The ironic consequences of Obama’s election: Decreased support for social justice

Do Americans think that, because of Barack Obama’s election, affirmative action and other policies that address racial injustice are no longer necessary? In this study, we examined this question by assessing participants’ perceptions of racial progress and support for remedying racial injustice both prior to and after Barack Obama’s presidential victory. Following the election, participants increased their perception that racism is less of a problem in the US today than in times past. They also expressed less support for policies designed to address racial inequality. Given the continued prevalence of racial disparities in virtually all aspects of American society, these results raise important implications for the status of policies aimed at eliminating racial injustice.     

The child parent drop-in center: Community based primary prevention

A community supported child-parent drop-in program that provides services to families with few financial resources or to those who may not seek help from other service agencies is described. Services are provided free or at a minimal cost. The family oriented program provides short-term, respite care for children from birth to kindergarten age, educational programs and social opportunities for parents, short-term crisis counseling, referral to other community resources, and volunteer opportunities and training. Three centers are housed in facilities that donate the space. The centers recruit, train and actively involve parents, students, senior citizens and other volunteers to work in the program. Service groups and businesses aid in fund-raising and human service agencies provide consultation, act as referral resources and help with program operation. Each center is individualized to meet the needs of the community it serves.     

Self-guided behavioral skills training: A public health approach to promoting nurturing care environments

The World Health Organization identified the promotion of “Nurturing Care Environments” as a global health priority. Responsive caregiving, 1 of 5 domains describing nurturing care, is critical for healthy child development. Relatively little research has evaluated population-level interventions aimed to increase responsive caregiving during the first 1,000 days of an infant's life. In this pilot study, we evaluated an intervention designed for population-level dissemination that targeted responsive caregiving. The self-guided behavioral skills training aimed to teach mothers to imitate infant vocalizations. The intervention was delivered within an on-line asynchronous training. All 3 mothers increased vocal imitative behavior following training without receiving coaching or behavior-specific feedback from an implementer. The results offer a preliminary proof of concept with implications for population-level intervention design and evaluation.     

Etiology of obsessions and compulsions: a behavioral-genetic analysis

It is unknown whether various types of obsessive-compulsive (OC) symptoms have a common genetic or environmental etiology. For example, it is unknown whether hoarding is etiologically associated with prototypic OC symptoms, such as washing, checking, and obsessing. Also unknown is whether particular OC-related symptoms are etiologically linked to the general tendency to experience emotional distress (negative emotionality). To investigate these and other issues, a community sample of 307 pairs of monozygotic and dizygotic adult twins provided scores on 6 OC-related symptoms (obsessing, neutralizing, checking, washing, ordering, and hoarding) and 2 markers of negative emotionality (trait anxiety and affective lability). Genetic factors accounted for 40%-56% of variance in the 8 phenotypic scores (M = 49% of variance for OC-related symptoms). Remaining variance was due to nonshared (person-specific) environment. More detailed analyses revealed a complex etiologic architecture, where OC-related symptoms arise from a mix of common and symptom-specific genetic and environmental factors. A general genetic factor was identified, which influenced all symptoms and negative emotionality. An environmental factor was identified that influenced all symptoms but did not influence negative emotionality. Each of the 6 types of symptoms was also shaped by its own set of symptom-specific genetic and environmental factors. The importance of genetic factors did not vary as a function of age or sex, and the architecture of general and specific etiologic factors was replicated for participants having relatively more severe OC symptoms. Gene-environment interactions were identified. Implications for an etiology-based classification system are discussed.     

Impact of Interpersonal Conflict on Individuals High in Unmitigated Communion1

The current study examined the impact of interpersonal conflict on mood and physical symptoms for individuals who scored high on a personality characteristic called unmitigated communion (UC), as compared to individuals who did not score high in UC. UC is defined as a focus on others to the exclusion of the self. Forty‐one undergraduate students participated in 7 consecutive nightly interviews. Participants described their social interactions, indicated whether the interaction involved interpersonal conflict, and indicated their distress and physical symptoms at the end of the day. Multilevel modeling analysis demonstrated that conflict adversely affected UC and non‐UC individuals similarly on the same day, but had a more negative impact for UC individuals on the following day.     

Processing emotion information from both the face and body: An eye-movement study

This study examined the perception of emotional expressions, focusing on the face and the body. Photographs of four actors expressing happiness, sadness, anger, and fear were presented in congruent (e.g., happy face with happy body) and incongruent (e.g., happy face with fearful body) combinations. Participants selected an emotional label using a four-option categorisation task. Reaction times and accuracy for the categorisation judgement, and eye movements were the dependent variables. Two regions of interest were examined: face and body. Results showed better accuracy and faster reaction times for congruent images compared to incongruent images. Eye movements showed an interaction in which there were more fixations and longer dwell times to the face and fewer fixations and shorter dwell times to the body with incongruent images. Thus, conflicting information produced a marked effect on information processing in which participants focused to a greater extent on the face compared to the body.     

Imagining what might be: why children underestimate uncertainty

Children’s well-documented tendency to behave as if they know more than they do about uncertain events is reduced under two conditions: when the outcome of a chance event has yet to be determined and when one unknown outcome has occurred but is difficult to imagine. In Experiment 1, in line with published findings, 5- and 6-year-olds (N = 61) preferred to guess the unknown location of a known object when the object was in place rather than before its location had been determined. There was no such preference when the object’s identity was unknown. In Experiment 2, 29 5- and 6-year-olds were more likely to correctly mark both possible locations when an already hidden object’s identity was unknown rather than known. We conclude that children’s vivid imaginations can lead them to underestimate uncertainty in a similar way to imagination inflation or fluency effects in adults.     

A multilevel examination of interpartner intimate partner violence and psychological aggression reporting concordance

Low concordance of reports across partners has consistently been observed when partners report the frequency of intimate partner violence (IPV) and psychological aggression (PA) in their relationship. Researchers have been unsuccessful in the quest to discover systematic biases across reporters, perhaps due to examining constructs that are not the source of bias (e.g., gender, victim/perpetrator status) or examining potentially fruitful constructs using underpowered statistics or erroneous conceptualizations (e.g., examining variables at a dyadic, rather than an individual, level). We used multilevel modeling with two samples (Ns = 88 and 164 couples) to examine husbands' and wives' relationship satisfaction as individual-level correlates of husband- and wife-perpetrated IPV and PA reporting concordance. Consistent with prior literature, low to moderate levels of agreement were observed, and gender and victim/perpetrator status were not consistently associated with reporting concordance. In contrast, for both husbands and wives, relationship satisfaction was associated with reporting concordance such that high relationship satisfaction was related to reporting less of one's partner's PA than the partner reported, whereas low relationship satisfaction was related to reporting more of one's partner's PA than the partner reported. A similar pattern of results emerged for the reporting of IPV, but results did not cross validate between samples. These findings suggest that relationship satisfaction may lead to either reluctance, or increased willingness, to attribute negative relationship events to partner behavior, potentially due to partner blame and relationship schemas. In addition, the influence of individual-level factors may be occluded when aggregated across partners to examine correlates of interpartner reporting concordance.