Parenting and Adolescent Adjustment in Mexico: Initial Evidence of Validity for the Mexican Parenting Questionnaire for Adolescents (MPQ-A)

The present study examined the validity of a self-report parenting instrument for use with Mexican adolescents. The 13-item measure was adapted from the Mexican Parenting Questionnaire. The sample included 1123 adolescents (M age?=?15.07, SD?=?1.52) from Puebla, Mexico. Adolescents self-reported on six subscales of parenting (i.e., affection, verbal guidance, monitoring, communication, physical punishment and verbal punishment), as well as on measures of school grades, life satisfaction, familism, depressive and anxiety symptoms. Using confirmatory factor analyses, the original constructs were found to be a good fit with the data. Most subscales consisted of moderate levels of internal consistency and predicted several measures of adolescent adjustment in expected directions. Girls were more likely to report higher levels of monitoring, affection, and communication than boys. Adolescents who were younger and who reported lower school grades were more likely to report greater levels of physical punishment. Familism was positively associated with five of the six parenting dimensions (i.e., affection, verbal guidance, monitoring, physical punishment, and communication). Findings advance understanding on families and adolescent well-being in Mexico and may inform culturally competent services for clinicians who work with Mexican families.     

Authoritative Parenting of Chinese Mothers of Children with and without Intellectual Disability

The present study examined authoritative parenting and associations with parenting sense of competence and social support in Chinese mothers of children with intellectual disability and mothers of typically developing children. One hundred and sixty-seven mothers of children with intellectual disability with a mean age of 10.89 years (SD?=?1.74) and 119 mothers of typically developing children with a mean age of 10.55 years (SD?=?1.10) participated in a survey. Mothers of children with intellectual disability reported similar levels of parental warmth, and less use of reasoning and autonomy support compared with mothers of typically developing children. Parenting efficacy contributed uniquely to three dimensions of authoritative parenting for mothers of children with intellectual disability. By comparison, parenting efficacy did not contribute to use of reasoning and autonomy support for mothers of typically developing children. Social support made a unique but small contribution to parental warmth but not to parental reasoning and autonomy support for mothers of children with intellectual disability. For mothers of typically developing children, social support was associated with both parental warmth and autonomy support. This study suggests that child disability status is related to maternal authoritative parenting, and additionally, parenting efficacy plays a more critical role in predicting authoritative parenting of Chinese mothers of children with intellectual disability than mothers of typically developing children.     

Leisure and health: why is leisure therapeutic?

The purpose of this article is to examine the empirical evidence and describe theoretical perspectives that address under what conditions and why leisure can be therapeutic and contribute to health and well-being. This review of the literature provides empirical evidence that leisure can contribute to physical, social, emotional and cognitive health through prevention, coping (adjustment, remediation, diversion), and transcendence. After examining this empirical evidence, the article addresses why leisure is therapeutic and concludes by presenting two concepts useful to practitioners who desire to provide leisure guidance to help people avoid risk and maximise the therapeutic possibilities of leisure.     

Gender Symmetry and Asymmetry in Violent Relationships: Patterns of Mutuality Among Racially Diverse Women

Three patterns of mutual intimate partner violence (IPV) are proposed, based on frequency and severity: Male primary perpetrator (MPP), female primary perpetrator (FPP), and symmetrical (SYM). Patterns and effects of ethnicity were examined with 445 African American, Euro-American, and Mexican American low-income women experiencing mutual IPV. More relationships were classified as MPP (54%) than SYM (35%) or FPP (11%). Comparing women's and men's perpetration of several types of IPV (e.g., threats, severe physical) indicated MPP-pattern women experienced all IPV types more often and were more likely to sustain injury than their male partners. Fewer gender differences were found in the FPP pattern. Racial/ethnic groups were more similar than different; previously reported differences may be explained by variation in socioeconomic status. The larger part of the study was funded by grant R49/CCR610508 from the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, awarded to the third author. This article was also made possible by grant 2001-WT-BX-0504 from the National Institute of Justice awarded to the first and third authors. These agencies are not responsible for the results. Portions of this paper were presented by the first and third authors at the International Family Violence Conference in Portsmouth, NH, July, 2003.     

Exploring Indigenous Mental Health Practices: The Roles of Healers and Helpers in Promoting Well‐Being in People of Color

The authors present an extensive literature review and discuss the cultural relevance of indigenous healing practices in promoting psychological, physical, and spiritual well‐being in people of color. Suggestions are also presented for ways counselors might work with indigenous healing resources to promote the well‐being of people of color.     

Heart Rate Reactivity in HAD and LAD Rats during Pavlovian Fear Conditioning

Recently, we reported that High-Alcohol-Drinking (HAD) rats exhibited selective deficits in active avoidance learning under alcohol-naive conditions, and that administration of moderate doses of alcohol (0.5 and 1.0 g/kg) facilitated learning in these rats (Blankenship et al., 2000; Rorick et al., 2003b). We hypothesized that the deficits resulted from excessive fear in the aversive learning context and that the anxiolytic properties of alcohol may have contributed to the improved learning that was observed after alcohol administration. This hypothesis was supported by a recent study in which prolonged freezing in HAD rats was seen after a classical fear conditioning procedure (Rorick et al., 2003a). To provide additional evidence that HAD rats indeed exhibit behaviors consistent with the expression of increased fear in aversive learning contexts, we employed a Pavlovian fear conditioning task to measure heart rate in HAD and Low-Alcohol-Drinking (LAD) rats. In this study, HAD (HAD-1 and HAD-2) and LAD (LAD-1 and LAD-2) rats were assigned to one of three pre-exposure conditions: Context Only, Context/Tone, or Sequential (Context Only followed by Context/Tone) Pre-Exposure. Following pre-exposure, fear conditioning acquisition and extinction procedures were identical for all groups. Results indicated that although no baseline differences were observed between HAD and LAD rats, HAD rats receiving Context-Only pre-exposure exhibited excessive heart rate reactivity to the tone conditional stimulus during fear conditioning acquisition, compared to LAD rats receiving the same pre-exposure conditions. These findings support the hypothesis that HAD rats exhibit behaviors consistent with increased fear in aversive learning contexts, as measured by autonomic conditioning.     

Visual judgments of kinship: an alternative perspective

Following other researchers, we investigated the premise that visual judgment of kinship might be modelled as a signal-detection task, strictly related to similar facial features. We measured subjects' response times to face-pair stimuli while they performed visual judgments of kinship, similarity, or dissimilarity, and examined some priming effects involved. Our results show that kinship judgment takes longer on average than either similarity or dissimilarity judgment-which is compatible with existing models, yet might also suggest that kinship judgments are of a more complex character. In our priming study we observed selective suppression/enhancement of the efficacy of dissimilarity judgments whenever they followed similarity and kinship judgments. This finding confounds the notion, inherent in previous models, of resemblance cues signalling for kinship, since similarity and dissimilarity cannot be considered just as opposite concepts, and observed priming effects need to be explicitly modelled, including dissimilarity cues. To model kinship judgments across faces that are perceived as dissimilar, a new framework may be required, perhaps accepting the perspective of a task-driven use of the visual cues, modulated by experience and cultural conditioning.     

Gender, Self-Objectification and Pubic Hair Removal

Pubic hair removal is common in college age men and women in the United States and Australia. The present research addresses two questions related to this practice: (1) Are objectification and body shape concerns related to pubic hair removal; and (2) Do these relationships differ by gender? U.S. undergraduates, 148 women and 76 men, completed questionnaires about the presence, frequency of, and reasons for pubic hair removal; self-objectification, including self-surveillance and body shame; self-consciousness in sexual situations; and drives for leanness, thinness, and muscularity. While both genders reported similar rates of pubic hair removal, women reported greater frequency and higher normative, sexiness, and cleanliness reasons for pubic hair removal. Normative and sexiness reasons were positively correlated with self-surveillance. The relationships among normative and sexiness reasons and self-objectification were significantly higher for women with women??s body shame and self-surveillance scores more strongly impacted by normative and sexiness reasons. Findings are interpreted within the framework of objectification theory.     

Collaborative remembering in older adults: age-invariant outcomes in the context of episodic recall deficits

Rapidly growing research reveals complex yet systematic consequences of collaboration on memory in young adults, but much less is known about this phenomenon in older adults. Young and older adults studied a list of categorized words and took three successive recall tests. Test 1 and 3 were always taken individually, and Test 2 was done either in triads or alone. Despite older adults recalling less overall than young adults, both age groups exhibited similar costs and benefits of collaboration: Collaboration reduced both correct and false recall during collaborative remembering, was associated with more positive beliefs about its value, and produced reminiscence, collective memory, and some forgetting in its cascading effects on postcollaborative recall. We examine the role of retrieval organization in these effects. As environmental support may play a substantial role in healthy aging, the relatively preserved effects of collaboration on memory in older adults hold promise for testing judicious uses of group remembering in aging.