Colic: What's maternal mental health got to do with it?

Families can benefit when pediatric and mental health professionals have a greater appreciation of psychological and relational issues that arise in the course of caring for an infant with colic. The Infant Behavior, Cry, and Sleep Clinic is a multidisciplinary, clinical intervention for parents who identify infant crying as adversely affecting infant, parental, and/or family functioning. Pairing pediatric and mental health expertise provides parents with strategies to manage infant colic within a context that recognizes parental mental health needs. Clinical case material illustrates varying responses and degrees of psychological distress in mothers whose infants have colic. Treatment approaches to colic that take into account maternal mental health needs may contribute to more optimal infant, maternal, and family outcomes.     

Telehealth for persons with severe functional disabilities and their caregivers: facilitating self-care management in the home setting

Persons with severe functional disabilities are the highest users of health care services. Caring for the needs of this population represents a significant percentage of our national health care costs. A growing body of research has demonstrated the efficacy of self-management strategies and caregiver engagement for effective long-term care for individuals with chronic medical conditions. Economic forces over the past decade have led to new challenges and resulted in major changes in health care delivery resulting in shortened length of inpatient stays and greater limits on the length of outpatient treatment. Telehealth is an innovative method for health care delivery and a means of meeting this new challenge. This article highlights the findings of 3 pilot studies on the use of telecommunications technologies in promoting self-care management and enhancing health care outcomes in persons with severe disabilities and their family caregivers. The importance of matching technology to the needs of this population, lessons learned from these investigations, and future directions for research are addressed.     

JOB CHARACTERISTICS AND WELL-BEING AT MIDLIFE Ethnic and Gender Comparisons

Lacking in the research on work and well-being is a focus on the characteristics of the employment role that contribute to well-being and their differential relations across ethnicity and gender. White and Black women and men at midlife (ages 40-64) were studied. The samples were drawn from two national surveys and included 186 White women, 202 White men, 254 Black women, and 169 Black men. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to assess the relation of work commitment, job satisfaction, role stress, occupational status and personal income to perceived control, life satisfaction, and happiness. Marital status, age, and hours worked were included as control variables. Results indicate that job satisfaction is positively related to life satisfaction for all four groups, and to happiness for White women and Black men. Personal income is positively related to perceived control for Black women and White men, and to life satisfaction for White women. Occupational status is positively related to perceived control for White and Black women; role stress is negatively related to life satisfaction among White men, and to happiness among Black women. Among the control variable, being married positively related to well-being for all four race-sex groups.     

Dimensions of Temperament: Affect Intensity and Consumer Lifestyles

This article focuses on the relation between affect intensity and 3 fundamental dimensions of temperament—emotionality, sociability, and sensory arousability. The purpose was to show that individual differences in affect intensity as a dimension of temperament can influence not only advertising responses, but also the lifestyles and preferences of consumers. Study 1 confirmed the emotionality dimension in that high affect intensity individuals responded with significantly stronger levels of emotion when exposed to an affectively charged advertising appeal, but not when exposed to a nonemotional appeal. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that the fundamental dimensions of temperament are accompanied by heightened emotional intensity and do predict different preferences for lifestyle activities for high and low affect intensity consumers. A significant Affect Intensity × Gender interaction occurred indicating that both men and women expressed stronger emotions when experiencing activities that were gender‐congruent (e.g., watching sports on TV for men, and smelling perfumes for women). Future research directions are also discussed.     

Dimensions of Religion and Spirituality: A Longitudinal Topic Modeling Approach

In lieu of the traditional text data analysis methods, structural topic modeling was utilized to analyze the text contents of 255 self-report inventories of religion and spirituality (R/S) published from 1929 to 2017. The study had two objectives: (a) to clarify and identify the latent dimensions of R/S inherent in the items of the measures; and (b) to examine and demonstrate the usefulness of a longitudinal topic modeling in the study of R/S. We identified 5,617 unique text terms from the measures and fitted topic models on those terms to extract latent dimensions called topics. We also simultaneously analyzed the longitudinal effect of publication decade (i.e., 1950s–2010s) on the topics. A topic model with three topics was chosen to best support the data: Experience of Transcendence (Topic 1), Engagement in Transcendence (Topic 2), and Essence of Transcendence (Topic 3). In addition, the longitudinal analysis revealed that Topic 1 showed a continual increase over the decades, while Topics 2 and 3 both demonstrated a gradual decrease, in effect matching the general trend of Topic 1's increasing popularity in society and the academia.     

Developmental change and cross‐domain links in vocal and musical emotion recognition performance in childhood

Although the configurations of psychoacoustic cues signalling emotions in human vocalizations and instrumental music are very similar, cross‐domain links in recognition performance have yet to be studied developmentally. Two hundred and twenty 5‐ to 10‐year‐old children were asked to identify musical excerpts and vocalizations as happy, sad, or fearful. The results revealed age‐related increases in overall recognition performance with significant correlations across vocal and musical conditions at all developmental stages. Recognition scores were greater for musical than vocal stimuli and were superior in females compared with males. These results confirm that recognition of emotions in vocal and musical stimuli is linked by 5 years and that sensitivity to emotions in auditory stimuli is influenced by age and gender.     

FEMINIST RESEARCH METHODS A Content Analysis of Psychology and Social Science Textbooks

This research examined the extent to which research methods textbooks in psychology and general social science discuss feminist challenges and approaches to social science (N = 40 textbooks). Two dimensions were examined. First, within the "nonsexist" dimensions, textbooks were analyzed to determine if they used nonsexist language and if they discussed ways to avoid sexist bias in research. The second dimension was "profeminist." Within this dimension four subdomains receiving considerable attention from feminist researchers were explored: (a) epistemology (or "ways of knowing"); (b) objectivity and subjectivity; (c) the relationship between the researcher and the researched; and (d) qualitative versus quantitative methodologies. Results demonstrated that although the majority of the textbooks did not use sexist language, they did not move much beyond this standard. There was little discussion of feminist challenges to these research issues. When the textbook authors did mention these topics, their analyses were most often inconsistent with feminist approaches.