Issues in the treatment of depressed children

Basic research into the cognitive, behavioral, familial, and physiological disturbances associated with depressive disorders during childhood is reviewed. Implications for the development of a treatment program are discussed and a comprehensive treatment model is proposed. The proposed model includes intervention strategies for the child, parents, family, and school. The child component consists of intervention strategies for the affective, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological disturbances that are evident from the existing research. The parent training component is designed to address disturbances in parenting due to cognitive disturbances and skills deficits. The family therapy component emphasizes changing interaction patterns that communicate schema-consistent maladaptive interactions. A school consultation component is proposed in which school personnel support the skills training through prompting use of the skills and reinforcement of the use of the coping skills.     

Sexism, Hostility toward Women, and Endorsement of Beauty Ideals and Practices: Are Beauty Ideals Associated with Oppressive Beliefs?

Relationships between the endorsement of Western beauty ideals and practices and measures of hostility toward women and sexism were studied in 159 college men and 194 college women. The participants were predominately 18 or 19 years of age and of European American ethnicity. Correlations were computed between five factor analytically derived measures of beauty ideals and practices, two measures of the thin body ideal, and the following measures: Hostility toward Women Scale (HTWS; Lonsway & Fitzgerald, 1995), Attitudes toward Women Scale (AWS; Spence & Helmreich, 1978), and the two subscales of the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI; Glick & Fiske, 1996): hostile sexism (ASI-H) and benevolent sexism (ASI-B). It was found that endorsement of Western beauty ideals and practices was associated with hostility toward women, traditional sexism, hostile sexism, and, to a lesser extent, benevolent sexism. Results support feminist critiques of beauty practices as oppressive.     

Language and the perception of emotion

Three studies assessed the relationship between language and the perception of emotion. The authors predicted and found that the accessibility of emotion words influenced participants' speed or accuracy in perceiving facial behaviors depicting emotion. Specifically, emotion words were either primed or temporarily made less accessible using a semantic satiation procedure. In Studies 1 and 2, participants were slower to categorize facial behaviors depicting emotion (i.e., a face depicting anger) after an emotion word (e.g., "anger") was satiated. In Study 3, participants were less accurate to categorize facial behaviors depicting emotion after an emotion word was satiated. The implications of these findings for a linguistically relative view of emotion perception are discussed.     

Promoting Preschoolers’ Emotional Competence Through Prosocial TV and Mobile App Use

This study explored the relationship between preschoolers’ exposure to Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood television programming and its accompanying mobile app and preschoolers’ emotion knowledge and use of emotion regulation strategies. An experiment involving 121 parent-child dyads from 3 US metro areas found that children who played with the Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood app, and those who both played with the app and watched episodes of the program, employed the emotion regulation strategies taught by Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood media more frequently 1 month later than children in a control condition. Preschoolers (3- and 4-year-olds) also exhibited higher levels of emotion knowledge 1 month after playing with the app. In addition, watching Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood TV episodes in the home led to increases in parents’ provision of active mediation. Implications for families, educators, and producers of educational media content are discussed.     

A Socioecological Approach to Relational Demography: How Relative Representation and Respectful Coworkers Affect Job Attitudes

Purpose

This paper advances a socioecological perspective toward understanding the relationship between demography and job attitudes by considering the joint effects of individual ethnicity and ethnic group relative representation—the degree to which an individual’s own demographic group is represented similarly in their organization and the community in which the organization is located.

Design/Methodology/Approach

Hierarchical polynomial regression analyses of census and survey data from 57,000 employees of 142 hospitals in the United Kingdom suggest that ethnic group relative representation is related to ethnic minority employees’ job satisfaction and turnover intentions.

Findings

An asymmetric pattern emerged wherein the effect of under-representation on turnover intentions was stronger than the effect of over-representation. Moreover, the effects of relative representation varied with respectful treatment by coworkers; relative representation had little effect on attitudes of employees who reported low levels of coworker respect but generally enhanced attitudes when respect was high.

Originality/Value

This work points to the meaningful role that socioecological factors can play in what are typically considered to be intraorganizational phenomena, thereby highlighting the need for organizational research to assess relevant aspects of the communities in which organizations are embedded.

     

Daily hassles,ethnic identity and psychological adjustment among Lebanese‐Canadians

Acculturation, as a process of cultural change, has been related to a number of consequences including psychological distress. While some research has demonstrated how post‐migration stressors influence the adjustment of immigrants, it has been proposed that daily hassles—irritants in daily interactions—such as minor chronic problems with the in‐group and the out‐group have an even greater impact on adjustment than major life events. Furthermore, research has shown that ethnic identification profiles and discrimination are two factors closely associated with adjustment among immigrant populations. This study was, therefore, meant to further investigate the relationships among ethnic identity, discrimination (personal and collective), and adjustment (self‐esteem and depression) through a model proposing daily hassles as a mediator among these factors. There were 100 first‐ and second‐generation Lebanese‐Canadians who participated in the study. They completed a questionnaire measuring ethnic identification to their in‐ and out‐group, discrimination, hassles experienced with their in‐ and out‐group, depression, and self‐esteem. Path analyses revealed the mediating role of daily hassles between identity and discrimination, on the one hand, and indices of depression and self‐esteem, on the other. The results also demonstrated that greater experienced personal discrimination was associated with higher levels of experienced out‐group hassles and more out‐group hassles related to lower levels of adjustment. Processes of identity revealed that a higher level of Lebanese identity was associated with less experienced in‐ and out‐group hassles, which positively related to better adjustment. However, Canadian identity directly and positively related to depression. These results are discussed, first, with respect to their implications for current theorizing regarding the process of acculturation. Daily hassles would indeed now stand as a key mediating factor in the explanation of adjustment among immigrants. Second, the findings are deemed to have practical implications in term of the direction of programmes aimed at alleviating acculturative stress.     

The Factor Structure of MASC Youth Report in Norwegian School Children

Identifying children with symptoms of anxiety before they develop clinical disorders is important. The objective of our study was to examine the latent factor structure of the MASC (youth report version) in a large self-selected sample of school children in 4th to 6th grade, and examine if the measure had a comparable factor structure for gender and age. Gender and age differences in anxiety symptoms were also examined. Children (N?=?1686, 53.8% female) were recruited from schools during pretest of an ongoing randomized, controlled, indicative intervention. Latent variable modelling was used to determine the underlying concepts of the MASC. We found good model fit for the four-factor model, however some items on the Harm/Avoidance scale had low factor loadings. Invariance analysis indicated that the MASC had similar factor structure (comparable meaning) for boys and girls and for younger and older children in this sample. Girls scored significantly higher than boys on all subscales and on the Total Anxiety scale. Age differences were only found on the Separation Anxiety scale. Overall, the original four-factor structure of the MASC was confirmed within a large sample of school children and was invariant across gender and age. However, the Harm/avoidance scale warrants some attention. The MASC is a potentially useful measure to be used for screening purposes in a school setting.     

Addressing Relationship Health Needs in Primary Care: Adapting the Marriage Checkup for Use in Medical Settings with Military Couples

The overall objective of this study was to pilot the Marriage Checkup (MC), a brief intervention for enhancing marital resiliency tailored to a military population, for use by internal behavioral health consultants (IBHCs) working in an integrated primary care clinic. The MC was revised to fit into the fast-paced environment of primary care (e.g., streamlined to fit within three 30-min appointments), and military-relevant material was added to the content. IBHCs working in primary care were then trained to offer the intervention. Thirty participants were enrolled in the study and completed a relationship checkup and one-month follow-up questionnaires. Analysis of post-test and one-month follow-up data showed statistically significant improvements in participants’ marital health compared to pre-treatment. The MC intervention appeared to be well received by both couples and IBHCs.