Practicing Possibilities: Parents’ Explanations of Unusual Events and Children’s Possibility Thinking

Young children tend to judge improbable events to be impossible, yet there is variability across age and across individuals. Our study examined parent–child conversations about impossible and improbable events and links between parents’ explanations about those events and children’s possibility judgments in a reasoning task. Regression analyses revealed that parents’ speculation about potential mechanisms for improbable events during a parent–child book-sharing activity predicted children’s possibility judgments for similar events in an individual task and accounted for more of the variance than children’s age. Also, parents’ skepticism regarding mechanisms for impossible events was negatively correlated with children’s judgments about the possibility of improbable events. Additionally, children’s overall causal justifications for their judgments were correlated with parents’ talk about speculative mechanisms. Results suggest the importance of conversation with parents for young children’s developing understanding of the distinction between impossible and improbable.     

Pathways of Risk and Resilience: Impact of a Family Resilience Program on Active‐Duty Military Parents

Over the past decade, studies into the impact of wartime deployment and related adversities on service members and their families have offered empirical support for systemic models of family functioning and a more nuanced understanding of the mechanisms by which stress and trauma reverberate across family and partner relationships. They have also advanced our understanding of the ways in which families may contribute to the resilience of children and parents contending with the stressors of serial deployments and parental physical and psychological injuries. This study is the latest in a series designed to further clarify the systemic functioning of military families and to explicate the role of resilient family processes in reducing symptoms of distress and poor adaptation among family members. Drawing upon the implementation of the Families Overcoming Under Stress (FOCUS) Family Resilience Program at 14 active‐duty military installations across the United States, structural equation modeling was conducted with data from 434 marine and navy active‐duty families who participated in the FOCUS program. The goal was to better understand the ways in which parental distress reverberates across military family systems and, through longitudinal path analytic modeling, determine the pathways of program impact on parental distress. The findings indicated significant cross‐influence of distress between the military and civilian parents within families, families with more distressed military parents were more likely to sustain participation in the program, and reductions in distress among both military and civilian parents were significantly mediated by improvements in resilient family processes. These results are consistent with family systemic and resilient models that support preventive interventions designed to enhance family resilient processes as an important part of comprehensive services for distressed military families.     

Modification of Hostile Interpretation Bias in Depression: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Interpretation Bias Modification (IBM) is gaining attention in the literature as an intervention that alters cognitive biases and reduces associated symptoms. Forty, primarily college-aged, non-treatment-seeking adults with major depressive disorder (MDD) were randomly assigned to receive either IBM targeting hostile interpretation bias (IBM-H) or a healthy video control (HVC) condition. Compared to those in HVC, participants in IBM-H reported more benign interpretations and fewer hostile interpretations at posttreatment. No difference in depressive interpretation bias was found between groups at posttreatment. IBM-H led to improved anger control at posttreatment and follow-up compared to HVC, though no effects of condition were found on trait anger or depressive symptoms. The IBM-H group perceived their treatment as less credible than the HVC group. For individuals with high expectancy of treatment success, IBM-H led to lower posttreatment depressive symptoms compared to HVC, while findings trended in the opposite direction for those with low expectancy of success. Overall, these preliminary findings point to boundary conditions for the efficacy of IBM protocols for anger and depression and potential improvements to be made to future IBM protocols.     

Investigating the mechanisms of visually-evoked tactile sensations

When attempting to detect a near-threshold signal, participants often incorrectly report the presence of a signal, particularly when a stimulus in a different modality is presented. Here we investigated the effect of prior experience of bimodal visuotactile stimuli on the rate of falsely reported touches in the presence of a light. In Experiment 1, participants made more false alarms in light-present than light-absent trials, despite having no experience of the experimental visuotactile pairing. This suggests that light-evoked false alarms are a consequence of an existing association, rather than one learned during the experiment. In Experiment 2, we sought to manipulate the strength of the association through prior training, using supra-threshold tactile stimuli that were given a high or low association with the light. Both groups still exhibited an increased number of false alarms during light-present trials, however, the low association group made significantly fewer false alarms across conditions, and there was no corresponding group difference in the number of tactile stimuli correctly identified. Thus, while training did not affect the boosting of the tactile signal by the visual stimulus, the low association training affected perceptual decision-making more generally, leading to a lower number of illusory touch reports, independent of the light.     

The Parentification Inventory: Development,Validation, and Cross-Validation

Abstract

This study hypothesized that subjects who strongly endorse unrealistic beliefs about intimate relationships would score higher on a measure of exposure to popular romantic media than subjects who do not. The relationship between exposure to media and satisfaction with one's current intimate relationship was also explored. Results for the 109 adult subjects support the hypothesis (r=.18, p<.05). There was also a trend for married women who were more exposed to the popular romantic media to be less satisfied with their current intimate relationships (r=? .26, p<.10). These results would seem to have significant psychological and social implications.