Susceptibility to prosocial and antisocial influence in adolescence following mindfulness training

Mindfulness training programmes have shown to encourage prosocial behaviours and reduce antisocial tendencies in adolescents. However, less is known about whether training affects susceptibility to prosocial and antisocial influence. The current study investigated the effect of mindfulness training (compared with an active control) on self-reported prosocial and antisocial tendencies and susceptibility to prosocial and antisocial influence. 465 adolescents aged 11–16 years were randomly allocated to one of two training programmes. Pre- and post-training, participants completed a social influence task. Self-reported likelihood of engaging in prosocial and antisocial behaviours did not change post-training, and regardless of training group, participants showed a higher propensity for prosocial influence than for antisocial influence. Finally, participants were less influenced by antisocial ratings following both training programmes.     

Parents' perceptions of the quality of infant sleep behaviours and practices: A qualitative systematic review

A systematic review of qualitative studies was conducted to explore how parents perceive sleep quality in their infants aged 0–24 months and the factors that influence these perceptions. A systematic search of the databases Scopus, Embase, Cinahl, PsycInfo and MEDLINE, was undertaken to identify eligible peer-reviewed studies published between 2006–2021. Ten papers met inclusion criteria and were subsequently included in the review. Evaluation of papers with the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme qualitative checklist classified papers as weak, moderate or strong, with half considered strong. Thematic synthesis identified one superordinate theme, culture, and five interrelated subordinate themes regarding how parents perceive their infant's sleep and the factors that may influence these perceptions. These themes were: (1) Infants physical and emotional comfort; (2) Beliefs regarding safety; (3) Parental and familial wellbeing; (4) Perceived degree of infant agency; (5) Influence of external beliefs and opinions. The findings from this review may assist practitioners in providing parents with personalized and culturally sensitive information regarding infant sleep and may also inform antenatal and early intervention practices, subsequently minimizing parental distress regarding infant sleep patterns.     

The role of effort type and intensity in children's decisions about effort-based outcomes

Despite the importance of persistence in early learning, we know little about how children reason about outcomes that result from their efforts. Here we examined the role of effort type (i.e., physical vs. cognitive) and intensity (i.e., high vs. low effort) in shaping children's decision making about effort-based rewards. Five- to 7-year-olds (N = 133) were assigned to one of four conditions (High Physical Effort, Low Physical Effort, High Cognitive Effort, Low Cognitive Effort) and completed a series of tasks to construct a toy. Tasks varied in the type (physical/cognitive) and intensity (high/low) of effort required to complete them. After constructing their toy, children completed a series of tasks to probe how much they valued that toy. Across conditions, children preferred their toy and gave it a higher monetary value, relative to a stranger's. However, when choosing their toy came at a cost, children no longer preferred it. Only children who built their toy through either cognitive or low effort were willing to incur a cost for their toy. Older children, across conditions, were also more likely to incur a cost for their toy. These findings demonstrate that by age five, children are sensitive to variations in effort type and intensity, and these factors shape how they evaluate effort-based rewards.     

Ignorance is not a victimless crime: The case of the caring teacher,part 2

Confusion about the mandated reporting of child abuse was discovered in a case study to be widespread, including at the state level. Such extensive confusion serves to keep citizens from both seeing the depth of suffering to which children are subjected and responding appropriately to their suffering; and it serves to keep society dissociated from the impact violence has on us.     

Sexual equality,male superiority,and Korean women in politics: Changing gender relations in a “patriarchal democracy”

As a newly industrialized country Korean society may be characterized as a patriarchal democracy, where the Western democratic principle of sexual equality and the traditional Confucian ideology of male superiority contradict each other and complicate the behavioral rules for gender relations. This paper explores the processes of social change in gender relations by examining organizational patterns of social actions of individuals in male-female interactions in South Korea, with a focus on the experiences of women in politics. The analysis suggests the emerging pattern of gender relations in Korean society is a compartmentalized gender schema that is fluid and situationally defined by the individual's nunch'i (tact or savoir-faire).The research on which this paper is based was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the East-West Center. I am grateful to the two institutions. Special thanks are also due to Jerry Boucher, Jon McGee, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on early versions of this paper.     

Gender and Self-Reported Sexual Arousal in Response to Sexual Stimuli: A Meta-Analytic Review

Social constructionist theories and sociobiological perspectives have led to increased interest in gender differences in sexual behavior. This study involved a meta-analysis of gender differences in sexual arousal in response to sexual stimuli. Forty-six studies in which participants were presented with a sexual stimulus depicting males and females and in which participants responded using a self-report measure of arousal were compiled, and 62 independent effect sizes were aggregated. An overall effect size of d = .31 showed a small to moderate-sized gender difference in sexual arousal with men reporting more arousal than women across all studies. There was significant variation in the effect sizes, though, which was only partially explained by variables coded from the studies. It was found that the gender difference was slightly larger for studies using pornographic vs. erotic stimuli, was larger for studies where participants were tested in a private setting or small group compared to a large group, and was much larger for college age participants compared to those who were older than college age. Generally, the pattern of results provided more support for predictions from social influence theories compared to sociobiological theory.     

Ability to generate mental images in students of art

To evaluate the ability to generate mental images and its relations to artistic training, 44 undergraduates were presented with a list of selected fragments from 40 characters in the Roman alphabet. Subjects provided those letters suggested by the fragments for as many items as possible within a 90-second interval. It was hypothesized that students who had received college training in studio art would be able to produce a greater number of candidate images than students not trained in art, resulting in more correct answers and higher scores. Results confirmed the hypothesis. Trained subjects completed significantly more of the letters on the image-generation task than did those not trained in art (p=.0001). This suggests that superior ability to generate images is associated with artistic training. Further, these results imply that, to the degree to which artistic training reflects ability, image generation may also be related to artistic ability.     

Anxious attachment and psychological distress in cardiac rehabilitation patients

This study investigated the relevance of anxious attachment to the differentiation of psychologically distressed and non-psychologically distressed cardiac patients. Attachment is a biologically based behavioral system in which proximity to a special other is sought or maintained to achieve a sense of safety and security. Anxious attachment, as the name denotes, fails to achieve the function of attachment in the sense of individuals having little or no confidence in the availability of their attachment figures. Empirically, three scales (feared loss of the attachment figure, proximity seeking and separation protest) capture the features of anxious attachment as elaborated by Bowlby. These scales were administered to 178 cardiac rehabilitation patients drawn from the cardiac rehabilitation program of the Calgary General Hospital. The results indicate that feared loss and proximity seeking differentiated psychologically distressed from non-psychologically distressed patients. The implications of this finding for the understanding of psychologically distressed cardiac patients are discussed.     

Perceived stressors and stress responses among hospital-based nursing trainees

Perceived sources and levels of stress were assessed with a rating scale describing the experience of stressors and stress responses and an unstructured self-report about the reasons of such ratings in 60 nursing students in their first and final year of hospital training. The results, which show a significantly higher report of stress in the latter group, also point to identifiable sources of stressors in hospital-based nursing training procedures. Several recommendations to alleviate these conditions are discussed.