Exploration of Coping Strategies of Youth Accessing Residential and Day Treatment Programs

Youth with emotional and behavioral disorders are often dealing with many challenges such as strained relationships, academic difficulties and family conflict in addition to their clinical symptoms. Youth can access intervention for these challenges in day and residential treatment centers. However, little is known about how these adolescents cope with stress or the strategies they use. The purpose for this study was to explore the ways youth report coping with stress, and in particular the active, passive/depressive and risky strategies they report using in response to stress. A second purpose was to explore the relationships between active, passive/depressive and risky strategies and their self-reported psychological difficulties. Using a crosssectional design, 30 adolescents (12–18 years of age, 79 % female) completed standardized measures of psychological difficulties and coping with stress. Youth reported using a variety of strategies to cope, and endorsed learning to live with it, and doing an activity alone as the two most commonly used. There were robust relationships between active (negative association) and risky behaviors (positive association) with psychological difficulties. Implications for family therapy are discussed.     

Religiosity and Subjective Well-Being Among Old People: Evidence from a Transitional Country

Applied Research in Quality of Life - Using data from the 2011 Vietnam National Aging Survey, we examined whether religion is associated with subjective well-being (i.e. happiness or life...     

Commitment in relationships: An updated meta‐analysis of the Investment Model

This article provides a systematic review and updated meta‐analysis of the extant literature on Rusbult's Investment Model of Commitment. This meta‐analysis aimed to determine the strength of the associations between commitment and its antecedents and to investigate potential moderators of these associations. This meta‐analysis included 50,427 participants from 202 independent samples (collected between 1980 and early 2016) that had examined the intercorrelations between satisfaction, investment size, quality of alternatives, and commitment. Across all studies, satisfaction had the largest aggregate association with commitment (r = 0.65), followed by investments (r = 0.53) and quality of alternatives (r = ?0.43). Several significant moderators of the relationships between the antecedents and commitment were also identified. Implications and future research directions are discussed.     

How do we track invisible objects?

We previously demonstrated that observers in multiple object tracking experiments can successfully track targets when all the objects simultaneously vanish for periods lasting several hundred milliseconds (Alvarez, Horowitz, Arsenio, Dimase, &; Wolfe, 2005). How do observers do this? Since observers can track objects that move behind occluders (e.g., Scholl &; Pylyshyn, 1999), they may treat a temporal gap as a case of complete occlusion. If so, performance should improve if occlusion cues (deletion and accretion) are provided and items disappear and reappear one by one (asynchronously), rather than simultaneously. However, we found better performance with simultaneous than with asynchronous disappearance (Experiment 1), whereas occlusion cues were detrimental (Experiment 2). We propose that observers tolerate a gap in tracking by storing the current task state when objects vanish and resuming tracking on the basis of that memory when the objects reappear (a task-switching account).     

Effects of training intensity on observers' ratings of anxiety, social skills, and alcohol-specific coping skills

Few studies have addressed the amount of training needed to obtain reliable ratings in behavioral observation data. The current study examined the effects of differing intensities of frame-of-reference (FOR) rater training on observers' ratings of anxiety, social skills, and alcohol-specific coping skills in community volunteers with and without social anxiety and alcohol use disorders. Interrater reliability was assessed by comparing three training conditions (no-training, moderate FOR, and intensive FOR) on discrepancies between raters'scores and the strength of association between raters'scoring patterns. The discrepancies between raters' scores were significantly larger in the control condition than in the intensive and moderate training conditions. Generally, small and nonsignificant differences were found between intensive and moderate training's discrepancy scores. Strength of association results showed significantly lower correlations in the control group compared to the intensive group. However, these correlational results showed less consistent differences between the moderate and other training conditions; differences when found were in the expected directions. Study findings suggest that differing training intensities can affect rating scores and that interrater reliability may be meaningfully assessed through multiple methods.     

Sex differences in English language acculturation and learning strategies among Vietnamese adults aged 40 and over in the United States

This study examines sex differences in English language acculturation and learning strategies among older Vietnamese in the United States in a nationwide probability sample. Data of this study came from the Southeast Asian Refugee Self-Sufficient Study (1982). The results reveal that older Vietnamese women had more problems with their English language than older Vietnamese men. In addition, the Vietnamese men were more likely to use various learning strategies to improve their English skills than the women.     

Cross‐national comparisons of attitudes towards suicide and suicidal persons in university students from 12 countries

This paper reports the results of a comparative investigation of attitudes to suicide and suicidal persons in 5,572 university students from 12 countries. Participants filled out two scales measuring attitudes towards suicide and suicidal persons, a measure of psychological distress together with the questions about suicidal behavior. Results showed that the highest suicide acceptance scores were observed in Austrian, UK, Japanese and Saudi Arabian samples and the lowest scores were noted in Tunisian, Turkish, Iranian and Palestinian samples. While the highest social acceptance scores for a suicidal friend were noted in Turkish, US, Italian and Tunisian samples, the lowest scores were seen in Japanese, Saudi Arabian, Palestinian and Jordanian samples. Compared to participants with a suicidal past, those who were never suicidal displayed more internal barriers against suicidal behavior. Men were more accepting of suicide than women but women were more willing to help an imagined suicidal peer. Participants with accepting attitudes towards suicide but rejecting attitudes towards suicidal persons reported more suicidal behavior and psychological distress, and were more often from high suicide rate countries and samples than their counterparts. They are considered to be caught in a fatal trap in which most predominant feelings of suicidality such as hopelessness or helplessness are likely to occur. We conclude that in some societies such as Japan and Saudi Arabia it might be difficult for suicidal individuals to activate and make use of social support systems.     

Health, stress, psychological resources, and subjective well-being among older blacks

This study examines the structural relationships among sociodemographic characteristics, health status, stress, psychological resources, and subjective well-being (SWB) among the Black elderly. A structural equation model of SWB was evaluated with data from the 1979-1980 National Survey of Black Americans. The results revealed that poor subjective health status was predictive of lower levels of personal efficacy and SWB. Stressful life events tended to depress subjective assessments of health and had negative effects on self-esteem and SWB. Marital status and age had positive effects on SWB. Chronic health conditions and other demographic variables, however, had indirect effects on SWB.     

Child Maltreatment in Vietnam: Prevalence and Cross-Cultural Comparison

This Vietnam prevalence study on child maltreatment (VPM-2014) was designed to examine the prevalence of child maltreatment in Vietnam and to compare it with the child maltreatment prevalence in the Netherlands using the same measures and procedure. Questionnaires were filled out by 1,851 students aged 12 to 17 years (47.3% were boys). Results indicated that half of the students (49.9%) reported at least 1 event of child maltreatment in the past year. Emotional abuse was most frequently reported (31.8%), followed by physical abuse, neglect, and witnessing parental conflict. Sexual abuse was the least prevalent (2.6%). Compared with the Netherlands, the prevalence rates of most types of child maltreatment were higher in Vietnam: The largest difference was with emotional abuse, followed by neglect, physical abuse, and witnessing parental conflict. Only the past-year sexual abuse prevalence in Vietnam was lower. These findings highlight the alarming problem of child maltreatment in Vietnam.