Attachment and affect regulation: a framework for family treatment of conduct disorder

Conduct disorder (CD), a pervasive adolescent disorder with clinically significant antisocial behaviors, has been a difficult syndrome to treat successfully. Recently, research on affect regulation and attachment has suggested that attachment and affect regulation strategies may underlie the development of conduct disorder in adolescents, implying that attention to these factors might improve family treatment for CD. In this review of the research literature, I discuss the role of attachment and affect regulation in the development and treatment of CD. In addition, I present information about the framework, intervention protocol, and preliminary evidence of effectiveness of an attachment- and affect regulation-based intervention that has been developed and implemented with multiple-family groups of parents and incarcerated adolescents.     

Two-year-olds' search strategies and visual tracking in a hidden displacement task

Children younger than 3 years have difficulty with search tasks that involve hidden displacement. Partial visual information was provided about a ball's path as it moved toward a hiding place. Children (2.0 and 2.5 years old) saw a ball rolling down a ramp placed behind a transparent screen with 4 opaque doors. A wall, placed on the ramp and directly behind 1 of the doors, protruded above the screen and stopped the ball. Children were asked to find the ball. The transparency of the screen permitted visual tracking of the ball between the doors, but its final resting place was obscured. Both age groups were equally proficient at tracking the ball as it rolled behind the screen, but the 2.5-year-olds were more likely to reach to the correct door. Looking behavior was related to errors in the younger group in that tracking that stopped short or continued past the correct door was associated with incorrect choices.     

Depressive symptoms and lymphocyte proliferation in older adults

In an 18-month prospective study, community-dwelling older adults, including both spousal caregivers of dementia patients and noncaregiving controls, were examined. Participants were selected on the basis of the presence or absence of chronic depressive symptoms that exceeded a cutoff score for clinically relevant depressive symptoms on a self-report symptom measure. Compared with nondepressed older adults, those with chronic, mild depressive symptoms had poorer T cell responses to 2 mitogens from baseline to follow-up. Additionally, among individuals with depressive symptoms, older age was associated with the poorest blastogenic response to the mitogens at follow-up. These findings extend the association between depression and immune function to community-dwelling older adults with chronic, mild depressive symptoms.     

The interactive effects of conscientiousness and agreeableness on job performance

The authors hypothesized that the relationship between conscientiousness and job performance would be stronger for persons high in agreeableness than for those low in agreeableness. Results of hierarchical moderated regression analyses for 7 independent samples of employees across diverse occupations provided support for the hypothesis in 5 of the samples. In samples supporting the hypothesis, among the highly conscientious workers, those low in agreeableness were found to receive lower ratings of job performance than workers high in agreeableness. One explanation for lack of an interaction between conscientiousness and agreeableness in the other 2 samples is that those jobs were not characterized by frequent, cooperative interactions with others. Overall, the results show that highly conscientious workers who lack interpersonal sensitivity may be ineffective, particularly in jobs requiring cooperative interchange with others.     

Putting the cart before the horse: the benefits of arbitrating before mediating

The authors examined the impact of 2 hybrid dispute resolution procedures (mediation-arbitration [med-arb] and arbitration-mediation [arb-med]) and 3 disputant dyadic structures (individual vs. individual, individual vs. team, and team vs. team) on various dispute outcomes. Consistent with W. H. Ross and D. E. Conlon (2000), the authors found that disputants in the arb-med procedure (a) settled in the mediation phase of their procedure more frequently and (b) achieved settlements of higher joint benefit than did disputants in the med-arb procedure. These results suggest that arb-med may be a dispute resolution procedure with broader applicability than originally imagined.     

Five-factor model of personality and job satisfaction: a meta-analysis

This study reports results of a meta-analysis linking traits from the 5-factor model of personality to overall job satisfaction. Using the model as an organizing framework, 334 correlations from 163 independent samples were classified according to the model. The estimated true score correlations with job satisfaction were -.29 for Neuroticism, .25 for Extraversion, .02 for Openness to Experience, .17 for Agreeableness, and .26 for Conscientiousness. Results further indicated that only the relations of Neuroticism and Extraversion with job satisfaction generalized across studies. As a set, the Big Five traits had a multiple correlation of .41 with job satisfaction, indicating support for the validity of the dispositional source of job satisfaction when traits are organized according to the 5-factor model.     

Perceiving personal discrimination: the role of group status and legitimizing ideology

It was hypothesized that relative group status and endorsement of ideologies that legitimize group status differences moderate attributions to discrimination in intergroup encounters. According to the status-legitimacy hypothesis, the more members of low-status groups endorse the ideology of individual mobility, the less likely they are to attribute negative outcomes from higher status group members to discrimination. In contrast, the more members of high-status groups endorse individual mobility, the more likely they are to attribute negative outcomes from lower status group members to discrimination. Results from 3 studies using 2 different methodologies provide support for this hypothesis among members of different high-status (European Americans and men) and low-status (African Americans, Latino Americans, and women) groups.     

Relation of maximal ankle dorsiflexion angle and passive resistive torque to passive-elastic stiffness of ankle dorsiflexion stretch

The maximal passive ankle dorsiflexion angle and the maximal passive resistive torque at this angle were measured for 81 women 20 to 84 years of age and correlated with the passive-elastic stiffness (stiffness) of an ankle dorsiflexion stretch. Pearson correlation coefficients and multiple regression analyses were used to examine whether the two clinical measurements could predict ankle stiffness. The maximal passive resistive torque showed a moderate correlation with stiffness in the full stretch range (r = .69) and high correlation with stiffness in the last half of the full stretch range (r = .84). The maximal dorsiflexion angle showed a low correlation with stiffness in the full stretch range (r = .27) and in the last half of the full stretch range (r = .36). The maximal passive resistive torque and the dorsiflexion angle together accounted for 54% of the stiffness variance in the full stretch range and 76% of the stiffness variance in the last half of the full stretch range. Thus, the clinical measurements of the maximal passive dorsiflexion angle and the maximal passive resistive torque were directly and significantly related to the ankle dorsiflexion passive-elastic stiffness and good predictors of stiffness in the last half of the passive ankle dorsiflexion stretch.