Predicting Sexual Satisfaction in Women: Implications for Counselor Education and Training

The authors examined how physical affection in the family of origin, partner initiation and communication, and masturbatory practices predicted 4 measures of sexual satisfaction. Participants in this national study were 2,632 women who volunteered to complete a survey on women's sexuality. Results showed that partner initiation and communication most strongly predicted female sexual satisfaction regardless of how it was measured. Implications for counselor education and training are discussed, and directions for further study are suggested.     

Change detection in complex scenes: hemispheric contribution and the role of perceptual and semantic factors

The perceptual salience and semantic relevance of objects for the meaning of a scene were evaluated with multiple criteria and then manipulated in a change-detection experiment that used an original combination of one-shot and tachistoscopic divided-visual-field paradigms to study behavioural hemispheric asymmetry. Coloured drawings that depicted meaningful situations were presented centrally and very briefly (120 ms) and only the changes were lateralised by adding an object in the right or in the left visual hemifield. High salience and high relevance improved both response times (RTs) and accuracy, although the overall contribution of salience was greater than that of relevance. Moreover, only for low-salience changes did relevance affect speed. RTs were shorter when a change occurred in the left visual hemifield, suggesting a right-hemisphere advantage for detection of visual change. Also, men responded faster than women. The theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.     

Children's activities and their meanings for parents: a mixed-methods study in six Western cultures

Theoretical perspectives and research in sociology, anthropology, sociolinguistics, and cultural psychology converge in recognizing the significance of children's time spent in various activities, especially in the family context. Knowing how children's time is deployed, however, only gives us a partial answer to how children acquire competence; the other part must take into account the culturally constructed meanings of activities, from the perspective of those who organize and direct children's daily lives. In this article, we report on a study of children's routine daily activities and on the meanings that parents attribute to them in six Western middle-class cultural communities located in Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United States (N = 183). Using week-long time diaries kept by parents, we first demonstrate similarities as well as significant differences in children's daily routines across the cultural samples. We then present brief vignettes--"a day in the life" --of children from each sample. Parent interviews were coded for themes in the meanings attributed to various activities. Excerpts from parent interviews, focusing on four major activities (meals, family time, play, school- or developmentally related activities), are presented to illustrate how cultural meanings and themes are woven into parents' organization and understanding of their children's daily lives. The results of this mixed-method approach provide a more reliable and nuanced picture of children's and families' daily lives than could be derived from either method alone.     

Women accused of sex offenses: a gender-based comparison

Sexual offenses committed by women are likely underestimated and under-reported. This exploratory study compares and contrasts women accused of sexual offenses and their male counterparts. Data were retrospectively compiled on all alleged female and age-matched male sex offenders who were referred for psychiatric evaluation to a large Midwestern city's court psychiatric clinic over a six-year period. Data were abstracted regarding their crimes, charges, demographics, social history, medical history, legal history, violence history, substance use, sexual history, psychiatric history and their victims. Like the men, women were most frequently referred for sexual predator classification evaluations. Ages ranged from 19 to 62 years, and the majority had children. Most had prior arrests. One-third had a past history of psychiatric hospitalization, and most were given a non-paraphilic psychiatric diagnosis. The majority of the women reported past histories of sexual or physical victimization. While there were many similarities between female and male sex offenders in this psychiatric sample, women more frequently had victims of both genders.     

Sticky thoughts: depression and rumination are associated with difficulties manipulating emotional material in working memory

Cognitive inflexibility may play an important role in rumination, a risk factor for the onset and maintenance of depressive episodes. In the study reported here, we assessed participants' ability to either reverse or maintain in working memory the order of three emotion or three neutral words. Differences (or sorting costs) between response latencies in backward trials, on which participants were asked to reverse the order of the words, and forward trials, on which participants were asked to remember the words in the order in which they were presented, were calculated. Compared with control participants, depressed participants had higher sorting costs, particularly when presented with negative words. It is important to note that rumination predicted sorting costs for negative words but not for positive or neutral words in the depressed group. These findings indicate that depression and rumination are associated with deficits in cognitive control.     

The use of response cost to treat spitting by a child with autism

We evaluated the extent to which noncontingent access to one or multiple items and the contingent removal of a specific item decreased a young boy's spitting. Results indicated that the boy's spitting did not decrease when he was given noncontingent access to multiple, alternative stimuli or to a toy radio. By contrast, when the toy radio was removed contingent on spitting, the rate of the boy's spitting decreased to zero or near‐zero levels. Similar results were produced in the boy's special education classroom. Follow‐up sessions conducted 2 and 4 months later indicated that the reduction in the boy's spitting persisted across time. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Attachment and mental and physical health: self-compassion and mattering as mediators

Research shows a strong link between adult attachment and mental and physical health, but little is known about the mechanisms that underlie these relationships. The present study examined self-compassion and mattering, two constructs from positive psychology literature, as potential mediators. Using survey data from a sample of 208 college students, relationships among attachment, self-compassion, mattering, and functional health were explored. Correlational analyses indicated that attachment anxiety and avoidance were strongly related to the mental health component of functional health. Mediation analyses indicated that mattering and self-compassion mediated the relationships between attachment orientation (i.e., levels of avoidance and anxiety) and mental health. These findings suggest that individuals' abilities to be kind toward themselves and their sense of belonging and being important to others are pathways through which attachment orientation relates to mental health.     

Development and Preliminary Evaluation of the Bedtime Routines Questionnaire

In the past, child bedtime routines have been examined through observation or sleep diaries. These methods are often expensive and hinder study comparisons due to lack of consistent operational definitions of routines. This article describes the development and psychometric evaluation of the Bedtime Routines Questionnaire (BRQ), a 31-item paper-and-pencil, parent-report measure of children’s bedtime routines. The BRQ and related measures were completed by 226 caregivers of children ages 2 to 8. The BRQ demonstrated a solid factor structure, adequate internal consistency, and fair validity coefficients. Overall, promising results for the BRQ are reported.     

Emotion Regulation and Attachment: Unpacking Two Constructs and Their Association

This study examined the association between the security of attachment and processes influencing the development of emotion regulation in young children. A sample of 73 4 1/2-year-olds and their mothers were observed in an emotion regulation probe involving mild frustration for children, and mothers and children were later independently interviewed about how the child had felt. Fewer than half the mothers agreed with children’s self-reports in the emotion they attributed to children (a lower rate than the concordance of observer ratings with children’s self-reports), and higher mother-child concordance was associated with secure attachment and mother’s beliefs about the importance of attending to and accepting their own emotions. Mother-child conversations about recent events evoking children’s negative emotion were also analyzed. Children were less likely to avoid conversing about negative feelings when they were in secure attachments and when mothers were more validating of the child’s perspective. Children’s greater understanding of negative emotions was also significantly associated with higher mother-child concordance and less child conversational avoidance. Taken together, these findings underscore the multiple influences of attachment on emotion regulation and the importance of children’s emotion understanding to these processes.     

Adolescent Psychopathy and the Five Factor Model: Domain and Facet Analysis

Given the consideration of callousness as a specifier for Conduct Disorder in the DSM-V, it seems imperative that researchers continue to investigate this personality style in adolescents to determine both its applicability and utility. The present study examined the Youth Psychopathic traits Inventory (YPI; Andershed et al. 2002) and the Interpersonal Adjective Scale Revised-Big 5 (IASR-B5; Trapnell and Wiggins 1990a, b) psychopathy scales in relation to the Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality. Using a sample of adolescent offenders (N = 145), the YPI and IASR-B5 psychopathy scales showed adequate reliability and strong inverse bivariate relations with the FFM domains of Agreeableness (−A) and Conscientiousness (−C). Multivariate analyses, at the facet level, revealed that Tendermindedness (−A) and Assertiveness (+E) explained the association between FFM facets and the YPI, whereas Altruism (−A), Modesty (−A), Straightforwardness (−A), Assertiveness (+E), Warmth (−E), and Deliberation (+C) all uniquely contributed to the IASR-B5 psychopathy scale. Both measures were linked with general and violent recidivism. The authors discuss the implications of these findings in terms of the use of personality to help describe conduct problem youth and the need for future research in this important area.