Mothers’ and Adolescents’ Perceptions of Family Environment and Adolescent Social-Emotional Functioning

Research has emphasized the importance of the relationship between family functioning and adolescent behavioral development. The present study examines family environment and social-emotional functioning of primarily minority adolescents, viewed from both adolescents’ and mothers’ perspectives. Participants were a school-based sample of adolescents with and without risk for emotional and behavioral disabilities and their mothers (N = 86 dyads). Results suggested an association between the mothers’ views of their adolescent children’s problem behaviors and the adolescents’ self-ratings of risk-taking behaviors across 5 years. Overall, mothers of the at risk youth receiving special education services reported higher ratings of youth problem behaviors, but results also indicated that mothers of the at risk adolescent boys not receiving special education services perceived greater depressive symptoms in their children and more family conflict in their homes. Mothers of youth at risk but not receiving special education services experienced higher levels of stress associated with being a parent than mothers of the not-at-risk adolescents. The parent measures of adolescent behavior and depressive symptoms, family conflict, and parental stress were not predictive of the social-emotional functioning of these adolescents in the multilevel models. Implications of these findings for early identification and family focused intervention programs are discussed.     

The spiritual benefits of travel for senior tourists

This research explores the spiritual benefits of travel for older adults and illustrates how travel meets seniors' self‐actualization and spiritual growth needs. The theoretical point of departure for this research is seniors' quest for meaning and self‐actualization, which act as push factors inducing older adults to travel. Semistructured depth interviews were conducted with 16 retired senior informants who had extensive travel experience. Using an interpretive method, this research reveals four key themes that illustrate the spiritual benefits of travel, thereby extending the growing literature on the motivations of senior travelers. These themes are described as “traveling generates meaning for older adults,” “traveling reveals the self to older adults,” “traveling encourages older adults to better understand others,” and “traveling enables older adults to better understand their relationship to nature”. In sum, the themes describe how older adults may meet their unique spiritual needs through travel and thereby enhance their spiritual development. This research represents one of a few studies examining senior tourism to employ an interpretive method and provides rich insights as a result. This research also extends the emerging research on spirituality in marketing by illustrating how the tourism industry may benefit from a perspective that considers the spiritual benefits of consumption. The research findings suggest that the intangible spiritual benefits of travel, in addition to the tangible benefits, should be highlighted in travel offers and tourism communications targeted to older adults. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Probability Discounting in College Students’ Willingness to Isolate During COVID-19: Implications for Behavior Analysis and Public Health

The Psychological Record - The present study was a preliminary analysis of college students’ willingness to self-isolate and socially isolate during the COVID-19 pandemic analyzed through a...     

Is the hijab protective? An investigation of body image and related constructs among British Muslim women

Previous studies have reported equivocal findings concerning the impact of wearing a hijab, or Islamic head‐ and body‐cover, on Muslim women's body image. Here, we sought to examine that impact using a larger sample of Muslim women than has been relied upon and a wider range of body image measures. A total of 587 British Muslim women completed a battery of scales assessing their frequency and conservativeness of hijab use, body image variables, attitudes towards the media and beauty ideals, importance of appearance, and religiosity. Preliminary results indicated that 218 women never used the hijab and 369 women used some form of the hijab at least rarely. Controlling for religiosity, women who wore the hijab had more positive body image, lower internalization of media messages about beauty standards, and placed less importance on appearance than women who did not wear the hijab. Among women who wore the hijab, hijab use significantly predicted weight discrepancy and body appreciation over and above religiosity. These results are discussed in terms of the possible protective impact among British Muslim women of wearing the hijab.     

Altered attention for stimuli on the hands

Attention operates in the space near the hands with unique, action-related priorities. Here, we examined how attention treats objects on the hands themselves. We tested two hypotheses. First, attention may treat stimuli on the hands like stimuli near the hands, as though the surface of the hands were the proximal case of near-hand space. Alternatively, we proposed that the surface of the hands may be attentionally distinct from the surrounding space. Specifically, we predicted that attention should be slow to orient toward the hands in order to remain entrained to near-hand space, where the targets of actions are usually located. In four experiments, we observed delayed orienting of attention on the hands compared to orienting attention near or far from the hands. Similar delayed orienting was also found for tools connected to the body compared to tools disconnected from the body. These results support our second hypothesis: attention operates differently on the functional surfaces of the hand. We suggest this effect serves a functional role in the execution of manual actions.     

Conservatives Anticipate and Experience Stronger Emotional Reactions to Negative Outcomes

The present work examined whether conservatives and liberals differ in their anticipation of their own emotional reactions to negative events. In two studies, participants imagined experiencing positive or negative outcomes in domains that do not directly concern politics. In Study 1, 190 American participants recruited online (64 male, M_age = 32 years) anticipated their emotional responses to romantic relationship outcomes. In Study 2, 97 Canadian undergraduate students (26 male, M_age = 21 years) reported on their anticipated and experienced emotional responses to academic outcomes. In both studies, more conservative participants predicted they would feel stronger negative emotions following negative outcomes than did more liberal participants. Furthermore, a longitudinal follow‐up of Study 2 participants revealed that more conservative participants actually felt worse than more liberal participants after receiving a lower‐than‐desired exam grade. These effects remained even when controlling for the Big Five traits, prevention focus, and attachment style (Study 1), and optimism (Study 2). We discuss how the relationship between political orientation and anticipated affect likely contributes to differences between conservatives and liberals in styles of decision and policy choices.     

Or cues knowledge of alternatives: Evidence from priming

Recent research has determined that word meanings can instantly influence the meaning and distribution of other words in the sentence. Here, we manipulated basic carrier sentences with the disjunction or linking two nouns that were either filling the same thematic role or not, and were either semantically related or not. Though previous research has shown that one word can prime a semantically related word even in a sentential context, we predicted that if or cues knowledge about contextually‐relevant alternatives, priming for semantic relatives will only obtain when those words also fill the same thematic role. These predictions were confirmed, as self‐paced reading times of the second alternative in the sentence were faster only when the two alternatives shared the same thematic role and semantic category, suggesting that disjunction words like or function similarly to verbs, which cue knowledge about expected argument structure and sense depending on sentential context. The relevance of these findings for basic reasoning phenomena (i.e., the subadditivity effect) is also discussed.     

What Causes Internalising Traits and Autistic Traits to Co-occur in Adolescence? A Community-Based Twin Study

Autism shows a high degree of comorbidity with anxiety disorders. Adolescence is a time of increased stress and vulnerability to internalising problems. This study addresses for the first time the degree of genetic and environmental overlap between autistic traits (total measure and subscales) and internalising traits in a community-based adolescent twin sample. Parents of 12-14-year-old twins (N?=?3,232 pairs; 3,460 males, 3,004 females) reported on the twins’ internalising and autistic traits. Autistic trait subscales were created using principal component analysis. Bivariate twin model-fitting was conducted. Autistic and internalising traits correlated moderately (r?=?0.30). Genetic influences on individual traits were substantial but genetic overlap between traits was moderate (genetic correlation: males?=?0.30, females?=?0.12). Shared environmental influences were low for internalising traits and moderate for autistic traits, and showed considerable overlap (shared environmental correlation: males?=?0.53, females?=?1). Nonshared environmental influences were moderate for internalising traits and low for autistic traits and showed low overlap. A multiple component solution was found for autistic traits and of the derived subscales, autistic-like ‘Social Unease’ showed the most phenotypic and genetic overlap with internalising traits.     

Possible number systems

Number systems—such as the natural numbers, integers, rationals, reals, or complex numbers—play a foundational role in mathematics, but these systems can present difficulties for students. In the studies reported here, we probed the boundaries of people’s concept of a number system by asking them whether “number lines” of varying shapes qualify as possible number systems. In Experiment 1, participants rated each of a set of number lines as a possible number system, where the number lines differed in their structures (a single straight line, a step-shaped line, a double line, or two branching structures) and in their boundedness (unbounded, bounded below, bounded above, bounded above and below, or circular). Participants also rated each of a group of mathematical properties (e.g., associativity) for its importance to number systems. Relational properties, such as associativity, predicted whether participants believed that particular forms were number systems, as did the forms’ ability to support arithmetic operations, such as addition. In Experiment 2, we asked participants to produce properties that were important for number systems. Relational, operation, and use-based properties from this set again predicted ratings of whether the number lines were possible number systems. In Experiment 3, we found similar results when the number lines indicated the positions of the individual numbers. The results suggest that people believe that number systems should be well-behaved with respect to basic arithmetic operations, and that they reject systems for which these operations produce ambiguous answers. People care much less about whether the systems have particular numbers (e.g., 0) or sets of numbers (e.g., the positives).