Like Father,like Child: Early Life Family Adversity and Children’s Bullying Behaviors in Elementary School

Family adversity has been associated with children’s bullying behaviors. The evidence is, however, dominated by mothers’ perceptions of the family environment and a focus on mothers’ behaviors. This prospective population-based study examined whether children’s bullying behaviors were associated with mother- and father-reported family adversity, assessed before and after child birth. Peer-nominations were used to assess bullying behaviors of 1298 children in elementary school (mean age 7.5 years). The following paternal risk factors were prospectively associated with children’s bullying behaviors: (1) father-reported prenatal family distress, (2) fathers’ hostility at preschool age, and (3) fathers’ harsh disciplinary practices at preschool age, but effect sizes were relatively small. The effect of maternal risk factors was less consistent, only mother-reported family distress in childhood was associated with children’s bullying behaviors. The associations were independent of background family risk factors (i.e., life stress, contextual factors, and other background factors such as parental education and risk taking record) and early childhood externalizing problems. Moreover, our results indicated that father-reported family adversity predicted children’s bullying behaviors over and above the background family risk factors, early childhood externalizing problems and mother-reported family adversity. We also demonstrated that the association of fathers’ prenatal hostility and family distress with subsequent bullying behavior of their child at school was partly mediated by fathers’ harsh disciplinary practices at preschool age. Our findings highlight the importance of fathers’ behaviors in the development of children’s bullying behaviors.     

A progressive model for teaching children with autism to follow gaze shift

Gunby, Rapp, Bottoni, Marchese and Wu (2017) taught three children with autism spectrum disorder to follow an instructor's gaze shift to select a specific item; however, Gunby et al. used different types of prompts with each participant. To address this limitation, we used a progressive training model for increasing gaze shift for three children with autism spectrum disorder. Results show that each participant learned to follow an adult's shift in gaze to make a correct selection. In addition, two participants displayed the skill in response to a parent's gaze shift and with only social consequences; however, the third participant required verbal instruction and tangible reinforcement to demonstrate the skill outside of training sessions.     

Assessing Stimulus Control in a Discrimination Task with Compound Stimuli: Evaluating Testing Procedures and Tracking Eye Fixations

The Psychological Record - Experiments with pigeons have suggested that the way stimuli are arranged in tests affects the demonstration of the stimulus control established during training. The...     

Effects of Business Internships on Students,Employers, and Higher Education Institutions: A Systematic Review

The objective of this study is to provide a systematic review of the literature on the impact of internships completed by university students. This research also aims to analyze variables that can affect outcomes and satisfaction in the internship experience. Fifty‐seven studies were included and examined. The effects and variables identified were listed and classified. The findings of this review support the overall positive effects of business internships and confirm that they are a win‐win situation for the main 3 stakeholders: students, employers, and higher education institutions.     

French Validation of the Overexcitability Questionnaire 2: Psychometric Properties and Factorial Structure

Overexcitability corresponds to an overall response to stimulations in 5 domains: psychomotor, sensual, intellectual, imaginational, and emotional. The aim of this study was to develop a French version of the Overexcitability Questionnaire 2 (OEQ2) and to expand its psychometric properties. Two studies were conducted: one with a sample of 474 adolescents and another with a sample of 436 adults. Internal consistency, factorial structure, and validity (correlations with intelligence, personality, and alexithymia) were examined. The French OEQ2 showed satisfactory psychometric properties, thus advocating for its use in further research on overexcitability and in clinical practice.     

Gay-Straight Alliances Vary on Dimensions of Youth Socializing and Advocacy: Factors Accounting for Individual and Setting-Level Differences

Gay‐Straight Alliances (GSAs) are school‐based youth settings that could promote health. Yet, GSAs have been treated as homogenous without attention to variability in how they operate or to how youth are involved in different capacities. Using a systems perspective, we considered two primary dimensions along which GSAs function to promote health: providing socializing and advocacy opportunities. Among 448 students in 48 GSAs who attended six regional conferences in Massachusetts (59.8 % LGBQ; 69.9 % White; 70.1 % cisgender female), we found substantial variation among GSAs and youth in levels of socializing and advocacy. GSAs were more distinct from one another on advocacy than socializing. Using multilevel modeling, we identified group and individual factors accounting for this variability. In the socializing model, youth and GSAs that did more socializing activities did more advocacy. In the advocacy model, youth who were more actively engaged in the GSA as well as GSAs whose youth collectively perceived greater school hostility and reported greater social justice efficacy did more advocacy. Findings suggest potential reasons why GSAs vary in how they function in ways ranging from internal provisions of support, to visibility raising, to collective social change. The findings are further relevant for settings supporting youth from other marginalized backgrounds and that include advocacy in their mission.     

Panning for the gold in health research: Incorporating studies’ methodological quality in meta-analysis

Background: Systematic reviews now routinely assess methodological quality to gauge the validity of the included studies and of the synthesis as a whole. Although trends from higher quality studies should be clearer, it is uncertain how often meta-analyses incorporate methodological quality in models of study results either as predictors, or, more interestingly, in interactions with theoretical moderators.

Objective and methods: We survey 200 meta-analyses in three health promotion domains to examine when and how meta-analyses incorporate methodological quality.

Results: Although methodological quality assessments commonly appear in contemporary meta-analyses (usually as scales), they are rarely incorporated in analyses, and still more rarely analysed in interaction with theoretical determinants of the success of health promotions. The few meta-analyses (2.5%) that did include such an interaction analysis showed that moderator results remained significant in higher quality studies or were present only among higher quality studies. We describe how to model quality interactively with theoretically derived moderators and discuss strengths and weaknesses of this approach and in relation to current meta-analytic practice.

Conclusions: In large literatures exhibiting heterogeneous effects, meta-analyses can incorporate methodological quality and generate conclusions that enable greater confidence not only about the substantive phenomenon but also about the role that methodological quality itself plays.