Parents Taking Action: A Psycho‐Educational Intervention for Latino Parents of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

The increased prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) among Latino children, later diagnosis, limited access to bicultural specialist support, and worsened health outcomes when compared to non‐Latinos points to the need for a culturally relevant parent education intervention. This pilot study examined the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary outcomes of a culturally derived intervention, Parents Taking Action, for 19 Spanish‐speaking mothers of children with ASD. This study introduces the Promotora de Salud Model of intervention delivery to the autism field. A mixed‐methods design including one group pre‐ and posttest design and focus groups was used to evaluate the outcomes of PTA. We found that the intervention was both feasible to implement and acceptable to participants. We also found significant increases in empowerment oriented outcomes for parents between pre‐ and posttest suggesting that the intervention is promising. Suggestions for future research and practice are offered.     

Male Cross-Dressers in Therapy: A Solution-Focused Perspective for Marriage

This paper offers techniques on how to work with male cross-dressers using solution-focused therapy. An overview about issues crossdressers often face is addressed which shows they have many of the same concerns as other clients seeking therapy. Solution-focused therapy is discussed as a way to work with male-cross dressers and their partners. A case study of a male cross-dresser and his wife is presented and possible directions are suggested for marriage and family therapists.     

‘It's not that we hate you’: Understanding children's gender attitudes and expectancies about peer relationships

Widespread gender segregation, evident throughout elementary school, seems to imply that girls and boys have negative feelings and thoughts about one another, and classic theories of inter‐group processes support this idea. However, research has generally overlooked children's feelings and perceptions about gender‐related interpersonal interactions. This paper investigates the nature of children's attitudes about same‐ and other‐gender peers, and explores how those attitudes relate to the expectancies and beliefs children hold about same‐ and other‐gender peer interactions. Children (N= 98 fifth graders) completed questionnaires assessing their global liking of own‐ and other‐gender peers ( Yee & Brown, 1994 ), positive and negative attitudes about own‐ and other‐gender peers, and outcome expectancies related to interacting with own‐ and other‐gender peers. Results indicated that rather than being characterized by out‐group negativity, children's inter‐group gender attitudes are best characterized by an in‐group positivity bias. Children's positive and negative affective attitudes were also significantly associated with outcome expectancies. In contrast, global liking of own‐ and other‐gender peers was less predictive of outcome expectancies. Thus, the greater specificity of the affective attitude measures appeared to be a more predictive and potentially fruitful gauge of children's feelings about own‐ and other‐gender peers. Results are discussed in terms of the need for finer grained and more extensive studies of children's gender‐related feelings and cognitions about own‐ and other‐gender peers.     

Procedural justice and compliance behaviour: the mediating role of emotions

Procedural justice researchers have consistently found that if authorities treat people with trust, fairness, respect and neutrality, people will not only be more willing to cooperate with authorities, but they will also be more likely to comply with authority decisions and rules. New research in this area has gone on to explore the role that emotions play in response to procedural justice and injustice. What this new research has neglected to do, however, is examine whether emotions mediate the effect of procedural justice on subsequent compliance behaviour in real life settings. Using longitudinal survey data collected in two real‐life contexts (Study 1: a taxation dispute (N = 652), and Study 2: workplaces (N = 2366)), the present study will show that perceptions of procedural justice influence the emotions experienced by people, but more importantly these emotional reactions (i.e. anger and happiness) mediate the effect of justice on subsequent compliance behaviour. In other words, it is these positive and negative emotional reactions to perceived justice or injustice that go on to predict who will and will not comply with authority decisions and rules. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Gender identity and adjustment: understanding the impact of individual and normative differences in sex typing

The relationship among gender identity, sex typing, and adjustment has attracted the attention of social and developmental psychologists for many years. However, they have explored this issue with different assumptions and different approaches. Generally the approaches differ regarding whether sex typing is considered adaptive versus maladaptive, measured as an individual or normative difference, and whether gender identity is regarded as a unidimensional or multidimensional construct. In this chapter, we consider both perspectives and suggest that the developmental timing and degree of sex typing, as well as the multidimensionality of gender identity, be considered when examining their relationship to adjustment.     

Graded structure and the speed of category verification: On the moderating effects of anticipatory control for social vs. non-social categories

Speeded classification tasks have widely been used as leverage to discern whether exemplars are considered to be typical or atypical members of categories. However, little is known about the possibly different nature of the mechanisms that underlie such reactions for “social” vs. “non-social” categories. We presented participants with typical and atypical exemplars to classify and manipulated the opportunity that participants had to control their responses by varying whether stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was short (350 ms) or long (2000 ms). For non-social categories (e.g., BIRD), participants were faster to classify typical instances than atypical instances, regardless of SOA. In contrast, we predicted and found that manipulating SOA strongly moderated the pattern of response times when motives for control were greater, as was the case when participants were presented with occupations relevant to racial stereotypes (e.g., DOCTORS and JANITORS). The implications of these findings, and their relation to effects observed with gender-based occupational stereotypes, are discussed.     

Why go the extra mile? A longitudinal study on sojourn goals and their impact on sojourners' adaptation

Although international student mobility has become a ubiquitous phenomenon in many parts of the world, the goals that student sojourners pursue when moving abroad have received little systematic attention in psychological research. Likewise, their effects on psychological outcomes such as sojourners' psychological and sociocultural adaptation abroad have not yet been examined. Hence, the purpose of the present research was twofold: First, we established the parsimonious Sojourn Goals Scale and confirmed its psychometric quality and construct validity. Second, we used a longitudinal sample of student sojourners to investigate the role of sojourn goals for sojourners' sociocultural (i.e., sojourners' social relationships) and psychological (i.e., sojourn satisfaction) adaptation abroad at 3 months into the sojourn. Regression analyses revealed substantial effects of sojourn goals on measures of sociocultural adaptation. Response surface analyses served to examine the interplay of sojourn goals and respective sojourn experiences on sojourn satisfaction. We discuss implications for both psychological and applied research and identify future research needs.     

Attention Problems as a Mediator of the Relation between Executive Function and Social Problems in a Child and Adolescent Outpatient Sample

Social functioning is critical for the successful navigation of everyday life for children, adolescents, and adults. Recent theories have postulated a neuropsychological basis for social functioning with particularly strong links with the executive functioning (EF) system. The current study examined attention problems as a mediator between EF (e.g., working memory, planning, and response inhibition) and social functioning in a child and adolescent outpatient sample. Participants were 218 children ages 6–16 (M = 10.23; SD = 2.52; 68.8 % males) who were referred to an outpatient clinic for psychoeducational assessment. Bias-corrected bootstrapping mediation analyses were used to examine the hypothesized models. The effects of working memory and planning (but not response inhibition) on social problems were mediated by attention problems in both teacher- and mother-reported models. These findings also held up in cross-source models (e.g., mother-reported attention problems as a mediator in a model predicting teacher-reported social problems). These findings have implications for dimensional models of social functioning and conceptual models for specific clinical populations (e.g., attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder).