by the occupying society constitutes a meaningful sociopsychological barrier to resolving the conflict peacefully. We hypothesized that this perception will be associated with objections both to conflict resolution processes and to specific compromises intended to end the occupation. Furthermore, we hypothesized that the association between denial of the occupation and compromises will be partially mediated by denial of its costs, low levels of moral emotions, and closure to new information about the conflict. Taking the prolonged Israeli occupation as our case study, we used three nationwide representative polls of Jewish Israelis to test our hypotheses. The studies supported our hypotheses, pointing to the distinct role that the perception of prolonged occupation by the occupying society plays in peacefully ending this situation, and the psychological mechanisms underlying occupation denial as a barrier to conflict resolution.     

(Re)encountering Individuality: Schlegel's Romantic Imperative as a Response to Nihilism

According to Friedrich Schlegel: “The Romantic imperative demands [that] all nature and science should become art [and] art should become nature and science”; “[P]oetry and philosophy should be made unified”, and “life and society [should be made] poetic”. The aim of this paper is to explain why Schlegel believes that this is an imperative that constrains philosophy and ordinary life. I argue that the answer to this question requires that we regard the Romantic imperative as a response to the skeptical worry that was introduced by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi as nihilism. The aspect of nihilism that I discuss concerns the worry that we are incapable of experiencing individuals qua individuals. According to Schlegel, this skeptical threat requires a reorientation in thought and philosophical method, one that must be modeled on the aesthetic orientation towards the world. More precisely, the experience of individuals qua individuals, which is called into question by the nihilist, depends on the special normative structure of the creative and critical attitude towards art and beauty that Schlegel called Romantic Poesie. Kant failed to address nihilism because he failed to recognize that the normative structure that he himself ascribed to the judgment of taste is required also for experiencing individuals as individuals, and for being properly responsive to persons.     

Effects of perception versus imagery on later recognition of visual patterns.

Three experiments were conducted to determine the role of imagery in aiding memory for visual information and to compare its effectiveness relative to direct perception. Subjects engaged in orienting tasks in which they had to decide whether the second of two sequentially presented meaningless patterns was a part of the first. They later received unexpected recognition tests for the original drawings. Increasing the interval between patterns by adding an extra post-stimulus period for imaginal processing improved later recognition scores. Experiments comparing continued perception with an equal blank interval suggested that periods of direct perception and of imagery are about equally effective in promoting memory. The results are discussed in the frame work of Craik and Lockhart (1972) with regard to type I and type II processing, and in the light of Neisser's (1967) view on imagery and perception.     

Levels of perceptual processing as a function of stimulus material and spatial location

Craik and Lockhart (1972) have proposed a framework for human memory research which is based on levels of processing. Most of the studies which support this approach have been concerned with comparing structural vs. semantic tasks. The present paper extends the levels of processing approach to earlier stages of processing and emphasizes levels ofperceptual processing. It is suggested that depth of perceptual processing depends on the nature of the stimulus material. Neisser’s (1967) theory of preattentive mechanisms and focal attention is shown to be a theory of levels of perceptual processing. Differences in the nature in which these two processes operates are discussed.     

Negative-based prominence: the role of negative features in matching and choice

Previous research related to the prominence effect (e.g., Tversky, Sattath, & Slovic, 1988) has mainly focused on the causes and boundary conditions of the effect. This article investigates the determinants of prominence and explores a negative-based prominence effect in which the negative attribute becomes the prominent one. Using a matching-choice procedure, Experiments 1 and 2 show that the negative dimension became the prominent one under two different cover stories, suggesting that the negative feature looms larger in choice than in matching. The robustness of negative-based prominence was further demonstrated in a direct choice task without matching (Experiment 3) and was shown to be resistant to the impact of added positive features (Experiment 4). Finally, Experiments 5 and 6 distinguish between two determinants of prominence: intrinsic prominence caused by attribute importance and negative-based prominence caused by negative attribute values. By lowering the values on the positive dimension and enhancing the values on the negative dimension, one can reverse the prominence effect. The results suggest that, compared to a matching task, choice leads to enhanced sensitivity to negative features. The relations between negative characteristics of an attribute and other factors that determine prominence are discussed in the final section.     

The representation of negative numbers: exploring the effects of mode of processing and notation

The representation of negative numbers was explored during intentional processing (i.e., when participants performed a numerical comparison task) and during automatic processing (i.e., when participants performed a physical comparison task). Performance in both cases suggested that negative numbers were not represented as a whole but rather their polarity and numerical magnitudes were represented separately. To explore whether this was due to the fact that polarity and magnitude are marked by two spatially separated symbols, participants were trained to mark polarity by colour. In this case there was still evidence for a separate representation of polarity and magnitude. However, when a different set of stimuli was used to refer to positive and negative numbers, and polarity was not marked separately, participants were able to represent polarity and magnitude together when numerical processing was performed intentionally but not when it was conducted automatically. These results suggest that notation is only partly responsible for the components representation of negative numbers and that the concept of negative numbers can be grasped only through that of positive numbers.     

Erratum: Decision anomalies,experimenter assumptions,and participants' comprehension: Revaluating the uncertainty effect

The above article (DOI: 10.1002/bdm.628 ) was published online on 14 November 2008 inWiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). An error was subsequently identified: Page 3, line 22: “certainty effect,” should read “uncertainty effect,”.     

Hemispheric visual atentional imbalance in patients with traumatic brain injury

We find a spatially asymmetric allocation of attention in patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI) despite the lack of obvious asymmetry in neurological indicators. Identification performance was measured for simple spatial patterns presented briefly to a locus 5 degrees into the left or right hemifield, after precuing attention to the same (ipsilateral) or opposite (cross-hemifield) side. Though the cue was non-predictive of target location overall, performance was significantly slower for cross than for ipsilateral trials in both patients and controls. We tested 21 TBI patients without overt focal brain damage and nine control subjects. Only patients demonstrated significantly worse performance for left side presentation in the ipsilateral condition. Furthermore, in the cross-hemifield condition, the left-right difference seen in TBI patients was significantly larger-reflecting a failure in producing a leftward attention shift. Again no significant difference was found in controls. These hemifield effects suggest an asymmetry in the ability of TBI patients in shifting attention to the left hemifield, whether from central fixation or from a cue in the contra-lateral hemifield. The results support basic hypotheses regarding visual attention: Attentional control may be asymmetric and attention may be a distributed, rather than localized cortical function.     

Attention and interpretation processes and trait anger experience,expression, and control

This study explored attention and interpretation biases in processing facial expressions as correlates of theoretically distinct self-reported anger experience, expression, and control. Non-selected undergraduate students (N?=?101) completed cognitive tasks measuring attention bias, interpretation bias, and Spielberger’s State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory (STAXI-2). Attention bias toward angry faces was associated with higher trait anger and anger expression and with lower anger control-in and anger control-out. The propensity to quickly interpret ambiguous faces as angry was associated with greater anger expression and its subcomponent of anger expression-out and with lower anger control-out. Interactions between attention and interpretation biases did not contribute to the prediction of any anger component suggesting that attention and interpretation biases may function as distinct mechanisms. Theoretical and possible clinical implications are discussed.