Mothers' emotional expressivity and children's behavior problems and social competence: mediation through children's regulation.

The relations between mothers' expressed positive and negative emotion and 55-79-month-olds' (76% European American) regulation, social competence, and adjustment were examined. Structural equation modeling was used to test the plausibility of the hypothesis that the effects of maternal expression of emotion on children's adjustment and social competence are mediated through children's dispositional regulation. Mothers' expressed emotions were assessed during interactions with their children and with maternal reports of emotions expressed in the family. Children's regulation, externalizing and internalizing problems. and social competence were rated by parents and teachers, and children's persistence was surreptitiously observed. There were unique effects of positive and negative maternal expressed emotion on children's regulation. and the relations of maternal expressed emotion to children's externalizing problem behaviors and social competence were mediated through children's regulation. Alternative models of causation were tested; a child-directed model in which maternal expressivity mediated the effects of child regulation on child outcomes did not fit the data as well.     

The Relations of Effortful Control and Impulsivity to Children's Sympathy: A Longitudinal Study

The relations of children's (n = 214 at Time 1; M age = 6 years at Time 1) dispositional sympathy to adult-reported and behavioral measures of effortful control (EC) and impulsivity were examined in a longitudinal study including five assessments, each two years apart. Especially for boys, relatively high levels of EC and growth in EC were related to high sympathy. Teacher-reported impulsivity was generally modestly negatively related to measures of teacher-reported sympathy for boys, and a decline in impulsivity was linked to boys’ sympathy. Some findings suggested a positive association between impulsivity and children's self-reported sympathy. EC, especially when reported by teachers, was more often a unique predictor of sympathy than was impulsivity. Results generally support the argument that sympathetic individuals, especially boys, are high in EC and that EC is a more consistent predictor of sympathy than impulsivity.     

The Relation of Pro‐Sociality to Self‐Esteem: The Mediational Role of Quality of Friendships

The present longitudinal study examined the role of quality of friendship in mediating the relation of pro‐sociality to self‐esteem over time. Participants were 424 Italian young adults (56% females) assessed at two waves (M_age = 21.1 at Time 1; M_age = 25 at Time 2). An autoregressive cross‐lagged panel model was used to test the mediational model. Self‐ and friend‐report measures of pro‐sociality, quality of friendship, and self‐esteem were included in the analyses. Results were in line with the hypothesized paths, with quality of friendship mediating the relation of pro‐sociality to later self‐esteem above and beyond its high stability. Self‐esteem, in turn, predicted pro‐sociality 4 years later. Overall, the present findings support the potential benefits of behaving pro‐socially for an actor in terms of increased perceived self‐worth and also expand previous work by outlining the specific mediational role of the quality of friendships. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.     

Activity Group Therapy of a Dull Boy with Severe Body EGO Problems

The presence of a time limit shapes the entire therapeutic process and culminates in the management of termination. This paper outlines a protocol for dealing with termination in time-limited psychotherapy groups: (1) Select suitable members with similar capacity to use a time-limited format; (2) use a closed group format; (3) clarify the time boundaries at the beginning; (4) reinforce the time frame during the last half of the group; (5) provide focused interventions; (6) forestall premature termination; (7) reinforce termination themes of deprivation, resentment and anger, rejection, grief and loss, responsibility for self; (8) structure the final session; and (9) plan a 4-month follow-up visit to encourage ongoing application. These guidelines provide the therapist with a general structure to ensure that major termination themes are systematically addressed. They deal with powerful concepts of maturation and self-responsibility and incorporate the principal strategies that distinguish time-limited from time-unlimited group psychotherapy.     

Individual Interpretation Of Psychoneurotic Inventory Items

The usual finding of greater resistance to extinction (Rn) following partial reinforcement (PR) as compared to continuous reinforcement (CR) has not been well documented with the use of human S s in instrumental conditioning. One hundred twenty male and female college students practiced discrete trials on the pursuit rotor. Resistance was measured by the number of trial S was willing to continue under instructions that S would terminate the experiment. Those S s receiving knowledge of results during 25%, 50%, or 75% of the first 24 trials showed greater Rn (p < .01) than Ss receiving knowledge of results on all 24 trials.     

The effect of mood-context on visual recognition and recall memory

Although it is widely known that memory is enhanced when encoding and retrieval occur in the same state, the impact of elevated stress/arousal is less understood. This study explores mood-dependent memory's effects on visual recognition and recall of material memorized either in a neutral mood or under higher stress/arousal levels. Participants' (N = 60) recognition and recall were assessed while they experienced either the same o a mismatched mood at retrieval. The results suggested that both visual recognition and recall memory were higher when participants experienced the same mood at encoding and retrieval compared with those who experienced a mismatch in mood context between encoding and retrieval. These findings offer support for a mood dependency effect on both the recognition and recall of visual information.