Do storybooks with anthropomorphized animal characters promote prosocial behaviors in young children?

For millennia, adults have told children stories not only to entertain but also to impart important moral lessons to promote prosocial behaviors. Many such stories contain anthropomorphized animals because it is believed that children learn from anthropomorphic stories as effectively, if not better than, from stories with human characters, and thus are more inclined to act according to the moral lessons of the stories. Here we experimentally tested this belief by reading preschoolers a sharing story with either human characters or anthropomorphized animal characters. Reading the human story significantly increased preschoolers' altruistic giving but reading the anthropomorphic story or a control story decreased it. Thus, contrary to the common belief, realistic stories, not anthropomorphic ones, are better for promoting young children's prosocial behavior.     

Self‐efficacy as a moderator of negative and positive self‐fulfilling prophecy effects: mothers' beliefs and children's alcohol use

This research examined two issues relevant to self‐fulfilling prophecies. First, it examined whether children's risk for alcohol use, as indicated by their self‐efficacy to refuse alcohol from peers, moderated their susceptibility to negative and positive self‐fulfilling prophecy effects created by their mothers. Second, it explored behavioral mediators that could be involved in the self‐fulfilling process between mothers and children. Longitudinal data from 540 mother–child dyads indicated that (1) low self‐efficacy children were more susceptible to their mothers' positive than negative self‐fulfilling effects, whereas high self‐efficacy children's susceptibility did not vary, (2) mothers' global parenting and children's perception of their friends' alcohol use partially mediated mothers' self‐fulfilling effects, and (3) these mediators contributed to low self‐efficacy children's greater susceptibility to positive self‐fulfilling prophecy effects. The power of self‐fulfilling prophecies, their link to social problems, and the potential for mothers' favorable beliefs to have a protective influence on adolescent alcohol use are discussed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mental Health Identification Practices of Jails: The Unmet Needs of the “Silent” Population

The overrepresentation of individuals with mental illness in the criminal/legal system is well documented. While professional associations urge diversion towards treatment, little is known about the practices these institutions use to identify this population. One understudied space in the criminal/legal continuum is jails. This exploratory study compares two types of mental health identification at jail booking to assess jail‐ and community‐based service outcomes by identification type (N = 2956): (a) staff observation and (b) a standardized screening instrument. Individuals identified through staff observation were significantly more likely to receive jail‐ and community‐based services, even though current symptomology and substance misuse were both significantly higher for individuals identified only by the screening instrument. These findings point to the importance of jails in providing stabilizing services during incarceration, but further, show the impact that identification practices have on individuals as they transition to the community. Community context showed varied rates of jail staff observations of mental illness, showing greater risks for individuals in rural communities. Implications include a need for system‐level changes by instituting evidence‐based identification practices in jails, and improving professional collaboration practices between mental health and criminal/legal practitioners as individuals enter and exit jails.     

Moderating Effects of Religious/Spiritual Coping in the Relation Between Perceived Stress and Psychological Well-Being

Although the relationship between stress and depressive symptoms is well documented, less is known about the role of coping strategies, in particular strategies for coping via religious or spiritual means. To investigate the relationships among these factors, data was collected with questionnaires completed by 127 MSW students at a northeastern university in 2003. Significant Stress×Religious/Spiritual Coping buffer interactions were found in the relationship between stress and depression. EQS 6.1 and hierarchical moderated regression analysis showed that religious/spiritual coping reduced the impact of stress on depression. Implications for practice are discussed.     

Sex Differences in Mothers' Speech and Play Behavior with 6-, 9-, and 14-Month-Old Infants

In this study, we analyzed mothers' speech and play behavior with their 6-, 9-, and 14-month-old sons and daughters. Thirty-six infant–mother dyads participated in a 10-min free-play session with gender-neutral toys. No sex differences were found in the infants' behavior, but sex differences were found in mothers' verbal behavior and level of engagement. Mothers of daughters made more interpretations and engaged in more conversation with their daughters, whereas mothers of sons made more comments and attentionals, which were typified by instructions rather than conversation. Furthermore, mothers interacted more with their daughters than with their sons across all ages. Overall, these results demonstrate that mothers transmit different messages to their male and female infants, both through language and interaction, which may contribute to infants' gender role development.     

Similarity-based interference during language comprehension: Evidence from eye tracking during reading

The nature of working memory operation during complex sentence comprehension was studied by means of eye-tracking methodology. Readers had difficulty when the syntax of a sentence required them to hold 2 similar noun phrases (NPs) in working memory before syntactically and semantically integrating either of the NPs with a verb. In sentence structures that placed these NPs at the same linear distances from one another but allowed integration with a verb for 1 of the NPs, the comprehension difficulty was not seen. These results are interpreted as indicating that similarity-based interference occurs online during the comprehension of complex sentences and that the degree of memory accessibility conventionally associated with different types of NPs does not have a strong effect on sentence processing.     

Trait Variance and Response Style Variance in the Scales of the Personality Inventory for DSM–5 (PID–5)

Using self- and observer reports on the Personality Inventory for DSM–5 (PID–5) and the HEXACO Personality Inventory–Revised (HEXACO–PI–R), we identified for each inventory several trait dimensions (each defined by both self- and observer reports on the facet-level scales belonging to the same domain) and 2 source dimensions (each defined by self-reports or by observer reports, respectively, on all facet-level scales). Results (N = 217) showed that the source dimensions of the PID–5 were very large (much larger than those of the HEXACO–PI–R), and suggest that self-report (or observer report) response styles substantially inflate the intercorrelations and the alpha reliabilities of the PID–5 scales. We discuss the meaning and the implications of the large PID–5 source components, and we suggest some methods of controlling their influence.     

The Effects of Cell Phone Use and Emotion‐regulation Style on College Students' Learning

Cell phones are becoming an inevitable part of the classroom, but extant research suggests that using cell phones in the classroom impairs academic performance. The present study examined the impact of different cell phone policies on learning and emotion‐regulation style. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: cell phone usage allowed, cell phone possession allowed but without usage, cell phones removed, and a no‐instruction control group. All participants watched a 20‐minute lecture and were sent text messages to mimic classroom distractions. Afterward, participants took a multiple‐choice test and filled out questionnaires assessing their level of obsessiveness, nomophobia, and mindfulness. Participants who had their cell phone taken away performed best on the test with no other differences. None of the emotional‐regulation measures moderated the results. These findings provide important insight as to how cell phone policies can optimize learning in the classroom.Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Race for Power in Public Good Games with Unequal,Unstable Punishment Power

Decentralized punishment can maintain contributions to a public good at a high level. This positive effect holds even for situations involving inequality in punishment power, meaning that the relative costs for punishment differ between persons. We extend this line of research by examining the additional influence of instability of and thus potential competition for punishment power in public good experiments. As in previous research, inequality is operationalized by assigning the role of a ‘strong player’ to one group member, who can punish others at a reduced cost compared to other players. Instability is operationalized by the fact that the role assignment can change across rounds and is contingent on behavior in previous rounds. Three experiments show that under unequal, unstable (punishment‐) power, individuals behave more competitively and engage in a race for power resulting in detrimental effects for the group. Specifically, we find that (i) unstable power goes along with a disproportionate use of punishment; (ii) not inequality by itself but rather the combination of instability and inequality causes this effect; and (iii) this excessive use of punishment is found not only when the role of the strong player is assigned to individuals who previously behaved rather selfishly but also when prosocial behavior leads to the top, speaking for a generalizability of our findings. Implications for organizational settings are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.