Infant Distress During Immunization: A Multimethod Assessment

The purpose of this study was to comprehensively describe infant procedural distress and pain across assessment modalities, and to compare similarities and differences across measures. A multimethod assessment of distress was conducted to investigate infants (N = 37) undergoing routine immunizations. Measures of infant distress included Parent report, nurse report, infant heart rate, and an observational measure of infant distress. Parents rated their infant's distress and pain significantly higher than did nurses. Observational and physiological ratings of infant distress were found to vary significantly by phase, and there were no correlations between adult ratings of pain and distress and physiological ratings. Findings suggest that infant procedural distress can be assessed in a number of manners. The discordance between these measures emphasizes the need for multimethod assessment of pediatric procedural distress in both research and clinical settings. Given the differences between parent and nurse ratings, clinicians should be aware that different assessment methods might lead to different conclusions about infant procedural distress.     

Choosing to Enter or Avoid Diagnostic Social Situations

ABSTRACT— Three studies suggest that people control the nature of their relationships, in part, by choosing to enter (or avoid) situations providing feedback about other people's social interest. In Study 1 , chronically avoidant individuals (but not others) preferred social options that would provide no information about other people's evaluations of them over social options that would, but did not prefer nondiagnostic situations more generally. In Study 2 , chronically avoidant students (but not others) in a methods class preferred to have their teacher assign them to working groups (a nondiagnostic situation) over forming their own groups (a diagnostic situation). In Study 3 , individuals experimentally primed to feel avoidant were less likely than those primed to feel secure to choose to receive feedback about how another person felt about them. Overall, the research suggests that choices of socially diagnostic versus socially nondiagnostic situations play an important role in guiding people's social relationships.     

Stability of Typical Patterns of Subjective Well-Being in Middle-Aged Swedish Women

Typical patterns of general subjective well-being (SWB) were searched for in a representative longitudinal sample of Swedish women (N = 272) at age 43 and 49. Cluster analysis at each age separately resulted in a six-cluster solution at both ages. The two solutions were similar, indicating structural stability across 6 years. Five of the six clusters also showed significant individual stability. Among these clusters, a generalized positive typical pattern and two generalized negative typical patterns were found, one characterized by very high negative affect and one characterized by very low global life satisfaction. A cluster characterized by above average positive and negative affect was also found as well as one characterized by low positive affect. A strong relationship was found between membership in an extreme cluster and the values in certain SWB-related variables, supporting the validity of the typical patterns found. Further, it was shown that cluster membership contributed to the prediction of some validation variables above the prediction achieved by using only SWB components entered as continuous variables, suggesting the presence of interactions and nonlinearities in the SWB area.     

Long-term outcome of Internet-delivered cognitive-behavioural therapy for social phobia: A 30-month follow-up

Internet-delivered guided cognitive behaviour therapy for social anxiety disorder has been found to generate promising short-term results, up to one year posttreatment. No study has however documented longer follow-up periods. In this 30-month follow-up we contacted 57 participants from the original study of which 77.2% (44/57) responded to the Internet-administered outcome measures and 66.7% (38/57) completed a telephone interview. Results showed large pretreatment to follow-up within-group effect sizes for the primary outcome measures (Cohen's d 1.10-1.71), and a majority (68.4%; 26/38) reported improvements in the interview. The findings suggest that the long-term effects seen in previous live treatment CBT trials can occur in Internet-delivered treatment as well.     

Offering more support than we seek

Two studies provide evidence that, in friendships, people offer support to partners more often than they request identical support for themselves. In one study, people reported being more likely to offer different types of support (e.g., a ride to a train station) than to request identical support. This effect was more pronounced for casual than established friendships. In a second study, people assigned randomly to be in a position to give support or to seek identical support from a friend gave more support than they sought. The observed asymmetry is attributed to people balancing desires to establish and strengthen communal relationships against desires to protect the self from rejection, not to people being inherently more unselfish than selfish.     

A Social Disorganization Perspective on Bullying-Related Attitudes and Behaviors: The Influence of School Context

Social disorganization theory suggests that certain school-level indictors of disorder may be important predictors of bullying-related attitudes and behaviors. Multilevel analyses were conducted on bullying-related attitudes and experiences among 22,178 students in 95 elementary and middle schools. The intraclass correlation coefficients indicated that 0.6–2% of the variance in victimization, 5–10% of the variance in retaliatory attitudes, 5–6% of the variance in perceptions of safety, and 0.9% of the variance in perpetration of bullying was associated with the clustering of students within schools. Although the specific associations varied somewhat for elementary schools as compared to middle schools, the hierarchical linear modeling analyses generally suggested that school-level indicators of disorder (e.g., student–teacher ratio, concentration of student poverty, suspension rate, and student mobility) were significant predictors of bullying-related attitudes and experiences. Student-level characteristics (i.e., sex, ethnicity, status in school) were also relevant to students’ retaliatory attitudes, perceptions of safety, and involvement in bullying. Implications for school-based research and violence prevention are provided.     

Predictors and outcomes of persistent or age‐limited registered criminal behavior: a 30‐year longitudinal study of a Swedish urban population

This study uses data from the longitudinal research program Individual Development and Adaptation, where an entire school‐grade cohort of children in a middle‐size Swedish city (n～1.300) has been followed from ages 10 to 43 and 48 for women and men, respectively. Our findings indicate that the patterns of offending across the life‐course differ between genders, where males seem to initiate their offending earlier than females. Further, there are very few women on a persistent offending‐trajectory. Focusing on precursors to as well as consequences of offending as indexed in official registers, our results indicate that individuals in the persistent offender group have the most pronounced adjustment problems in school‐ as well as in middle age. Individual characteristics and behaviors (e.g., aggression, hyperactivity, antisocial behavior) vary systematically between individuals with different developmental offending patterns. The combination of an unstable upbringing and own antisocial behavior seems to be especially predictive for criminality. For persistent offenders, the prevalence of alcohol and psychiatric problems at adult age is high for males and extremely high for females (nine out of ten and six out of ten for each of the two problem types for females). Further, the importance for adjustment of the two‐dimensional variation in the number of crimes committed during adolescence and adult age seems to have been surprisingly well captured by the “crude” division into the four offender groups that were used. Aggr. Behav. 35:164–178, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Structural equation models of sexual harassment: longitudinal explorations and cross-sectional generalizations

Sexual harassment and its corresponding outcomes develop and change over time, yet research on this issue has been limited primarily to cross-sectional data. In this article, longitudinal models of harassment were proposed and empirically evaluated via structural equations modeling using data from 217 women who responded to a computerized questionnaire in 1994 and again in 1996. Results indicate that sexual harassment influences both proximal and distal work-related variables (e.g., job satisfaction, work withdrawal, job withdrawal) and psychological outcomes (e.g., life satisfaction, psychological well-being, distress). In addition, a replication of the L. F. Fitzgerald, F. Drasgow, C.L. Hulin, M.J. Gelfand, and V.J. Magley (1997) model of harassment was supported. This research was an initial attempt to develop integrated models of the dynamic effects of sexual harassment over time.