Adolescents’ Involvement in Cyber Bullying and Perceptions of School: The Importance of Perceived Peer Acceptance for Female Adolescents

Young people are spending increasing amounts of time using digital technology and, as such, are at great risk of being involved in cyber bullying as a victim, bully, or bully/victim. Despite cyber bullying typically occurring outside the school environment, the impact of being involved in cyber bullying is likely to spill over to school. Fully 285 11- to 15-year-olds (125 male and 160 female, M _age = 12.19 years, SD = 1.03) completed measures of cyber bullying involvement, self-esteem, trust, perceived peer acceptance, and perceptions of the value of learning and the importance of school. For young women, involvement in cyber bullying as a victim, bully, or bully/victim negatively predicted perceptions of learning and school, and perceived peer acceptance mediated this relationship. The results indicated that involvement in cyber bullying negatively predicted perceived peer acceptance which, in turn, positively predicted perceptions of learning and school. For young men, fulfilling the bully/victim role negatively predicted perceptions of learning and school. Consequently, for young women in particular, involvement in cyber bullying spills over to impact perceptions of learning. The findings of the current study highlight how stressors external to the school environment can adversely impact young women’s perceptions of school and also have implications for the development of interventions designed to ameliorate the effects of cyber bullying.     

Improved Perceptions of Emotion Regulation and Reflective Functioning in Parents: Two Additional Positive Outcomes of Parent-Child Interaction Therapy

The purpose of this study was to test whether Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), a widely used effective therapy for children’s externalizing behaviors and parenting problems, was associated with improvements in parents’ emotion regulation and reflective functioning. We also investigated whether these improvements had unique associations with children’s improvements in externalizing and internalizing symptoms. Participants were 139 Australian children aged 29 to 83 months and their caregivers; all were referred for child externalizing behavior problems coupled with parenting skill deficits or high parent stress. All data were gathered via a questionnaire completed prior to and after completion of PCIT. Significant improvements were found in parents’ self-reported emotion dysregulation and capacity to use cognitive reappraisal for emotion regulation. There was also improvement in parents’ self-report of children’s symptoms, parenting practices, and reflective functioning in the form of prementalizing, which measured a low capacity to understand the emotional world of the child. Multiple regression showed that improvements in cognitive reappraisal, prementalizing, and negative parenting practices were associated with improvement in children’s symptoms. The findings extend the existing evidence for PCIT as an effective parenting intervention, adding parents’ perceived emotion regulation and reflective functioning to the list of positive outcomes from PCIT. Improved emotion regulation and reflective functioning, unique from changes in parenting practices, could be mechanisms that help explain why PCIT has been associated with improvements in children’s externalizing behaviors.     

Adolescent Self-Regulation as Resilience: Resistance to Antisocial Behavior within the Deviant Peer Context

This study tests the hypothesis that self-regulation serves as a resiliency factor in buffering youth from negative influences of peer deviance in middle to late adolescence. The interactive effects between peer deviance and self-regulation were investigated on change in antisocial behavior from age 17 to 19 years in an ethnically diverse sample of adolescents. A multi-agent construct was created using adolescent, parent, and teacher reports of self-regulation and peer deviance. Results indicated that self-regulation shows convergent validity and covaries as expected with developmental patterns of adolescent antisocial behavior. Self-regulation moderated the association of peer deviance with later self-reported adolescent antisocial behavior after controlling for prior levels of antisocial behavior. The implications of these findings for models for the development of antisocial behaviors and for intervention science are discussed.     

How do I Analyze Thee? Let Me Count the Ways: Considering Empathy in Couple Relationships using Self and Partner Ratings

In this article we describe some of the benefits and challenges of using self ratings and ratings of the partner to measure empathy and similar terms in couple research. If both members of the dyad are assessed, there will be four measures of the same variable. How to use these 4 measures in research and clinical work is a central question in this paper. We demonstrate 3 different latent models that can be used to analyze these ratings based on different theoretical premises. Using empathy as the independent variable with a longitudinal sample of 275 couples, structural equation models are used to evaluate the strength of these models in predicting relationship satisfaction. The findings indicate that the model that is consistent with the social constructionist perspective that focuses on the perceptions within the same person is a good fit to the data. Other models that compare ratings between members of the dyad do not fit the data well. The results demonstrate that perceptions of empathy do have a significant influence on relationship satisfaction across time, especially for females. However, it is largely males' perceptions of empathy of the self and the partner that influence relationship satisfaction for females.     

Virtual HR: The impact of information technology on the human resource professional

Accelerated investment and innovation in information technology (IT) offers prospects for conducting business in ways that are radically different from the past. Despite the growing presence of IT within organizations, however, we do not have a clear understanding of how IT impacts the role of professionals. We address this issue by investigating how jobs in one professional occupational segment, human resources (HR) professionals are influenced by extensive use of IT within the human resource department. Specifically, we examine how HR professionals handle HR information as well as the expectations placed on them resulting from an increased reliance on IT. Our findings suggest that IT enables HR professionals to more efficiently access and disseminate information while it also influences what is expected of them. Implications and future directions are discussed.     

Fluent Reading as the Improvement of Stimulus Control: Additive Effects of Performance-Based Interventions to Repeated Reading on Students' Reading and Error Rates

The impact of adding performance-based interventions to a skill-based intervention on oral reading fluency was examined with 3 elementary students identified as having difficulty with reading. Two performance-based interventions were combined with the skill-based intervention Repeated Reading (RR) to create the three instructional packages investigated. The packages included Repeated Readings (RR), Repeated Readings with Performance Feedback (RR/FB), and Repeated Readings with Performance Feedback and Contingent Reward (RR/FB/REW). Results suggested that Repeated Reading (RR) alone led to the greatest increase in reading fluency for participants with the highest reading rates and lowest error rates at baseline. In contrast, the participant who exhibited the lowest reading rate and highest error rate benefited the most when Repeated Readings was offered in conjunction with Performance Feedback (RR/FB) or Performance Feedback plus Contingent Reward (RR/FB/RW). Implications for blending skill- and performance-based interventions to develop stimulus control over fluent reading and future research directions are discussed.