Gender and appearance accuracy: Women’s advantage over men is restricted to dress items

Which aspects of people’s appearance do women remember better than men? Women were predicted to remember the dress-related items but not the physical characteristics of targets more accurately than men, given that the former might be a more female-relevant domain of interest among perceivers. Participants watched a videotaped target and then completed a surprise test of their memory for her/his appearance. Men were as accurate as women at remembering the target’s physical features but less accurate than woman at recalling what the target was wearing. Discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for eyewitness accuracy.     

Categorising intersectional targets: An “either/and” approach to race- and gender-emotion congruity

Research on the interaction of emotional expressions with social category cues in face processing has focused on whether specific emotions are associated with single-category identities, thus overlooking the influence of intersectional identities. Instead, we examined how quickly people categorise intersectional targets by their race, gender, or emotional expression. In Experiment 1, participants categorised Black and White faces displaying angry, happy, or neutral expressions by either race or gender. Emotion influenced responses to men versus women only when gender was made salient by the task. Similarly, emotion influenced responses to Black versus White targets only when participants categorised by race. In Experiment 2, participants categorised faces by emotion so that neither category was more salient. As predicted, responses to Black women differed from those to both Black men and White women. Thus, examining race and gender separately is insufficient to understanding how emotion and social category cues are processed.     

AQS security scores: What do they represent? A study in construct validation

In a sample of 129 Dutch 15‐month‐old infants, attachment security was assessed both with the Attachment Q‐Set (AQS; Waters, 1995) and with a short version of Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall's (1978) Strange Situation (SSS). Infants classified as secure using the SSS had significantly higher AQS scores than insecure and disorganized infants in particular. At the AQS item level, disorganized infants were described as significantly more noncompliant, fussy, and angry relative to secure infants. When security as assessed using the SSS was controlled, the observed quality of parental interactive behavior, parental ego‐resilience, high levels of infant task orientation and pleasure, and low levels of infant anger proneness were found to explain significant and unique portions of the variance in the AQS security scores. The apparently unfavorable set of characteristics associated with low AQS security scores suggests such scores to predict later developmental problems. ©2004 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.     

Maternal Control of Girls Versus Boys: Relations to Empathy and Persuasive Style with Peers

We investigated relations between maternal control and girls’and boys’ concern for others. Fifty-six pairs of children were separately interviewed, using a newly developed measure of empathy. While mothers completed a parenting inventory, we videotaped children as one child attempted to convince a friend to make greeting cards for hospitalized children. High maternal control was associated with lower empathy and less interpersonally sensitive verbal persuasion, but only in girls.     

Acceptance and commitment therapy versus tinnitus retraining therapy in the treatment of tinnitus: a randomised controlled trial

The study compared the effects of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) with Tinnitus Retraining Therapy (TRT) on tinnitus impact in a randomised controlled trial. Sixty-four normal hearing subjects with tinnitus were randomised to one of the active treatments or a wait-list control (WLC). The ACT treatment consisted of 10 weekly 60 min sessions. The TRT treatment consisted of one 150 min session, one 30 min follow-up and continued daily use of wearable sound generators for a recommended period of at least 8 h/day for 18 months. Assessments were made at baseline, 10 weeks, 6 months and 18 months. At 10 weeks, results showed a superior effect of ACT in comparison with the WLC regarding tinnitus impact (Cohen’s d = 1.04), problems with sleep and anxiety. The results were mediated by tinnitus acceptance. A comparison between the active treatments, including all assessment points, revealed significant differences in favour of ACT regarding tinnitus impact (Cohen’s d = 0.75) and problems with sleep. At 6 months, reliable improvement on the main outcome measure was found for 54.5% in the ACT condition and 20% in the TRT condition. The results suggest that ACT can reduce tinnitus distress and impact in a group of normal hearing tinnitus patients.     

The relation between early mother–infant skin‐to‐skin contact and later maternal sensitivity in South African mothers of low birth weight infants

The relation between early mother–infant skin‐to‐skin contact (SSC) and mothers' subsequent sensitivity to their low birth weight infants was investigated in a study of 12 mother–infant dyads who participated in a South African randomized control study of early SSC. The dyads were visited in the home when infants were under 1 year. Amounts of SSC were taken from hospital records and home interviews. Videotapes of mother–infant interactions in the home were scored for maternal sensitivity on the Maternal Behavior Q‐Sort (D.R. Pederson, G. Moran, & S. Bento, 1999) and the Maternal Behavior subscale of the Nursing Child Assessment Teaching Scale (G. Sumner & A. Spietz, 1994). Amount of SSC in infants' first 24 hr correlated with amount of SSC through the first month. Amount of SSC in infants' first 24 hr independently accounted for maternal sensitivity on both measures, indicating that early mother–infant SSC predicted subsequent maternal sensitivity.     

Can MFTs Address Spirituality with Clients in Publically Funded Agencies?

Many marriage and family therapy (MFT) trainees and therapists working toward licensure are accumulating hours in publically funded treatment centers. The increasingly diverse clientele in the U.S. likely will be served in the public sector, especially as many states are providing more funding for county agencies and increased tuition reimbursement and/or loan forgiveness for students and graduates who work for these organizations. MFTs may feel ill-equipped to address spiritual issues in therapy at these sites, especially when grappling with ethical concerns. This article delineates a case example in which an MFT attends to spiritual issues when working with a family in a county mental health center. The authors illustrate how a therapist can navigate the ethical dilemmas of this case when working from a Bowenian perspective.     

Infants in group care: their interactions with professional caregivers and parents across the second year of life

Seventy children were observed during structured play with their primary professional caregivers and three peers in the child care center and with their primary caregiving parents at home at 15 and 23 months of age. The same structured play tasks were used in the two settings and the quality of the children's interactions with caregivers and parents was rated using the same 7-point scales. As expected, the quality of caregiver–child interactions significantly increased between 15 and 23 months. At 15 months, the quality of caregiver–child interactions was significantly lower than the quality of parent–child interactions, particularly with regard to caregiver supportive presence and respect for the child's autonomy. At 23 months, however, the quality of caregiver–child interactions was no longer lower and in some respects even higher than the quality of parent–child interactions. At both ages, the children expressed more negativity towards their parents than towards their professional caregivers.