Attachment Theory as a Framework for Understanding Responses to Social Exclusion

We argue that attachment theory may provide a useful framework for understanding individuals' reactions to social exclusion. Attachment theory suggests that social exclusion should prompt an individual to seek comfort from an accepting attachment figure. However, most experimental studies constrain individuals from seeking out an attachment figure to quell their distress, and may interfere with the process of recruiting internalized attachment figures. When the goal of recruiting attachment figure support is blocked, individuals may adopt deactivating strategies, such as emotional numbing, to reduce their distress. Alternatively, individuals may adopt hyperactivating strategies, such as ingratiating behaviors, to seek proximity to attachment figure substitutes. We conclude with recommendations for future avenues of exclusion research stemming from attachment theory.     

Working memory in event‐ and time‐based prospective memory tasks: Effects of secondary demand and age

An experiment is reported examining the role of working memory in two laboratory‐based prospective memory (PM) tasks. Participants viewed a film for a later recognition memory task while simultaneously monitoring auditorially presented arithmetic problems for incorrect solutions. The arithmetic verification task was either low demand or high demand. In addition, participants were required either to indicate whenever an animal appeared in the film (event‐based PM task), or whenever 3 min had elapsed (time‐based PM task). PM performance was higher when the arithmetic task was low demand than when it was high demand. Young participants were more successful in both PM tasks than older participants, but only under high demand. Age did not interact with PM task type overall, and the young participants were faster overall in both types of PM task. Taken together, the results indicate that working memory plays an important role in PM tasks.     

Factors Associated with Perceived Paternal Involvement in Childrearing

Interest in paternal involvement in child care has increased as the demands on the time and resources of maternal caretakers have increased. The purpose of the present study was to examine variables associated with perceived paternal involvement in child care. Participants were 137 (90 European American and 47 African American) fathers of children between the ages of 2 and 6. Hierarchical multiple regression and analyses of variance indicated that ethnicity, gender role orientation, and perceived skill at child care were associated with higher levels of perceived paternal engagement in and responsibility for child care. Partners' work status was associated with perceived paternal responsibility for, but not engagement in child care. Data suggest that fathers' perceptions of their abilities, gender role, and family requirements may combine to influence child care involvement.     

Religiosity and Mental Health: A Meta–Analysis of Recent Studies

A meta–analysis was performed in an attempt to clarify the proposed relationship between religiosity and psychological adjustment. Specific focus was given to the issue of definition, namely, whether differences in researchers' conceptualizations of religiosity and mental health could account for the various contradictory findings by psychologists of religion. Analysis of 34 studies conducted during the past 12 years revealed that the definitions of religiosity and mental health utilized by psychologists in this field were indeed associated with different types and strengths of the correlations between religiosity and mental health. Discussion of results assesses the fit between relevant theory and the pattern of change in effect size across categories of religion and adjustment, and concludes with implications for therapeutic uses of religious involvement.     

Predictors of representational aggression in preschool children of low‐income urban African American adolescent mothers

Responses to five doll‐story stems thematically related to attachment experiences with the mother were videotaped in the home and used to evaluate child, maternal, and environmental predictors of representational aggression in 93 preschool children of African American women receiving public assistance who had become pregnant as teenagers. Significant correlations were found between representational aggression and child's gender (male), birth weight, maternal depressive affect, maternal educational attainment, recent employment, mother's historical residence with her own mother, and felt social support, accounting for 40% of the variance in representational aggression. A significant Felt Social Support × Gender interaction effect suggested that girls of mothers who perceive higher levels of felt social support are more likely to represent less aggression in their stories; felt social support was not associated with boys' representational aggression. A significant Felt Social Support × Employment interaction effect suggested that representational aggression is associated with lower levels of felt social support only among employed mothers. Findings suggest that different pathways exist for representational aggression in children of low‐income adolescent mothers, which nevertheless share predictors associated with poverty.     

Parents of the Battered Child: A Multidisciplinary Group Therapy Approach to Life-Threatening Behavior

ABSTRACT: This paper reports the demographic findings and the experience of a three-year, multidisciplinary group psychotherapy program, with 31 child-abusing families. No predictive demographic characteristics were identified. The abuse of children ranged from mild bruising to severe brain damage and multiple fractures. Group therapy as an intervention procedure had its successes and failures. The dynamics of male-female co-therapists, the peer group sharing, and the capacity to ultimately verbalize inadequacies in the parenting role were crucial factors in therapy. As an experiential encounter the study gives a poignant insight into the personal and family pathology of parents who abuse their children.     

Planning and Problem solving Using the Five disc Tower of London Task

This paper investigates the planning and problem-solving abilities of normal adult subjects using a complex version of Shallice's (1982, 1988) Tower of London (TOL) task. Subjects were required to plan a fluent solution to a range of 5-disc TOL puzzles and then execute their formulated plans as fast as possible. The number of errors and the times taken to prepare the most efficient solutions increased monotonically with the number of chunks of subgoal moves. A subgoal move is a move that is essential for the solution of the puzzle, but which does not place a disc into its goal position. A subgoal chunk is a consecutive series of subgoal moves that all transfer discs to and from the same pegs. Furthermore, preparation time was found to be sensitive to a manipulation that increased the number of competing alternative choices, at critical steps in move selection. When subjects planned their action sequences 'on-line', analyses of individual moves and individual move latencies suggested that planning TOL solutions was limited by the difficulty in evaluating and selecting one action (or one subgoal chunk) from the set of competing potential actions at each step in the course of problem solving.     

The effects of exposure duration and practice on the immediate memory spans of children and adults

Immediate memory spans for alphabetic items were determined for second-grade, fifth-grade, and adult subjects. Subjects were tested on three days, ten trials per day at each of three exposure durations: 15, 50, and 200 msec. One half of the subjects were presented with exposure durations in an ascending order, the other half in a descending order. The results indicated that immediate memory span increases with age and practice. The exposure duration effect depended on the order and day in which durations were presented. There was a suggestion that the exposure duration effect was also dependent upon the age and sex of the subject. The ordering of array positions from most accurately reported to least accurately reported was identical for all three age levels, indicating that scanning strategies are well established at an early age.     

Observing behavior in the albino rat: a within-subjects' comparison of increasing levels of visual complexity.

54 male CD strain Charles River albino rats were tested for complexity preference using a non-locomotor response. Each subject was presented an array of photographic slides containing an incremental series of complexity elements, i.e., 1, 2, 5 and 25 elements. All photographic slides were randomized both within and across subjects. Each photographic slide of each level of complexity was repeated three times. Results of an analysis of covariance, with luminance as the covariate, showed that cummulative viewing time increased with an increase in stimulus complexity. The relationship between looking and level of complexity was shown to be different when covariance procedures were used than without them.     

Pain cues and uncertainity as determinants of aggression in a situation involving repeated instigation.

In contrast to the Buss aggression paradigm, a situation was employed in which subjects were given an expanded range of response options and were exposed to instigation throughout their response period. It was found that (a) despite these changes pain cues depressed aggressiveness in the present situation as they generally do in the Buss paradigm, but that this effect only occurred where the subjects' aggression was initially ineffective in changing their target's behavior; (b) situational uncertainity, which is minimal in a Buss-type situation, was related to aggressiveness; (c) subjects tended to match rather than attempt to control the responses of the target; and (d) the present paradigm is capable of isolating a personality variable related to overall aggressiveness. These data are discussed in terms of other recent paid cue studies that deviate from the standard Buss situation. Generally, the findings suggest the potential of increasing the range of situations in which aggression is studied.