Preventing Violence Against Women: Engaging the Fathers of Today and Tomorrow

Although fathers play a key role in helping their children develop ideas about gender relations and close relationships, they have been largely overlooked as a resource to help prevent violence against women. This paper explores some of the reasons why fathers have not been successfully engaged in violence prevention. Engaging fathers to promote wider definitions of masculinity for themselves and their children is presented as a major mechanism by which fathers could help prevent violence against women. The information-motivation-behavior model of change, developed for preventing high-risk sexual behavior, is applied to the area to provide structure for understanding previous and current attempts to engage fathers. Examples of innovative programs are used to highlight the application of this model.     

Utility of the Multidimensional Health Profile—Psychosocial Functioning Scales (MHP-P) for Assessing Psychosocial Adjustment in Gastric Bypass Surgery Patients

This study examined the utility of the Multidimensional Health Profile—Psychosocial Functioning (MHP-P) for the preoperative assessment of gastric bypass surgery (GBS) applicants. The MHP-P, a 58-item screening inventory that assesses 4 psychosocial areas relevant to health (mental health, life stress, social resources, and coping skills), was administered to 449 morbidly obese patients who were being considered for GBS. Data were compared with the results of a much more lengthy assessment procedure involving a 273-item comprehensive biographical and medical history interview, the MMPI-2, the Basic Personality Inventory, and the Beck Depression Inventory. The 17 measures of the MHP-P showed highly significant correlations with other measures considered to be of relevance in GBS outcome, confirming the utility of the MHP-P as a cost-effective procedure for use in this clinical medical setting.     

Trust and Acceptance in Response to References to Group Membership: Minority and Majority Perspectives on Cross‐Group Interactions1

This research examined anticipated feelings of trust and acceptance in cross‐group interactions among members of ethnic minority and majority groups, depending on whether an out‐group member referred to their group membership. In Study 1, Asian, Latino, and White participants read scenarios describing interactions between them and an in‐group member, an out‐group member, or an out‐group member who referred to their group membership. Participants from each group responded more negatively toward interactions with out‐group members when they referred to group membership. These findings were replicated in Study 2 with samples of Black and White participants, also showing that anticipated prejudice partially mediated the effects of out‐group members' references to group membership on feelings of trust and acceptance. Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of facilitating intergroup communication and conversations about group differences.     

Crossing Bridges: Assembling Culture into Brands and Brands into Consumers' Global Local Cultural Lives

Fournier and Alvarez (2019—this issue) and Batra (2019—this issue), respectively, offer interpretive and psychological perspectives on how brands acquire cultural meanings. In this commentary, we discuss the opportunities for leveraging these two perspectives, and use an assemblage theory lens to uncover the dynamics of how cultural models articulated through cultural myths, metaphors, ideologies, and cultural objects circulate through the brand assemblage and through the consumer assemblage. We offer a bridge‐crossing approach to research opportunities bringing both a socio‐historical‐cultural approach and psychological approach to understand how cultural meanings are assembled into brands and how consumers assemble brands into their lives.     

Early development of visual attention in infants in rural Malawi

Eye tracking research has shown that infants develop a repertoire of attentional capacities during the first year. The majority of studies examining the early development of attention comes from Western, high‐resource countries. We examined visual attention in a heterogeneous sample of infants in rural Malawi (N = 312–376, depending on analysis). Infants were assessed with eye‐tracking‐based tests that targeted visual orienting, anticipatory looking, and attention to faces at 7 and 9 months. Consistent with prior research, infants exhibited active visual search for salient visual targets, anticipatory saccades to predictable events, and a robust attentional bias for happy and fearful faces. Individual variations in these processes had low to moderate odd‐even split‐half and test‐retest reliability. There were no consistent associations between attention measures and gestational age, nutritional status, or characteristics of the rearing environment (i.e., maternal cognition, psychosocial well‐being, socioeconomic status, and care practices). The results replicate infants’ early attentional biases in a large, unique sample, and suggest that some of these biases (e.g., bias for faces) are pronounced in low‐resource settings. The results provided no evidence that the initial manifestation of infants’ attentional capacities is associated with risk factors that are common in low‐resource environments.     

The relationship between multidimensional economic well‐being and children’s mental health,physical health,and executive function development in South Africa

Conceptualizing both economic well‐being (EWB) and children's development as multidimensional constructs, the present study examines their association using bioecological developmental theory and structural equation modeling with Zulu children (ages 7–10) in KwaZulu‐Natal, a highly impoverished region of South Africa (N = 1,958). Relative EWB within impoverished communities consists of three dimensions: material assets (durable goods and living environment), fiscal appraisal (subjective experiences of access to/allocation of resources), and fiscal capacity (monetary inflow/outflow). Children's development also is measured across multiple dimensions: physical health, mental health, and executive functioning. In addition to an overall association between EWB and children's development across outcomes, the sub‐dimensions of EWB are differentially related to aspects of children's development. The dimension of material assets exhibits the greatest association with child outcomes, while fiscal capacity exhibits the least. Implications of these findings are discussed, including the use of multidimensional approaches to measuring EWB to understand, more clearly, its relationship to multiple dimensions of children's development. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcawZ6oOt-Q     

Taking sustainable fashion mainstream: Social media and the institutional celebrity entrepreneur

There is a growing imperative to address the negative environmental impact of fashion and an increased awareness of sustainability issues: the sustainable fashion concept (SFC). However, while consumers are becoming more aware and concerned about sustainability, this is not resulting in the purchase of sustainable fashion products in preference to “mainstream” goods. This so‐called attitude–behaviour gap is well documented in academic literature, and yet there is a lack of research into potential methods of disrupting this phenomenon. This study seeks to redress this by examining the potential influence of celebrity institutional entrepreneurs (CIEs) to raise awareness of the SFC and to therefore guide and change consumer behaviour towards more sustainable practice. CIEs are celebrities who use their social position to espouse their values with the intention of influencing institutional habits and behaviours. In this case, Emma Watson is identified as an appropriate and credible proponent, and her @the_press_tour Instagram account was used to examine her influence. A netnographic investigation of this account was conducted in combination with eight in‐depth interviews with account followers to examine attitudes and actions towards sustainable fashion. Findings showed that the account had partial impact on consumer engagement with the SFC in that it led to the participants being more likely to discuss and consider the issues around sustainable fashion; however, it had no significant impact on purchases of sustainable fashion. The study concludes that CIEs can impact the attitudes of mainstream consumers towards sustainable fashion; however, further research is required to determine any long‐term influence.     

Improved Perceptions of Emotion Regulation and Reflective Functioning in Parents: Two Additional Positive Outcomes of Parent-Child Interaction Therapy

The purpose of this study was to test whether Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), a widely used effective therapy for children’s externalizing behaviors and parenting problems, was associated with improvements in parents’ emotion regulation and reflective functioning. We also investigated whether these improvements had unique associations with children’s improvements in externalizing and internalizing symptoms. Participants were 139 Australian children aged 29 to 83 months and their caregivers; all were referred for child externalizing behavior problems coupled with parenting skill deficits or high parent stress. All data were gathered via a questionnaire completed prior to and after completion of PCIT. Significant improvements were found in parents’ self-reported emotion dysregulation and capacity to use cognitive reappraisal for emotion regulation. There was also improvement in parents’ self-report of children’s symptoms, parenting practices, and reflective functioning in the form of prementalizing, which measured a low capacity to understand the emotional world of the child. Multiple regression showed that improvements in cognitive reappraisal, prementalizing, and negative parenting practices were associated with improvement in children’s symptoms. The findings extend the existing evidence for PCIT as an effective parenting intervention, adding parents’ perceived emotion regulation and reflective functioning to the list of positive outcomes from PCIT. Improved emotion regulation and reflective functioning, unique from changes in parenting practices, could be mechanisms that help explain why PCIT has been associated with improvements in children’s externalizing behaviors.     

Role of employee felt obligation and endorsement of the just world hypothesis: A social exchange theory investigation in an organizational justice context

According to social exchange theory, felt obligation after being treated justly is key to explaining why justice perceptions influence behaviors important to organizations, such as task performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Perhaps those who believe in a just world (Just World Hypothesis, JWH) are more likely to feel obligated to reciprocate just treatment with behaviors benefiting the organization. Thus, our goal was to investigate whether belief in the JWH influences to what extent people feel obligated after being treated justly and the importance of felt obligation in regard to behavioral outcomes, such as OCB and task performance. Based on 160 university alumni and their supervisors, results provide support that justice perceptions can relate to both job performance and OCB via felt obligation, providing empirical support for the theoretical role of felt obligation in the social exchange theory explanation of how justice perceptions can translate into employee behaviors benefiting the organization. Results also suggest that endorsement of the JWH interacts with procedural and distributive justice perceptions, but not interpersonal justice perceptions, to influence felt obligation and that the indirect effect of distributive and procedural justice perceptions on both OCB and task performance via felt obligation is only significant for individuals with relatively high levels of endorsement of the JWH. Implications are discussed.