The moderating role of empathy in the association between parental support and adolescent aggressive and delinquent behavior

The present two‐wave longitudinal study addressed the role of affective empathy and parental support in aggressive and delinquent behavior in a sample of 323 adolescents (158 boys, 165 girls). Self‐report questionnaires were used to assess affective empathy, perceived support from parents, delinquency, and aggression. Guided by theories on children's differential susceptibility to socialization, we expected adolescents with different levels of empathy to vary in their responsiveness to parental support. In agreement with our hypothesis, empathy moderated the relation of perceived parental support with aggressive and delinquent behavior. Controlling for the effect of gender and for the stability of aggression and delinquency, higher perceived parental support was predictive of lower levels of aggression at age 15, but only for adolescents high in empathy. Remarkably, adolescents low in empathy not only appeared to benefit less from parental support, but even showed more aggression and delinquency at age 15 when they perceived their parents to be more supportive at age 14. Aggr. Behav. 38:368‐377, 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

An integrated approach to delivering exposure-based treatment for symptoms of PTSD and depression in OIF/OEF veterans: preliminary findings

Combat-exposed military personnel from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan report high rates of PTSD and associated psychiatric problems. A formidable body of research supports exposure therapy as a front-line intervention for PTSD; however, relative to studies of civilians, fewer investigations have evaluated the effectiveness of exposure therapy using military samples. Specifically, barriers to care (e.g., stigma associated with receiving mental health services ) may compromise utilization of evidence-based psychotherapy. As such, researchers have argued that veterans with PTSD may require an integrated and innovative approach to the delivery of exposure techniques. This paper presents the rationale for and preliminary data from an ongoing clinical trial that compares the home-based telehealth (HBT) application of a brief, behavioral treatment (Behavioral Activation and Therapeutic Exposure; BA-TE) for veterans with PTSD to the standard, in-person application of the same treatment. Forty OIF/OEF veterans with PTSD and MDD were consented, enrolled, and randomized to condition (BA-TE in-person, or BA-TE HBT) and symptoms of anxiety and depression were assessed at pre- and posttreatment. Participants in both conditions experienced reductions in depression, anxiety, and PTSD symptoms between pre- and posttreatment, suggesting that HBT application of an integrated PTSD treatment may be feasible and effective.     

Boundaries of reciprocity: Incompleteness of information undermines cooperation

Past research has revealed that people have a strong tendency to respond to others' cooperative behavior with cooperation and to others' noncooperative behavior with noncooperation. Yet it is unclear whether or not this tendency still holds when people have only incomplete information about their interaction partner's past behavior. To address this question, we designed a new paradigm - a coin allocation paradigm - in which participants were provided with incomplete information about another person's degree of cooperative behavior (i.e., coin allocations to the participant). Consistent with our hypotheses, two experiments revealed that incompleteness of information undermines both expectations about another person's cooperation as well as one's own cooperation. Moreover, complementary analyses indicated that the detrimental effects of incompleteness of information on cooperation were mediated by expectations of other's cooperation. We suggest that a relatively strong belief in self-interest serves to fill in the blanks when information is incomplete, which undermines expectations of other's cooperation as well as one's own cooperative behavior.     

Agentic and Communal Personality Traits: Their Associations with Depression and Resilience among Transgender Women

Research reports the perpetuation of communal traits by transgender women, possibly to affirm their core gender identity. Transgender women in the United States are nearly 6 times more likely than the general population to experience significant depressive symptoms. Studies among non-transgender individuals in the United States demonstrate that agentic traits are associated with less depressive symptoms, while studies on communal traits are more inconsistent in their association with indicators of depression. Our study’s central objective was to examine the associations of agency and communion with depression and resilience (i.e., personal competence and acceptance of self and life) among transgender women living part-time and full-time in the female gender role. Participants in the United States were recruited through online and offline purposive sampling. One hundred and twenty-two transgender women (primarily Caucasian; ages ranging from 22 to 75) completed a web-based questionnaire. Results indicated that agentic and communal traits were significantly associated with decreased symptoms of depression and increased levels of resilience. One component of resilience – acceptance of self and life – mediated the relationship between agentic/communal traits and depression, however, for communal traits this pattern was only found for transgender women living in the female role full-time. There were no significant differences on depressive symptoms and one component of resilience - personal competence – among transgender women living full-time compared to transgender women living in the female role part-time. Transgender women living full-time in the female gender role reported higher levels of agentic/communal traits and acceptance of self and life compared to those living part-time in the female gender role. Our findings are discussed in the context of mental health among transgender women.     

Frequency drives lexical access in reading but not in speaking: the frequency-lag hypothesis

To contrast mechanisms of lexical access in production versus comprehension we compared the effects of word frequency (high, low), context (none, low constraint, high constraint), and level of English proficiency (monolingual, Spanish-English bilingual, Dutch-English bilingual) on picture naming, lexical decision, and eye fixation times. Semantic constraint effects were larger in production than in reading. Frequency effects were larger in production than in reading without constraining context but larger in reading than in production with constraining context. Bilingual disadvantages were modulated by frequency in production but not in eye fixation times, were not smaller in low-constraint contexts, and were reduced by high-constraint contexts only in production and only at the lowest level of English proficiency. These results challenge existing accounts of bilingual disadvantages and reveal fundamentally different processes during lexical access across modalities, entailing a primarily semantically driven search in production but a frequency-driven search in comprehension. The apparently more interactive process in production than comprehension could simply reflect a greater number of frequency-sensitive processing stages in production.     

War stress and late-life mortality in World War II male civilian resistance veterans

The mental and physical health of 146 Dutch males exposed to severe war stress during their young adulthood were examined in 1986-1987 when they were at ages 61 to 66 years. The veterans' data were compared with a randomly selected population-based sample of same-aged males. In 2005, 70% of the war stress veterans had died, and only 35% of the comparison group. The baseline quality of life was significantly poorer in the war stress veterans than in the comparison group. Baseline variables explained 42% of the increased risk of mortality among war stress veterans. Smoking was the largest single contributor to mortality.     

Facilitated attentional disengagement from negative information in relation to self-reported depressive symptoms of Dutch female undergraduate students

Prior research has shown that depressive symptoms are associated with an enhanced attention toward negative stimuli and difficulty of disengaging attention from negative stimuli. The current study was an extension of a 2005 study by Koster and colleagues. A different stimulus presentation time and word set were used. The whole range of depressive symptoms was included in this sample instead of creating dichotomized groups. The Exogenous Cueing Task with negative, positive, and neutral cues was administered to 85 female undergraduate university students. Participants completed the Beck's Depression Inventory-II-NL questionnaire to measure self-reported depression. Contrary to previous findings, depressive symptoms were related to a facilitated rather than impaired attentional disengagement from negative stimuli. An explanation for the discrepancy with findings from Koster, et al. may be the different stimulus presentation time (1000 msec. instead of 500 or 1500 msec.).     

When authoritarianism meets religion: Sacrificing others in the name of abstract deontology

Authoritarianism is a stable construct in terms of individual differences (social attitudes based on personality and values), but its manifestations and behavioral outcomes may depend on contextual factors. In the present experiment, we investigated whether authoritarianism is sensitive to religious influences in predicting rigid morality. Specifically, we investigated whether authoritarians, after supraliminal religious priming, would show, in hypothetical moral dilemmas, preference for impersonal societal norms even at the detriment of interpersonal, care‐based prosociality toward proximal persons and acquaintances in need. The results confirmed the expectations, with a small effect size for the religious priming × authoritarianism interaction. In addition, these results were specific to participants' authoritarianism and not to their individual religiosity. The interaction between authoritarian dispositions and religious ideas may constitute a powerful combination leading to behaviors that are detrimental for the well‐being and the life of others, even proximal people, in the name of abstract deontology. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Biased allocation of faces to social categories

Three studies show that social categorization is biased at the level of category allocation. In all studies, participants categorized faces. In Studies 1 and 2, participants overallocated faces with criminal features--a stereotypical negative trait--to the stigmatized Moroccan category, especially if they were prejudiced. On the contrary, the stereotype-irrelevant negative trait stupid did not lead to overallocation to the Moroccan category. In Study 3, using the stigmatized category homosexual, the previously used negative trait criminal--irrelevant to the homosexual stereotype--did not lead to overallocation, but the stereotype-relevant positive trait femininity did. These results demonstrate that normative fit is higher for faces with stereotype-relevant features regardless of valence. Moreover, individual differences in implicit prejudice predicted the extent to which stereotype-relevant traits elicited overallocation: Whereas more negatively prejudiced people showed greater overallocation of faces associated with negative stereotype-relevant traits, they showed less overallocation of faces associated with positive stereotype-relevant traits. These results support our normative fit hypothesis: In general, normative fit is better for faces with stereotypical features. Moreover, normative fit is enhanced for prejudiced individuals when these features are evaluatively congruent. Social categorization thus may be biased in itself.