Anxiety and Social Functioning: The Moderating Roles of Family Accommodation and Youth Characteristics

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - It is well established that anxiety can contribute to social functioning difficulties during childhood and adolescence. It is less clear which...     

Parental Knowledge/Monitoring and Depressive Symptoms During Adolescence: Protective Factor or Spurious Association?

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - Parental knowledge/monitoring is negatively associated with adolescents’ depressive symptoms, suggesting monitoring could be a target for...     

Executive functions,math anxiety and math performance in middle school students

Previous studies mainly investigated working memory (WM) and math anxiety (MA) leaving almost unexplored other aspects of executive functions (EFs) in middle school period. Filling the gap in the literature, the aims of this study were: (1) to better examine the relationship between MA and math performance, (2) to better examine the relationship between EFs and math performance and (3) to investigate the interplay between EFs and MA on math performances. This study confirmed a significant and negative relationship between MA and math performance, indicates a significant and positive relationship between visuospatial WM and math performance, shifting and math performance and highlight a scarcely investigated indirect influence of MA through the measure of shifting on math performance. Our findings shed further light on the mediating role of EFs between MA and math performance and underline some future perspectives.     

The association of sleep disturbances with endocrine and perceived stress reactivity measures in male employees

Evidence on the relationship between stress reactivity and sleep is conflicting. This study examined the association between disturbed sleep and perceived and endocrine stress reactivity independently of age, body mass index (BMI), and chronic stress. One hundred and twenty middle-aged men were exposed to the Trier Social Stress Test for Groups. The Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index and the Perceived Stress Reactivity Scale were used to assess sleep and perceived stress reactivity, respectively. Endocrine stress reactivity was examined by assessing salivary cortisol levels. Regression analyses showed that men with disturbed sleep had blunted overall cortisol responses (b = −18.246, p = .044), but the association did not survive adjustment for age, BMI, and chronic stress. In contrast, poor sleep was associated with heightened perceived stress reactivity independently of age and BMI (b = 0.235, p = .005), but additional adjustment for chronic stress attenuated the relationship and only chronic stress remained a significant predictor of perceived stress reactivity (b = 0.470, p < .001). Cortisol and perceived stress reactivity were uncorrelated. In summary, our study indicates associations between sleep disturbances and stress reactivity were not independent of BMI and chronic stress levels, and endocrine and perceived stress reactivity were dissociated.     

Addressing Issues in the Development and Use of the Composite International Reference Values as Rorschach Norms for Adults

This article describes 3 studies evaluating normative reference data for the Rorschach Comprehensive System (CS; Exner, 2003, 2007), with a particular focus on the viability of the Composite International Reference Values (CIRVs) that were compiled from 21 adult studies by Meyer, Erdberg, and Shaffer (2007). Study 1 documented how the CIRV norms are virtually identical when organized into 3 groups differentiated by the quality of their data collection effort, including an optimal group of 4 samples that relied on multiple experienced examiners and provided ongoing quality control over administration and coding. Analyses also showed that relative to the group of more optimal samples, the group of less optimal samples did not produce more variability in summary scores within or across samples or lower interrater reliability for coding. Study 2 used the existing CS reference norms to generate T scores for the CIRV means and documented how the CS norms make other samples of healthy nonpatients look psychologically impaired in multiple domains. Study 3 documented with examples from 4 different countries how 2 sets of within-country local norms produced notably different results on some variables, which compromises the ability of local norms to be used instead of the CIRVs. Taken together, the 3 studies provide support for the use of CIRVs in clinical practice as norms that are generalizable across samples, settings, languages, and cultures and that account for the natural variability that is present when clinicians and researchers contend with the ambiguity contained in the standard CS reference materials concerning the proper ways to administer and code. We conclude by urging CS users to rely on the CIRVs when making clinical inferences and to adopt alternative methods of ensuring they are following cohesively standardized administration and coding guidelines.     

Do Lemmas Speak German? A Verb Position Effect in German Structural Priming

Lexicalized theories of syntax often assume that verb‐structure regularities are mediated by lemmas, which abstract over variation in verb tense and aspect. German syntax seems to challenge this assumption, because verb position depends on tense and aspect. To examine how German speakers link these elements, a structural priming study was performed which varied syntactic structure, verb position (encoded by tense and aspect), and verb overlap. Abstract structural priming was found, both within and across verb position, but priming was larger when the verb position was the same between prime and target. Priming was boosted by verb overlap, but there was no interaction with verb position. The results can be explained by a lemma model where tense and aspect are linked to structural choices in German. Since the architecture of this lemma model is not consistent with results from English, a connectionist model was developed which could explain the cross‐linguistic variation in the production system. Together, these findings support the view that language learning plays an important role in determining the nature of structural priming in different languages.