LOSS STORY

Loss has many layers and complexities.The experience itself is known socially while it registers emotionally, in the body. Both the social and the embodied experience comprise the subject matter that we seek to understand, perhaps even "know," as it plays its part in our lives. This knowledge arises in personal reflection and in the stories that are told after the event. In this respect stories are an integral part of the loss experience. The present article was written 5 years after the death of my father (and was itself triggered by another loss experience). Like the loss experience, stories of loss can be enriching, perhaps even transformative, when they communicate intellectually, emotionally, and viscerally.     

The Relation of Parent and Child Gender to Parental Tolerance of Child Disruptive Behaviors

Parental tolerance has been defined as the degree to which a parent tends to be annoyed by his or her child’s disruptive behavior. The purpose of the current study is to examine the relation of both parent and child gender to parental tolerance of child disruptive behaviors. Participants were 150 parents with 3–6 year-old at-risk children (47.5 % girls) who sought help with parenting of their child’s oppositional defiant behaviors. Tolerance was measured by the difference between parent ratings of intensity on 36 disruptive behaviors and whether each behavior was identified as a problem (resulting in a score of either high, expected, or low tolerance). A 2 (child gender) by 2 (parent gender) analysis of variance was conducted on the tolerance score. A significant interaction between child and parent gender emerged: Mothers were equally tolerant of boys’ and girls’ oppositional defiant behavior but fathers were more tolerant of boys’ than girls’ oppositional behavior. Exploratory analyses suggested that this interaction may be qualified by clinical status of the child. Implications and future directions are discussed.     

Father–Daughter Communication About Sex Moderates the Association Between Exposure to MTV’s 16 and Pregnant/Teen Mom and Female Students’ Pregnancy-Risk Behavior

MTV’s hit programs 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom have been the subject of national debate since their inception. Supporters contend that the shows inhibit pregnancy-risk behavior. Critics contend that the shows glamorize adolescent motherhood and encourage pregnancy-risk behavior. The present study explored the possibility that the association between viewing 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom and student females’ pregnancy-risk behavior depends on the extent to which females’ parents communicated with them about sex while they were growing up. Survey data were gathered from 313 female students. A disordinal interaction was found between father–daughter sexual communication, viewing frequency, and recent intercourse behavior. Frequent viewing was associated with an increased probability of having engaged in recent intercourse for females whose fathers did not communicate with them about sex while growing up. Conversely, frequent viewing was associated with a decreased probability of having engaged in recent intercourse for females whose fathers often communicated about sex with them while growing up. No interaction was found between mother–daughter sexual communication, viewing frequency, and recent intercourse behavior. These results suggest that fathers may play an especially important role in determining how sexual media socialize their daughters.     

A job-seeking self-efficacy scale for people with physical disabilities: preliminary development and psychometric testing

People with disabilities are at an increased risk of unemployment. The role of interventions aiming to enhance the employment prospects of people with disabilities is receiving increased attention. However, evaluation is hampered by the paucity of measures specific to the needs of the target population. The purpose of the present study was to develop and conduct preliminary testing of the psychometric properties of a job-seeking self-efficacy (JSS) scale that reflected the experiences of people with physical disabilities. Job-seeking self-efficacy was defined as perceived ability to perform the skills involved in seeking employment that are salient to people with disabilities. Scale development and testing involved four studies and resulted in the 12-item JSS scale and six-item managing disability at interview (MDI) component, both of which were unidimensional and had high internal consistency. In addition, there was evidence of construct and concurrent validity. Greater jobseeking self-efficacy and perceived ability to manage disability at interview were associated with more positive psychological well-being. Only the MDI component was associated with physical functioning: lower perceived ability to manage disability at interview was associated with greater impairment of physical functioning. The pattern of associations supported the rationale for a separate component reflecting the need to resolve practical issues linked to access and availability of facilities before participation in the interview procedure per se .     

Feedback in behavior modification: an experimental analysis in two phobic cases

Two illustrations of single-case research are described in which an isolated therapeutic variable was sequentially introduced, withdrawn, and reintroduced while changes in a clinically relevant behavior were measured. A claustrophobic patient and a knife-phobic patient received graduated practice in facing their phobic stimuli; length of time the claustrophobic patient stayed in a small dark room per trial, and length of time the knife-phobic patient kept knife exposed per trial were measured. In both experiments, when feedback of these time scores was withdrawn, ongoing progress was retarded. Reinstatement of feedback led to renewed improvement. In Experiment 2, adding and removing contingent verbal praise against a constant background of precise feedback did not significantly alter rate of progress.     

The centroid paradigm: Quantifying feature-based attention in terms of attention filters

This paper elaborates a recent conceptualization of feature-based attention in terms of attention filters (Drew et al., Journal of Vision, 10(10:20), 1–16, 2010) into a general purpose centroid-estimation paradigm for studying feature-based attention. An attention filter is a brain process, initiated by a participant in the context of a task requiring feature-based attention, which operates broadly across space to modulate the relative effectiveness with which different features in the retinal input influence performance. This paper describes an empirical method for quantitatively measuring attention filters. The method uses a “statistical summary representation” (SSR) task in which the participant strives to mouse-click the centroid of a briefly flashed cloud composed of items of different types (e.g., dots of different luminances or sizes), weighting some types of items more strongly than others. In different attention conditions, the target weights for different item types in the centroid task are varied. The actual weights exerted on the participant’s responses by different item types in any given attention condition are derived by simple linear regression. Because, on each trial, the centroid paradigm obtains information about the relative effectiveness of all the features in the display, both target and distractor features, and because the participant’s response is a continuous variable in each of two dimensions (versus a simple binary choice as in most previous paradigms), it is remarkably powerful. The number of trials required to estimate an attention filter is an order of magnitude fewer than the number required to investigate much simpler concepts in typical psychophysical attention paradigms.