Measuring Coping in Low-Income European American,African American,and Mexican American Adolescents: An Examination of Measurement Equivalence

We examined the cross-ethnic and cross-language equivalence of the Children's Coping Strategies Checklist (Ayers, T.S., Sandler, I.N., West, S.G. and Roosa, M.W. (1996). A dispositional and situational assessment of children's coping: Testing alternative models of coping. Journal of Personality , 64 (4), 923-958) by assessing item, functional, and scalar equivalence in a sample of 319 European American, African American, and Mexican American adolescents from low-income inner-city families. Depression, as measured by Children's Depression Inventory, was the criterion in the analyses of scalar equivalence. The results suggest considerable cross-ethnic and cross-language measurement equivalence of the Children's Coping Strategies Checklist. The findings also suggest some caution in using the Children's Depression Inventory in comparative studies of African American and Mexican American adolescents or in studies that treat these groups as homogeneous samples.     

Action enhances auditory but not visual temporal sensitivity

People naturally dance to music, and research has shown that rhythmic auditory stimuli facilitate production of precisely timed body movements. If motor mechanisms are closely linked to auditory temporal processing, just as auditory temporal processing facilitates movement production, producing action might reciprocally enhance auditory temporal sensitivity. We tested this novel hypothesis with a standard temporal-bisection paradigm, in which the slope of the temporal-bisection function provides a measure of temporal sensitivity. The bisection slope for auditory time perception was steeper when participants initiated each auditory stimulus sequence via a keypress than when they passively heard each sequence, demonstrating that initiating action enhances auditory temporal sensitivity. This enhancement is specific to the auditory modality, because voluntarily initiating each sequence did not enhance visual temporal sensitivity. A control experiment ruled out the possibility that tactile sensation associated with a keypress increased auditory temporal sensitivity. Taken together, these results demonstrate a unique reciprocal relationship between auditory time perception and motor mechanisms. As auditory perception facilitates precisely timed movements, generating action enhances auditory temporal sensitivity.     

Property rights and the resolution of social conflict

It has long been argued that ownership depends upon social groups' establishing and adhering to rights such as the right to use and to exclude others from using one's own property. The authors consider the application of such rights in the interactions of young peers and siblings, and the extent to which parents support their children in establishing and maintaining the entitlement of owners. They show that children, but not their parents, give priority to ownership in settling property disputes, and argue that diverging models of children's relationships account for these differing perspectives of children and parents.     

Object-based auditory facilitation of visual search for pictures and words with frequent and rare targets

Auditory and visual processes demonstrably enhance each other based on spatial and temporal coincidence. Our recent results on visual search have shown that auditory signals also enhance visual salience of specific objects based on multimodal experience. For example, we tend to see an object (e.g., a cat) and simultaneously hear its characteristic sound (e.g., “meow”), to name an object when we see it, and to vocalize a word when we read it, but we do not tend to see a word (e.g., cat) and simultaneously hear the characteristic sound (e.g., “meow”) of the named object. If auditory–visual enhancements occur based on this pattern of experiential associations, playing a characteristic sound (e.g., “meow”) should facilitate visual search for the corresponding object (e.g., an image of a cat), hearing a name should facilitate visual search for both the corresponding object and corresponding word, but playing a characteristic sound should not facilitate visual search for the name of the corresponding object. Our present and prior results together confirmed these experiential association predictions. We also recently showed that the underlying object-based auditory–visual interactions occur rapidly (within 220 ms) and guide initial saccades towards target objects. If object-based auditory–visual enhancements are automatic and persistent, an interesting application would be to use characteristic sounds to facilitate visual search when targets are rare, such as during baggage screening. Our participants searched for a gun among other objects when a gun was presented on only 10% of the trials. The search time was speeded when a gun sound was played on every trial (primarily on gun-absent trials); importantly, playing gun sounds facilitated both gun-present and gun-absent responses, suggesting that object-based auditory–visual enhancements persistently increase the detectability of guns rather than simply biasing gun-present responses. Thus, object-based auditory–visual interactions that derive from experiential associations rapidly and persistently increase visual salience of corresponding objects.     

Individualism/collectivism and organizational citizenship behavior

Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) are workplace activities that exceed an employee's formal job requirements and contribute to the effective functioning of the organization. We explored the roles of the dispositional traits of individualism and collectivism in the prediction of OCB. The relationship was examined in the context of other constructs known to influence OCB, specifically, motives and identity as an organizational citizen. A total of 367 employees in 24 organizations completed surveys measuring individualism/collectivism, OCB motives, strength of organizational citizen role identity, and amount of OCB. The results showed collectivism to be a significant predictor of Organizational Concern and Prosocial Values motives, role identity, and OCB. Individualism predicted Impression Management motives and was a significant negative predictor of a role identity as one who helps others. The findings are discussed with regard to previous research in OCB.     

Asthma severity, child security, and child internalizing: using story stem techniques to assess the meaning children give to family and disease-specific events

Children with persistent asthma are at increased risk for mental health problems. Although mechanisms of effect are not yet known, it may be that children are less trusting of the family as a source of support and security when they have more severe asthma. This study tested whether asthma severity is related to children's perceptions of insecurity in the family, and whether insecurity is in turn associated with child adjustment. Children (N = 168; mean age = 8 years) completed story stems pertaining to routine family events (e.g., mealtimes) and ambiguous but potentially threatening asthma events such as tightness in the chest. Responses were evaluated for the extent to which appraisals portrayed the family as responding in cohesive, security-provoking ways. Asthma severity was assessed by both objective lung function testing and primary caregiver report. Caregivers reported child symptomatology. Beyond medication adherence, caregiver education, and child age and gender, greater asthma severity predicted more internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Greater asthma severity, assessed using spirometry (but not parent report), was related to less secure child narratives of the family, which in turn related to more child internalizing symptoms. Results suggest that asthma can take a considerable toll on children's feelings of security and mental health. Furthermore, given the difficulty in assessing young children's perceptions, this study helps demonstrate the potential of story stem techniques in assessing children's appraisals of illness threat and management in the family.     

Is the enhancement of memory due to reward driven by value or salience?

Past research using two levels of reward has shown that the higher-value items are remembered better than lower-value items and this enhancement is assumed to be driven by an effect of reward value. In the present study, multiple levels of reward were used to test the influence of reward salience on memory. Using a value-learning procedure, words were associated with reward values, and then memory for these words was later tested with free recall. Critically, multiple reward levels were used, allowing us to test two specific hypotheses whereby rewards can influence memory: (a) higher value items are remembered better than lower value items (reward value hypothesis), and (b) highest and lowest value items are remembered best and intermediate-value items are remembered worst (following a U-shaped relationship between value and memory; reward salience hypothesis). In two experiments we observed a U-shaped relationship between reward value and memory, supporting the notion that memory is enhanced due to reward salience, and not purely through reward value.     

Between Integrity and Despair: Toward Construct Validation of Erikson’s Eighth Stage

A new measure of Erikson’s final psychosocial stage, Integrity versus Despair, is presented and validated across two studies. In the first, 97 adults (68 women and 31 men) aged 65 and older responded to this measure: the Self-Examination Interview (SEI). Responses on the SEI were treated both categorically and dimensionally (continuous scores) with respect to four integrity statuses: Integrated, Nonexploring, Pseudointegrated, and Despairing. In Study One, categorical and dimensional Integrity statuses were examined in relation to five convergent measures: the Integrity subscale of the Modified Eriksonian Psychosocial Inventory, Openness to Experience, the Competence subscale of the California Personality Inventory, the Geriatric Depression Scale, and Perceived Health. As hypothesized, Integrated respondents were socially competent and resilient; Nonexploring persons conventional; Pseudointegrated respondents immature; and Despairing persons, demoralized. A subsample of participants took a semi-structured Adult Identity Status Interview. Integrated persons were most often Identity Achieved; Pseudointegrated and Nonexploring persons were most often Foreclosed. Study Two evaluated a new sample of 70 persons (51 women and 19 men) aged 70 and older. It generally confirmed the Integrity statuses developed in Study One, extending them to variables related to complexity and maturity of sociomoral reasoning and thinking style. As expected, the Integrated status was negatively related, and the Nonexploring status positively related, to intolerance for ambiguity. The highest levels of sociomoral reasoning occurred most in the Integrated status group, as did dialectical reasoning. In contrast, the Nonexploring and Despairing statuses had more formistic-mechanistic reasoners. Pseudointegrated persons produced the highest number of invalid protocols. The importance of present findings and implications of these studies for future directions in integrity research are discussed.