Relational Resilience in Māori,Pacific, and European Sole Parent Families: From Theory and Research to Social Policy

This study reports findings and policy recommendations from a research project that applied a relational resilience framework to a study of 60 sole parent families in New Zealand, with approximately equal numbers of Māori, Pacific, and European (White) participants. The sole parent families involved were already known to be resilient and the study focused on identifying the relationships and strategies underlying the achievement and maintenance of their resilience. The study was carried out to provide an evidence base for the development and implementation of policies and interventions to both support sole parent families who have achieved resilience and assist those who struggle to do so. The three populations shared many similarities in their pathways to becoming sole parents and the challenges they faced as sole parents. The coping strategies underlying their demonstrated resilience were also broadly similar, but the ways in which they were carried out did vary in a manner that particularly reflected cultural practices in terms of their reliance upon extended family‐based support or support from outside the family. The commonalities support the appropriateness of the common conceptual framework used, whereas the differences underline the importance of developing nuanced policy responses that take into account cultural differences between the various populations to which policy initiatives are directed.     

Psychometric properties of Spanish version of the Mini-Mental Adjustment to Cancer Scale

Background/ObjectiveThe aim of the study was to examine the factor structure and psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the Mini-Mental Adjustment to Cancer Scale (Mini-MAC) in a large sample of patients with non-metastatic, resected cancer.MethodsProspective, observational, multicenter study for which 914 patients were recruited from 15 Spanish hospitals. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, validity and reliability analyses were conducted.ResultsFactor-analytic results indicated a 4-factor structure of the Spanish version of the Mini-MAC. Three subscales have psychometric properties similar to those of Helplessness, Anxious preoccupation, and Cognitive avoidance of the original the Mini-MAC. The Fighting spirit and the Fatalism subscales were combined on the Positive attitude scale. The four factor-derived scale scores exhibited acceptable accuracy for individual measurement purposes, as well as stability over time in test-retest assessments at 6 months. Validity assessments found meaningful relations between the derived scale scores, and Brief Symptom Inventory depression and anxiety scores and Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy spiritual well-being scores.ConclusionsThe Spanish version of the Mini-MAC provides reliable and valid measures for patients with non-metastatic, resected cancer, and results corroborate the instrument’s cross-cultural validity.     

Online/offline self-disclosure to offline friends and relational outcomes in a diary study: The moderating role of self-esteem and relational closeness

Previous work suggests that the experiences of online and offline self-disclosure are heterogeneous among individuals. Yet little work has been done to identify the moderating role of individual characteristics and pre-existing relationship characteristics on the diverse relational outcomes. The present study using a 7-day diary design examined whether individuals' self-esteem level and relational closeness would moderate the relationships between online and offline self-disclosure to offline friends and two relational outcomes, that is, relationship satisfaction and trust in friendships. The analyses on 686 diary responses from 98 participants revealed that offline self-disclosure generally predicted greater relationship satisfaction and trust in friendships, whereas the role of online self-disclosure was not statistically significant. More importantly, self-esteem moderated the pattern associated with offline self-disclosure but not that with online self-disclosure. Specifically, offline self-disclosure predicted greater benefits to people with lower self-esteem relative to people with higher self-esteem. Moreover, pre-existing relational closeness moderated the relationship between offline self-disclosure and trust in friendships such that casual friendships benefited more from offline self-disclosure than close friendships did. The present study highlights the importance of personal characteristics and relationship characteristics in understanding the heterogeneous relational influence of different communication modes.     

Behavioural intention to use fully autonomous vehicles: Instrumental,symbolic, and affective motives

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have the potential to transform the transportation industry with significant economic, social and environmental benefits. However, the mass deployment of AVs depends on public desire to use them. This study aims to examine the effect of instrumental, symbolic, and affective motives on the behavioural intention to use fully AVs. Based on a survey of 240 U.S. residents, a structural equation modeling analysis was performed. Our results suggest the behavioural intention to use fully AVs depends on fulfilling instrumental (i.e., performance expectancy and hedonic motivation), symbolic (i.e., personal innovativeness and social influence) and affective motives (i.e., trust and performance risk). These results have implication for designing policy interventions to increase the deployment of AVs.     

Relational Spending in Funerals: Caring for Others Loved and Lost

Funeral rituals perform important social functions for families and communities, but little is known about the motives of people planning funerals. Using mixed methods, we examine funeral planning as end-of-life relational spending. We identify how relational motives drive and manifest in funeral planning, even when the primary recipient of goods and services is dead. Qualitative interviews with consumers who had planned pre-COVID funerals (N = 15) reveal a caring orientation drives funeral decision-making for loved ones and for self-planned funerals. Caring practices manifest in three forms: (a) balancing preferences between the planner, deceased, and surviving family; (b) making personal sacrifices; and (c) spending amount (Study 1). Archival funeral contract data (N = 385) reveal supporting quantitative evidence of caring-driven funeral spending. Planners spend more on funerals for others and underspend on their own funerals (Study 2). Preregistered experiments (N = 1,906) addressing selection bias replicate these results and find generalization across different funding sources (planner-funded, other-funded, and insurance; Studies 3A–3C). The findings elucidate a ubiquitous, emotional, and financially consequential decision process at the end of life.     

Self-Reported Psychological Well-Being and Disease-Related Strains among Adults with Diabetes

The study was designed to describe self-reported psychological well-being among adults with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes and to explore associations of psychological well-being with disease-related strains, such as self-reported long-term complications, frequency of hypoglycaemia and disablement or sick-leave. A sample comprising 534 Norwegian adults with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes aged 25-70 years participated in the study. Psychological well-being was assessed using three different scales; the WHO (Ten) Well-Being Index, the Short Zung Depression Rating Scale and four items from the anxiety sub-scale of the Hopkins Symptom Checklist. Findings indicate that adults with both types of diabetes reported relatively poor psychological well-being. There was a tendency for younger persons to report the worst psychological well-being. For symptoms of anxiety this tendency was most evident among people with Type 2 diabetes. People being disabled due to diabetes reported relatively markedly impaired psychological well-being, whereas self-reported diabetes-related complications and the number of episodes with hypoglycaemia were weakly associated with psychological well-being. Findings may indicate that healthcare practitioners should pay more attention to the psychological needs of people with diabetes. This applies especially to younger people with Type 2 diabetes.     

Cognitive and neuropsychological underpinnings of relational and conjunctive working memory binding across age

The ability to form associations (i.e., binding) is critical for memory formation. Recent studies suggest that aging specifically affects relational binding (associating separate features) but not conjunctive binding (integrating features within an object). Possibly, this dissociation may be driven by the spatial nature of the studies so far. Alternatively, relational binding may simply require more attentional resources. We assessed relational and conjunctive binding in three age groups and we included an interfering task (i.e., an articulatory suppression task). Binding was examined in a working memory (WM) task using non-spatial features: shape and colour. Thirty-one young adults (mean age = 22.35), 30 middle-aged adults (mean age = 54.80) and 30 older adults (mean age = 70.27) performed the task. Results show an effect of type of binding and an effect of age but no interaction between type of binding and age. The interaction between type of binding and interference was significant. These results indicate that aging affects relational binding and conjunctive binding similarly. However, relational binding is more susceptible to interference than conjunctive binding, which suggests that relational binding may require more attentional resources. We suggest that a general decline in WM resources associated with frontal dysfunction underlies age-related deficits in WM binding.     

Recognising relations: What can be learned from considering complexity

Analogy is an important cognitive process that has been researched extensively. Functional accounts of it typically involve at least four stages of processing (access, mapping, transfer, and evaluation); however, these accounts take the way in which the base analogue is understood, along with its relational structure, for granted. The goal of this paper is to open up a discussion about how this process (which we will call “relational recognition”) may occur. To this end, this paper describes two experiments that vary the level of relational complexity across exemplars. It was found that relational recognition tasks benefit from increased complexity, while mapping tasks suffer from it.     

Group mate absence,dissimilarity, and individual absence: Another look at “monkey see,monkey do”

In this study, we examined whether the alignment of individual and group absence depended on an individual's similarity or dissimilarity with his or her group mates. The study hypotheses were tested with organizational data, involving 1382 employees from 181 work groups. Our criterion was individual absence frequency, observed over a 12-month period. Dissimilarity indices fororganizational tenure and union affiliation were computed from organizational records. We found that the relation between group mate absence and individual absence was moderated by dissimilarity with respect to union affiliation (but not tenure dissimilarity), such that those with low union dissimilarity scores were more likely to align their absence behaviour with that of their group mates.