Emotion Regulation in At‐Risk Preschoolers: Longitudinal Associations and Influences of Maternal Histories of Risk

Emotion regulation is a key challenge of early childhood. The present study examined emotion regulation behaviour longitudinally from infancy to preschool. The continuity of emotion regulation was explored within the larger ecological context of maternal childhood histories of aggression and social withdrawal and maternal use of constructive and non‐constructive behaviours. Forty‐five mothers with childhood histories of aggression or social withdrawal from the Concordia Longitudinal Risk Project, a prospective, longitudinal, intergenerational study, participated with their preschool children. Infants' emotion regulation behaviour was observed during interactions with their mothers when they were 5½ months of age. Emotion regulation in these same children as preschoolers was coded during an interference task using the Preschooler Self‐Regulatory Scheme. Longitudinal findings demonstrated continuity in children's use of emotion regulation behaviours from infancy to preschool. Higher maternal childhood histories of risk, specifically social withdrawal, contributed to the prediction of preschoolers' increased attention‐seeking behaviours. Mothers' use of non‐constructive verbalizations predicted more maladaptive styles of emotion regulation in their preschoolers. The findings highlight the importance of helping children develop adaptive emotion regulation skills from a young age and have implications for the design of preventive intervention programmes to help parents foster children's emotion regulation abilities. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Heavy Metal,Religiosity, and Suicide Acceptability

There has been little work at the national level on the subject of musical subcultures and suicide acceptability. The present work explores the link between “heavy metal” rock fanship and suicide acceptability. Metal fanship is thought to elevate suicide acceptability through such means as exposure to a culture of personal and societal chaos marked by hopelessness, and through its associations with demographic risk factors such as gender, socioeconomic status, and education. Data are taken from the General Social Survey. A link between heavy metal fanship and suicide acceptability is found. However, this relationship becomes nonsignificant once level of religiosity is controlled. Metal fans are low in religiosity, which contributes, in turn, to greater suicide acceptability.     

Music and Suicidality: A Quantitative Review and Extension

This article provides the first quantitative review of the literature on music and suicidality. Multivariate logistic regression techniques are applied to 90 findings from 21 studies. Investigations employing ecological data on suicide completions are 19.2 times more apt than other studies to report a link between music and suicide. More recent and studies with large samples are also more apt than their counterparts to report significant results. Further, none of the studies based on experimental research designs found a link between music and suicide ideation, prompting us to do a brief content analysis of 24 suicide songs versus 24 nonsuicide songs from the same album. Using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software, we found no difference in the content of the suicide songs and controls, including the percentage of sad words, negative affect, and mentions of death, thus providing an explanation for nonfindings from experimental research. In summary, ecologically based (which capture at‐risk persons not in typical school‐based samples) and more recent investigations (which have used superior or new methodologies) tend to demonstrate a linkage between music and suicidality. Experimental research is needed with a control group of songs from an alternative genre with low suicidogenic content.