Predictors of Stress Generation in Adolescents in Mainland China

The current longitudinal study examined whether the personality vulnerabilities of self-criticism and dependency prospectively predicted stress generation in Chinese adolescents. Participants included 1,116 adolescents (588 girls and 528 boys), aged 15 to 18 years from rural, urban and ultra-urban mainland China. Participants completed self-report measures of personality, depressive and anxious symptoms and participated in a clinical interview assessing lifetime history of depression. The occurrence of negative life events was measured using a contextual-threat interview every 6-months for a total period of 18-months. Logistic regression analyses showed that after controlling for past depressive episodes and current depressive and anxious symptoms, self-criticism was prospectively associated with the occurrence of interpersonal stress generation, but not noninterpersonal stress generation. Dependency also predicted interpersonal stress generation, although only in girls and not boys. In line with previous Western findings, girls reported more interpersonal stress generation. Analyses across 3 levels of urbanization revealed several significant differences including higher reported interpersonal stress generation in urban girls than urban boys and overall higher levels of negative life events in ultra-urban youth. In sum, findings from the current study suggest that the stress generation process may be generalizable to Chinese youth.     

Mothers’ Attributions About Child Misbehavior: Can Situational Suggestions Change General Perceptions?

Mothers’ attributions about children’s misbehavior were experimentally manipulated to examine causal relationships among attributions, mood, and behavior and assess whether suggestion can change mothers’ general perceptions. Forty mothers of children aged 33 to 71 months were primed with dysfunctional child-referent (child responsible) or environment-referent (situation caused) attributions before a parent-child interaction. Mothers in the dysfunctional child-referent condition placed greater responsibility on children, reported less positive mood and endorsed more overly reactive discipline, and their children displayed more negative mood and misbehavior. The experimental manipulation also affected mothers’ general child attributions. Understanding how attributions form and change has implications for parenting interventions.     

New polytypes of long-period stacking ordered structures in a near-equilibrium Mg97Zn1Y2 alloy

By atomic-scale high-angle annular dark-field scanning transmission electron microscopy, the long-period stacking ordered (LPSO) structures in a near-equilibrium Mg₉₇Zn₁Y₂ (at.%) alloy have been characterised. In addition to 18R and 14H, new polytypes of LPSO structures are analysed and determined as 60R, 78R, 26H, 96R, 38H, 40H, 108H and 246R. All of these LPSO structures feature AB′C′A building blocks with two Mg layers and three Mg layers sandwiched between them. The Bravais lattices and space groups of new polytypes of LPSO structures were easily determined via the newly introduced method. A structural relationship between the LPSOs is proposed.     

Resetting the rules of the game: Language preferences and social relations of work between Russian immigrants and veteran professionals in an Israeli organization

Workplace is the main site of the cross-cultural encounter between majority and minority groups in multicultural societies, yet there is paucity of research on workplace language practices and their influence on the social relations of work. The current qualitative study focused on the patterns of language use and their links to social identities, inter-group attitudes and work relations between recent immigrants and veteran employees in a white-collar organization in Central Israel. On-site observations and interviews with the workers—Israeli-born, veteran Soviet immigrants of the 1970s, and recent arrivals—were conducted in Hebrew and in Russian. The findings indicate that language use indeed serves as the key marker of social identity and signifier of work status and group boundaries. The common use of Russian by recent immigrants is a trigger of conflict and mutual antagonism, as Hebrew-speakers perceive it as a sign of their separatism and anti-Israeli outlook.     

Publishing Action Research in Counseling Journals

The increased use of action research in counseling training and professional publications provides an opportunity to bridge the research‐practitioner gap that has plagued the profession for decades. In this article, action research is defined, and special considerations that counselor researchers need to address when designing, conducting, and reporting action research are presented. Suggestions are included throughout the article to assist counseling action researchers in publishing their studies in American Counseling Association journals.     

The role of the nucleus accumbens in knowing when to respond

While knowing what to expect is important, it is equally important to know when to expect it and to respond accordingly. This is apparent even in simple Pavlovian training situations in which animals learn to respond more strongly closer to reward delivery. Here we report that the nucleus accumbens core, an area well-positioned to represent information about the timing of impending rewards, plays a critical role in this timing function.     

Relative quantity judgments in South American sea lions (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Otaria flavescens</Emphasis>)

There is accumulating evidence that a variety of species possess quantitative abilities although their cognitive substrate is still unclear. This study is the first to investigate whether sea lions (Otaria flavescens), in the absence of training, are able to assess and select the larger of two sets of quantities. In Experiment 1, the two sets of quantities were presented simultaneously as whole sets, that is, the subjects could compare them directly. In Experiment 2, the two sets of quantities were presented item-by-item, and the totality of items was never visually available at the time of choice. For each type of presentation, we analysed the effect of the ratio between quantities, the difference between quantities and the total number of items presented. The results showed that (1) sea lions can make relative quantity judgments successfully and (2) there is a predominant influence of the ratio between quantities on the subjects’ performance. The latter supports the idea that an analogue representational mechanism is responsible for sea lions’ relative quantities judgments. These findings are consistent with previous reports of relative quantities judgments in other species such as monkeys and apes and suggest that sea lions might share a similar mechanism to compare and represent quantities.