Exploring Processes in Day-to-Day Parent–Adolescent Conflict and Angry Mood: Evidence for Circular Causality

Parent–adolescent conflict has been studied both as a precursor of long-term macrolevel developmental risks and as an outcome of microlevel, moment-to-moment interaction patterns. However, the family-level processes underlying the maintenance or regulation of conflict in daily life are largely overlooked. A meso-level understanding of parent–adolescent conflict offers important practical insights that have direct implications for interventions. The present study explores day-to-day reciprocal processes and carryover in parents’ and adolescents’ experiences of anger and conflict. Daily diary data provided by parent–adolescent dyads (N = 151) from two-caregiver households (adolescents: 61.59% female, mean age = 14.60 years) over 21 days were examined using a multivariate Poisson multilevel model to evaluate the circular causality principle in parents’ and adolescents’ daily conflict and anger. Findings offer empirical support for the theory, suggesting that parents’ and adolescents’ anger and conflict exist together in a feedback loop wherein conflict is both a consequence of past anger and also an antecedent of future anger, both within and across persons. Increased understanding of the daily interaction patterns and maintenance of parent–adolescent conflict can guide more informed, targeted, and well-timed interventions intended to ameliorate the consequences of problematic parent–adolescent conflict sequences.     

Intonation does aid serial recall after all

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - A sequence of spoken digits is easier to recall if the digits are grouped into smaller chunks (e.g., through the insertion of pauses). It has been claimed that...     

The nature of intrusive memories after trauma: the warning signal hypothesis

Individuals who had experienced a range of different traumas were asked to describe the quality and content of their intrusive memories. Visual intrusions were the most common, and thoughts were uncommon. Intrusion quality varied little with type of trauma. Intrusive memories commonly consisted of stimuli that were present immediately before the traumatic event happened or shortly before the moments that had the largest emotional impact (i.e., when the meaning of the event became more traumatic). It is suggested that intrusive memories are about stimuli that through temporal association with the trauma acquired the status of warning signals, i.e., stimuli that if encountered again would indicate impending danger. This explains why intrusive memories are accompanied by a sense of serious current threat. The warning signal hypothesis may be useful in guiding therapists in identifying the moments with the largest emotional impact that will need reprocessing in treatment, and in educating patients about the nature of reexperiencing symptoms.     

Envy and Generosity Between Co-Therapists

This paper explores the dynamics of envy and generosity between co-therapists. Generally speaking, co-therapists can be drawn into the same social comparisons (overt and covert), competitiveness, and envy as their group members. The list of valued resources can include the group's affection, appreciation, and recognition, or, more generally, one's status, popularity, creativity, sensitivity, understanding, or parental functioning. The group in turn, will sometimes tend to divide the therapists into the good one and the bad one in order to serve its own developmental needs. This process can increase the tension between the therapists, and feed their envy. I present an argument for processing those feelings and assert that awareness of co-therapist envy can promote the expression of generosity and enhance the capacity of group members for similar experiences. Clinical material will be presented to demonstrate how this works.     

Motivation in later life: personal projects and well-being

"Personal projects," as defined by B. R. Little (1983), were elicited from 600 community residents aged 70+, representing a broad range of health and illness. Factor analysis revealed 6 types of personal projects: activities of daily living, active recreation, other-oriented activities, intellectual activities, home planning, and spiritual moral activities. Background factors and health were shown to affect the number and type of projects reported. Most indices of personal projects were associated with positive affect and valuation of life. Only 1 was associated with depression. This confirms the differential association of personal projects to positive but not negative affect. Personal projects are seen as part of an open motivational system in which social position, cognitive ability, health, and positive mental health are mutually interacting members.     

The role of reinforcement contingencies in chronic alcoholism: An experimental analysis of one case

investigators have questioned chronic alcoholics and round that some of them have returned to normal social drinking (Davies, 1962; Lemere, 1953; Nørvig and Nielsen, 1956; Selzer and Holloway. 1957; and Shea, 1954). These findings would seem inconsistent with such notions as loss of control or craving as the basis of compulsive drinking. Moreover, antecedents and consequences of these explanatory constructs, have not been elucidated. The purpose of this research was to make an intensive study of a single subject to see if specific conditions could be identified under which a chronic alcoholic's drinking could be controlled, in a setting in which environmental variables could be systematically varied and drinking behavior documented.     

The relationship between social anxiety and social support in adolescents: a test of competing causal models

This study compared the strength of competing causal models in explaining the relationship between perceived support, enacted support, and social anxiety in adolescents. The social causation hypothesis postulates that social support causes social anxiety, whereas the social selection hypothesis postulates that social anxiety causes social support. The reciprocal model combines the two hypotheses by arguing that the causal relationship between social support and social anxiety is largely reciprocal. This study tests a modification of the reciprocal model by specifying perceptions of support as a mediating construct. Two waves of data with an interval of three months were collected on 357 college students. Structural equation modeling was used to compare the reciprocal and mediated reciprocal causal models. The study found some support for the mediated reciprocal model, but the magnitude of the relationships were weaker than expected. Limitations and suggestion for future research are discussed.     

Reducing playground bullying and supporting beliefs: an experimental trial of the steps to respect program

Six schools were randomly assigned to a multilevel bullying intervention or a control condition. Children in Grades 3-6 (N=1,023) completed pre- and posttest surveys of behaviors and beliefs and were rated by teachers. Observers coded playground behavior of a random subsample (n=544). Hierarchical analyses of changes in playground behavior revealed declines in bullying and argumentative behavior among intervention-group children relative to control-group children, increases in agreeable interactions, and a trend toward reduced destructive bystander behavior. Those in the intervention group reported enhanced bystander responsibility, greater perceived adult responsiveness, and less acceptance of bullying/aggression than those in the control group. Self-reported aggression did not differ between the groups. Implications for future research on the development and prevention of bullying are discussed.     

Gender, social class, and the subjective experience of aging: self-perceived personality change from early adulthood to late midlife

This study explored the applicability of previous research (obtained with groups of college-educated women) about the subjective experience of aging in midlife to men and less-educated people. Two-hundred fifty-nine men and women who graduated from a public high school in 1955-1957 retrospectively assessed their feelings of identity certainty, confident power, generativity, and concern about aging for their 60s, 40s, and 20s. Participants reported higher levels of identity certainty, confident power, and concern about aging at each age, and a leveling off of generativity in their 60s. There were some gender and social class differences. Although men and women recalled the same trajectory of these feelings, men reported higher levels of identity certainty and confident power across age. Non-college-educated men recalled the highest levels of concern about aging across age. We discuss how these findings add to our understanding of the experience of aging in these domains.     

Inhibition of response mode in task switching

Task inhibition was explored in two experiments that employed a paradigm in which participants switched among three tasks. Two tasks required manual choice responses based on numerical judgment (parity or magnitude), whereas a third task required an unconditional double-press of both response keys. Both experiments showed that switching to a just-abandoned task (n-2 task repetition) generally leads to a performance cost relative to switching to another task. Specifically, this task inhibition effect also occurred for the double-press task, suggesting inhibition of response mode. Prolonging the task-cuing interval showed that advance task preparation reduced only inhibition of the double-press task but not of the choice tasks (Experiment 1). Prolonging the response-cue interval led to a decrease of the inhibition effect in all tasks (Experiment 2), suggesting a time-based release of task inhibition. Together, the experiments support the notion of a response-related component of task inhibition.