The Role of Natural Support Systems in the Post-deployment Adjustment of Active Duty Military Personnel

This study examined the relations among three different types of naturally occurring social support (from romantic partners, friends and neighbors, and unit leaders) and three indices of service member well‐being (self reports of depressive symptoms, satisfaction with military life, and perceptions of unit readiness) for service members who did and did not report negative experiences associated with military deployment. Data were drawn from the 2011 Community Assessment completed anonymously by more than 63,000 USAF personnel. Regression analyses revealed that higher levels of social support was associated with better outcomes regardless of negative deployment experiences. Evidence of moderation was also noted, with all forms of social support moderating the impact of negative deployment experiences on depressive symptoms and support from unit leaders moderating the impact of negative deployment experience on satisfaction with military life. No moderation was found for perceptions of unit readiness. Subgroup analyses revealed slightly different patterns for male and female service members, with support providing fewer moderation effects for women. These findings may have value for military leaders and mental health professionals working to harness the power of naturally occurring relationships to maximize the positive adjustment of service members and their families. Implications for practices related to re‐integration of post‐deployment military personnel are discussed.     

A retrospective longitudinal study of cognitive and language skills in poor reading comprehension

Fifty‐six specific poor reading comprehenders (SPRC) were selected in Grade 4 and retrospectively compared to good comprehenders at preschool (age 5) and at the end of kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2. The results revealed deficits in vocabulary, grammar, verbal memory and early deficits in phonological awareness in most of the SPRC sample, beginning in preschool. The reading comprehension deficits in children with SPRC were not as marked in earlier assessments in Grade 1 and 2, probably because of the greater dependence on word decoding in reading comprehension in the early grades.     

Self‐rated personality and intelligence: a multivariate genetic analysis

The present study investigated the phenotypic, genetic, and environmental correlations between personality factors and measured intelligence. Twin pairs (92 monozygotic and 50 same sex dizygotic) completed 20 sets of personality adjectives in self‐report form as well as a group administered intelligence test, measuring general intelligence and verbal and performance composite scales. The personality adjectives were found to fit a five factor model. Personality aggregates were also created based on multiple regression analyses and used to predict each intelligence dimension. Triangular decompositions were computed to estimate the degree to which the phenotypic personality and intelligence relations were attributable to common genetic and/or environmental factors. Results of these analyses found small to moderate genetic and environmental correlations between intelligence and the personality factors, and moderate to high genetic correlations between intelligence and the personality aggregates, suggesting that intelligence is related to some personality traits at both the phenotypic and the genetic level. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The impact of culture on physiological processes of emotion regulation: a comparison of US and Chinese preschoolers

Cognitive determinants of emotion regulation, such as effortful control, have been hypothesized to modulate young children's physiological response to emotional stress. It is unknown, however, whether this model of emotion regulation generalizes across Western and non‐Western cultures. The current study examined the relation between both behavioral and questionnaire measures of effortful control and densely sampled, stress‐induced cortisol trajectories in U.S. and Chinese preschoolers. Participants were 3‐ to 5‐ year‐old children recruited from the United States (N = 57) and Beijing, China (N = 60). Consistent with our hypothesis, U.S. children showed a significant negative relation between maternal‐rated inhibitory control and both cortisol reactivity and recovery. However, this was not replicated in the Chinese sample. Children in China showed a significant positive relation between maternal‐rated attentional focusing and cortisol reactivity that was not seen in the U.S. Results suggest that children who reside in Western and non‐Western cultures have different predictors of their emotion‐related stress response.     

Mothers' and infants' responses to their partners' spontaneous action and vocal/verbal imitation

Twenty mother-infant dyads (10 boys, 10 girls) were videotaped longitudinally at ages 10, 13, 17, and 21 months during in-home free play and bath sessions. Mothers' and infants' responses to their partners' naturally occurring action and vocal/verbal imitations were described, and relations to infants' imitation rates and vocabularies were examined. Mothers' response rates were consistently high and unrelated to infants' imitation rates. As early as 10 months, infants responded to the great majority of maternal imitations, especially action imitations, often with actions. Infants' return imitations to action matching indicated increasing awareness of being imitated. Infants' responses to mothers' vocal/verbal imitation were associated with their later vocabulary levels. Children who would be more lexically advanced at 17 and/or 21 months provided more social responses at 10 months, more socially responsive actions and return verbal imitations at 13 months, and more non-imitative socially responsive words at 17 and 21 months.     

Graded structure and the speed of category verification: On the moderating effects of anticipatory control for social vs. non-social categories

Speeded classification tasks have widely been used as leverage to discern whether exemplars are considered to be typical or atypical members of categories. However, little is known about the possibly different nature of the mechanisms that underlie such reactions for “social” vs. “non-social” categories. We presented participants with typical and atypical exemplars to classify and manipulated the opportunity that participants had to control their responses by varying whether stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was short (350 ms) or long (2000 ms). For non-social categories (e.g., BIRD), participants were faster to classify typical instances than atypical instances, regardless of SOA. In contrast, we predicted and found that manipulating SOA strongly moderated the pattern of response times when motives for control were greater, as was the case when participants were presented with occupations relevant to racial stereotypes (e.g., DOCTORS and JANITORS). The implications of these findings, and their relation to effects observed with gender-based occupational stereotypes, are discussed.     

Buck-Passing and the Wrong Kind of Reasons

According to T.M. Scanlon's buck-passing account of value, to be valuable is not to possess intrinsic value as a simple and unanalysable property, but rather to have other properties that provide reasons to take up an attitude in favour of their owner or against it. The 'wrong kind of reasons' objection to this view is that we may have reasons to respond for or against something without this having any bearing on its value. The challenge is to explain why such reasons are of the wrong kind. This is what I set out to do, after illustrating the objection more thoroughly.     

Lowe's Defence of Constitutionalism

Constitutionalism says that qualitatively different objects can be made of the same matter at once. Critics claim that we should expect such objects to be qualitatively indistinguishable. E.J. Lowe thinks this complaint is based on the false assumption that differences in the way things are at a time must always be grounded in how things are at that time, and that we can answer it by pointing out that different kinds of coinciding objects are subject to different composition principles. I argue that he is mistaken on both counts.