Using Response Surface Analysis to Interpret the Impact of Parent–Offspring Personality Similarity on Adolescent Externalizing Problems

Personality similarity between parent and offspring has been suggested to play an important role in offspring's development of externalizing problems. Nonetheless, much remains unknown regarding the nature of this association. This study aimed to investigate the effects of parent–offspring similarity at different levels of personality traits, comparing expectations based on evolutionary and goodness‐of‐fit perspectives. Two waves of data from the TRAILS study (N = 1587, 53% girls) were used to study parent–offspring similarity at different levels of personality traits at age 16 predicting externalizing problems at age 19. Polynomial regression analyses and Response Surface Analyses were used to disentangle effects of different levels and combinations of parents and offspring personality similarity. Although several facets of the offspring's personality had an impact on offspring's externalizing problems, few similarity effects were found. Therefore, there is little support for assumptions based on either an evolutionary or a goodness‐of‐fit perspective. Instead, our findings point in the direction that offspring personality, and at similar levels also parent personality might impact the development of externalizing problems during late adolescence. © 2017 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology     

Occluding the trajectory of an object: effects on predicting containment with 9-, 12- and 16-month-olds

Infants of 9-16-month-old repeatedly saw a block that was lowered into the opening of a container. It was found that the more time infants have to see the block relative to the container the easier they detect that the object relation specifies containment.     

Parental rearing behavior prospectively predicts adolescents’ risky decision‐making and feedback‐related electrical brain activity

The present study examined the role of parental rearing behavior in adolescents’ risky decision‐making and the brain's feedback processing mechanisms. Healthy adolescent participants (n = 110) completed the EMBU‐C, a self‐report questionnaire on perceived parental rearing behaviors between 2006 and 2008 (T1). Subsequently, after an average of 3.5 years, we assessed (a) risky decision‐making during performance of the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART); (b) event‐related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited by positive (gain) and negative feedback (loss) during the BART; and (c) self‐reported substance use behavior (T2). Age‐corrected regression analyses showed that parental rejection at T1 accounted for a unique and significant proportion of the variance in risk‐taking during the BART; the more adolescents perceived their parents as rejecting, the more risky decisions were made. Higher levels of perceived emotional warmth predicted increased P300 amplitudes in response to positive feedback at T2. Moreover, these larger P300 amplitudes (gain) significantly predicted risky decision‐making during the BART. Parental rearing behaviors during childhood thus seem to be significant predictors of both behavioral and electrophysiological indices of risky decision‐making in adolescence several years later. This is in keeping with the notion that environmental factors such as parental rearing are important in explaining adolescents’ risk‐taking propensities.     

Repetition effect with picture stimuli: Possible implications for clarity

Increasing recognition accuracy with repeated presentations was demonstrated for complex pictorial stimuli (real-world photographs) by accuracy, signal detection, and confidence of decision indicators. Consistent with other research, the effect occurred only for short stimulus durations. The effect occurred for both old and new pictures, the rate of improvement being greater for old than for new pictures. Experiment II utilized focus-degraded stimuli to demonstrate that amount of information artifacts were not responsible for the observed differences between responses to old and new pictures.     

Measuring General Indecisiveness

Although indecisiveness seems to be a widespread problem, little empirical research has addressed its measurement. Frost and Shows (1993; Behaviour Research and Therapy, 31, 683–692) introduced the Indecisiveness Scale (IS) as a measure of individual differences in general indecisiveness. Although these authors conducted various psychometric analyses, some properties (e.g., factor structure, test-retest reliability) were not investigated. In the present studies, several reliability and validity indices were computed. First, four of the fifteen items of the IS were found to be omissible. Second, 4-week test-retest reliability was found to be satisfactory. Third, scores on the IS were found to correlate meaningfully with a concurrent measure of decision making, and with various scales of psychopathology. Lastly, in Study 4, the IS was found to predict scores on a behavioural measure of decision making, suggesting good predictive validity. Overall, these findings suggest that the IS has good psychometric properties.     

Sex Role Expectations in Children's Vocational Aspirations and Perceptions of Occupations

To study sex role expectations, 120 boys and girls from three age groups—preschool, second grade, and fifth grade—in two socioeconomic levels were asked to name their vocational aspirations and to choose whether a man, woman, or both could do the work in 30 occupations depicted in a slide-tape series. Results indicated that sex typing was present in the way their aspirations conformed to traditional sex roles, with a significant relationship (p <.001) between sex typing of aspirations and sex of the respondents. Significant differences in responses to the occupational slides were found on the variables of sex (p <.01), grade level (p <.001), and socioeconomic level (p <.05), with greater sex typing indicated by boys than girls, by preschool children than by older children, and by lower to lower-middle class children than by middle to upper-middle class children. The study revealed a disparity between many children's perceptions of occupations as ones in which both sexes could work and their own personalized, sex-typed aspirations.