Parental Involvement and Adolescents’ Academic Achievement: Latent Profiles of Mother and Father Warmth as a Moderating Influence

Parental involvement in their adolescents’ education plays an important role in promoting their children's academic outcomes. Yet, more research is needed to examine the relationship between parenting practices and parental warmth as well as to consider the potential joint contribution of warmth from both fathers and mothers. Thus, the primary purpose of the current study is to examine the extent to which patterns of parental warmth across fathers and mothers moderate the association between parental involvement and adolescents’ grade point average (GPA) and school engagement behaviors. Latent profile analysis was conducted to identify disparate profiles of fathers’ and mothers’ warmth within a nationally representative sample of 2,306 youths (51% male; mean age = 15.31 years, SD = 1.50; 77% non-Hispanic White) residing in opposite-sex, two-parent families from Wave I and II of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Latent-class enumeration processes support a five-profile solution characterized by differences in levels of parental warmth and congruency across parents: (a) Congruent High Warmth, (b) Congruent Moderate Warmth, (c) Congruent Low Warmth, (d) Incongruent High Mother/Low Father Warmth, and (e) Incongruent Low Father/Lower Mother Warmth. Subsequent multiple linear regression analyses reveal a moderating effect for Congruent Low Warmth on the relationship between parental involvement and adolescents’ GPA. Ultimately, the results show that variation in parental warmth exists across fathers and mothers with differing impact on adolescents’ outcomes. Excluding one parent without considering the joint effects of both parents will not produce an accurate and precise understanding of parenting in research or practice.     

Exploring Processes in Day-to-Day Parent–Adolescent Conflict and Angry Mood: Evidence for Circular Causality

Parent–adolescent conflict has been studied both as a precursor of long-term macrolevel developmental risks and as an outcome of microlevel, moment-to-moment interaction patterns. However, the family-level processes underlying the maintenance or regulation of conflict in daily life are largely overlooked. A meso-level understanding of parent–adolescent conflict offers important practical insights that have direct implications for interventions. The present study explores day-to-day reciprocal processes and carryover in parents’ and adolescents’ experiences of anger and conflict. Daily diary data provided by parent–adolescent dyads (N = 151) from two-caregiver households (adolescents: 61.59% female, mean age = 14.60 years) over 21 days were examined using a multivariate Poisson multilevel model to evaluate the circular causality principle in parents’ and adolescents’ daily conflict and anger. Findings offer empirical support for the theory, suggesting that parents’ and adolescents’ anger and conflict exist together in a feedback loop wherein conflict is both a consequence of past anger and also an antecedent of future anger, both within and across persons. Increased understanding of the daily interaction patterns and maintenance of parent–adolescent conflict can guide more informed, targeted, and well-timed interventions intended to ameliorate the consequences of problematic parent–adolescent conflict sequences.     

Care of the Self and Patient Participation in Genetic Discourse: A Foucauldian Reading of the Surgeon General's “My Family Health Portrait” Program

Critics of genetic discourse are concerned that deterministic and discriminatory views of genetics are increasingly becoming adopted. These views argue that current genetic discourse becomes a source of power whereby powerful institutions harm people with so-called “bad” genes. This essay argues that current analyses of the power of genetics discourse are grounded in an improper reading that disempowers patients. Deploying Michel Foucault's concept “care of the self,” this essay claims that genetics discourse is better understood as a way that patients take on power through rhetoric rather than a force that has power over patients. Through a close reading of the “My Family Health Portrait” program, this paper argues that patients experience a process of “subjection” wherein they become agents of and objects of genetics discourse both. This alternative mode of analyzing the power of genetics discourse has implications for our collective understanding of the operations of the care of the self and the uses of genetic information that we propose.     

Empathy, an integrative model

Empathy research has yielded various separate insights into empathy and its correlates. Yet a comprehensive theoretical account that situates these factors within a larger framework is lacking. In this paper a conception of empathy is proposed and defended, which makes it possible to provide an encompassing reconstruction of the processes that are characteristic of empathic encounters. This conception situates empathy within a context of communication. Doing so allows one to connect various treads in empathy research, but at the same time urges one to take new factors into account. It is argued that empathy is a response to a specific demand occurring in a specific context. The type of answer persons are able to provide depends on four types of factors. First, there are the psychological empathic components. We argue that empathy should be seen as a combination of (especially) parallel and reactive emotions, against a background of specific cognitive abilities. Second, it is argued that empathy is aided by a twofold control system, comprised of judgements and forms of self-control. Third, personality factors play a part in how a person responds to demands. Finally, but most importantly, it is pointed out that specific relational factors codetermine empathic reactions. In this paper we describe the theoretical background of our model and provide an elaborated account of the four factors that determine empathic acts in a given context. We illustrate the viability of our model by presenting observational data of children's empathic acts.