Perceived versus reported social referent approval and romantic relationship commitment and persistence

The current study examined social network influence processes on romantic relationship outcomes by obtaining the reported opinions of social referents as well as romantic relationship members’ perceptions of social network members’ opinions. Participants were 254 (151 women) college students from the United States involved in romantic relationships along with a male and female friend who all completed surveys regarding the participants’ romantic relationship. This work demonstrated that perceived normative beliefs of social network members significantly mediated the effects of reported social network approval on relationship commitment. Participants’ reports of relationship commitment were found to mediate the effect of subjective norms on relationship persistence. Along with network members’ relationship approval, participants’ satisfaction was found to predict participants’ normative beliefs.     

Training agrammatic subjects on passive sentences: implications for syntactic deficit theories

We trained two subjects with chronic agrammatic aphasia on production of passive sentences using a computerized, iconic-based communication system. After training, one of the subjects demonstrated significant improvements in his abilities to comprehend and verbally produce English passive voiced sentences, including sentences with conjoined subjects and objects. These results suggest that agrammatism does not represent a fixed syntactic deficit.     

What's Not to Love? Rethinking Appeals to Tradition in Contemporary Debates in Trinitarian Theology

Contemporary discussions of the doctrine of the Trinity are sometimes centered on debates between ‘Social Trinitarians’ and ‘Classical Trinitarians.’ Those who align with ‘Social Trinitarianism’ usually insist that an adequate doctrine of the Trinity demands an affirmation of intra-Trinitarian mutual love – and thus reject the doctrine of divine simplicity and numerical sameness out of a commitment to being fully Trinitarian. Meanwhile, those who want to recover ‘Classical Trinitarianism’ insist that the doctrine of divine simplicity is true and salutary – and thus reject any notion of love shared between the Father and Son within the divine life. I argue that both alternatives are profoundly out of step with the theological tradition they claim to retrieve and represent, for simultaneous affirmations of divine simplicity and mutual love are found all across the tradition of Latin scholastic theology. Constructive Trinitarian theology that makes appeal to the ‘classical’ tradition should take this diversity and complexity into account.     

A caregiver–child socioemotional and relationship rating scale

This article reports the construction and pilot reliability, validity, and psychometric properties of a new caregiver–child rating scale that emphasizes caregiver–child socioemotional interactions and relationships. While the scale was developed and studied in orphanages for young children, it potentially could be used in nonresidential early care and education settings as well as for parent–child interactions in the home. The intent was to assess a few dimensions that comprehensively cover the range of caregiver–child socioemotional interactions and relationships, by means of a scale that could be administered in a relatively short time period in a variety of situations and would not require extensive coder training, manuals, or materials. Results showed that the scale can be reliably administered even using observation periods as short as 5 min, that inter‐rater reliability was acceptable (based on data from two raters working in two orphanages, and five raters working in another), and that ratings of caregivers were similar across different types of caregiving activities (i.e., feeding, dressing/bathing, free play) and for caregivers attending to children birth to 4 and 4 to 8 years of age. In the orphanage context, factor analyses showed that the scale primarily reflects caregiver–child mutual engagement and relationship with subordinate components of caregiver punitiveness and caregiver‐ versus child‐directed behaviors and intrusiveness.