Social skills training and systematic desensitization in reducing dating anxiety.

Cooper et al. (1969) have criticized the types of target behavior chosen for therapy analogue studies for being irrelevant to clinical practice. A potential target behavior which appears to be pervasive, complex and directly relevant to clinical practice is interpersonal anxiety. Of special concern to college students is the interpersonal anxiety elicited by members of the opposite sex. especially in dating situations (Martinson and Zerface, 1970).An individual may experience interpersonal anxiety because of a deficit in social skills (reactive anxiety) or because of prior conditioning (conditioned anxiety) or because of some combination of both reactive and conditioned components. While it is possible that a treatment program aimed at a reduction of either of these anxiety components may be instrumental in ameliorating the other component, it would appear that a comprehensive treatment program would attempt to teach social skills as well as reduce conditioned anxiety.Desensitization procedures have demonstrated success in alleviating conditioned anxiety for a wide variety of clinical problems (Paul, 1969a. 1969b) and appears to be a logical choice for the conditioned component of dating anxiety. A number of outcome studies have reported some success in the use of in vivo desensitization (Rehm and Marston, 1968; Martinson and Zerface, 1970) and systematic desensitization (Stark, 1970) in reducing anxiety in date anxious subjects.The literature on treatment programs aimed at social skills training for date anxious subjects is meager. Melnick (1973) reported success in improving the appropriateness of the social behavior of subjects who had experienced a minimal dating history by the use of modeling, behavioral rehearsal and self-observation techniques.The present study was designed to test the relative effectiveness of two different types of treatment programs in alleviating interpersonal dating anxiety. The two experimental groups consisted of a systematic densensitization program which focused on the condition anxiety component and a social skills training program which focused on the reactive anxiety component.     

Deprivation and reward stimuli as compound stimuli

In Experiment 1 the experimental group was tested with a deprivation level and a reward magnitude which it had experienced previously but which it had not experienced in combination. This group was inferior in test performance to a group which had experienced the test deprivation-reward combination prior to test. These results were interpreted as indicating that deprivation stimuli and reward stimuli form a compound stimulus and training on the elements of the compound produces performance inferior to training directly on the compound. In Experiment 2, the decrement associated with two different shifts in deprivation and reward did not differ despite the different size change of total incentive involved in the two shifts. The results were interpreted as indicating that the deprivation-reward stimulus is not produced by a single underlying incentive mechanism.     

The Risks,Benefits, and Ethics of Trauma-Focused Research Participation

With the rising interest in the field of trauma research, many Institutional Review Boards, policymakers, parents, and others grapple with the impact of trauma-research participation on research participants' well-being. Do individuals who participate in trauma-focused research risk experiencing lasting negative effects from participation? What are the potential benefits that may be gleaned from participation in this work? How can trauma research studies be designed ethically, minimizing the risk to participants? The following review seeks to answer these questions. This review indicates that most studies in this area have found that only a minority of participants experience distress when participating in trauma-focused research. Furthermore, these negative feelings tend to dissipate quickly over time, with the majority of participants self-appraising their participation as positive, rewarding, and beneficial to society. Design characteristics that may serve to minimize participants' risk of experiencing distress are discussed, as well as implications for public policy and future research.     

Le climat d’entropie et le stress dans les organismes de sant

In recent years, many research and reporting of findings highlight the deteriorating work conditions in our hospitals, describing a climate of disorder in the arrangement of this system components (Masclet 2010). The study presented here examines the relationship between the entropy climate and stress of health personnel. The study was conducted in two hospitals in the Picardie region using a self-administered questionnaire answered by 161 workers in six trades. A transactional perspective has been used to clarify the role of organizational stressors through the mediation of psychological stress. The results confirm the mediating effect of psychological stress among the organizational social climate and perceived stress.     

Orthographic and phonological preview benefits: Parafoveal processing in skilled and less-skilled deaf readers

Many deaf individuals do not develop the high-level reading skills that will allow them to fully take part into society. To attempt to explain this widespread difficulty in the deaf population, much research has honed in on the use of phonological codes during reading. The hypothesis that the use of phonological codes is associated with good reading skills in deaf readers, though not well supported, still lingers in the literature. We investigated skilled and less-skilled adult deaf readers' processing of orthographic and phonological codes in parafoveal vision during reading by monitoring their eye movements and using the boundary paradigm. Orthographic preview benefits were found in early measures of reading for skilled hearing, skilled deaf, and less-skilled deaf readers, but only skilled hearing readers processed phonological codes in parafoveal vision. Crucially, skilled and less-skilled deaf readers showed a very similar pattern of preview benefits during reading. These results support the notion that reading difficulties in deaf adults are not linked to their failure to activate phonological codes during reading.     

Une étude sur le rôle modérateur des traits de personnalité sur la relation entre les conditions de l’organisation du travail et la détresse psychologique

This study is about psychological distress lived by Canadian workers. Only a few studies considered personal traits in the comprehension of this phenomenon. This study aims to determine the moderator role of self-esteem, the sense of control and the sense of cohesion on the relation between the work organization conditions and psychological distress. Some longitudinal data (n=7338 workers) coming from five cycles (1994-2003) of the National Population Health Survey (NPHS) have been used to complete some multilevel analysis (n1=time and n2=individual). The results indicate that the sense of control and the sense of cohesion play a moderator role on the relation between some of the work organization conditions and the level of psychological distress.     

Self-supporting personality and psychological symptoms: The mediating effects of stress and social support

This study examined relations among self-supporting personality, stress, social support, and psychological symptoms in a sample of 782 Chinese undergraduate students using the Self-Supporting Personality Scale for Adolescent Students (SSPS-AS), Adolescent Self-Rating Life Event Checklist (ASLEC), Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MPSSS), and Symptoms Check List 90 (SCL-90). As predicted, results from cross-sectional structural equation analyses suggested that stress and social support mediate the relationship between four self-supporting personality traits and psychological symptoms; an alternative stress-moderation model was not supported.     

Psychological contract breach,affective commitment to organization and supervisor,and newcomer adjustment: A three-wave moderated mediation model

This study examines the relationship of psychological contract breach to newcomer adjustment outcomes using affective commitments to organizations and supervisors as mediators and also looks at the moderating role of affective commitment to supervisors. Drawing from data collected at three points in time among a sample of newcomers (N = 224), we found that Time 2 affective organizational commitment mediated a positive relationship between Time 1 psychological contract breach and Time 3 turnover intention and emotional exhaustion. Moreover, affective commitment to supervisors interacted with organizational commitment such that the latter was more negatively related to Time 3 outcomes at low levels of commitment to supervisors. Similarly, the indirect relationships of psychological contract breach to Time 3 outcomes were stronger and negative at low levels of commitment to supervisors. Affective commitment's role in the psychological contract breach-outcome relationships during the entry period is discussed.     

Psychological functioning in siblings of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

We examined psychological functioning in siblings of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Siblings of children diagnosed with ADHD (n = 45) between the ages of 9 and 13 and a control group (n = 46) within the same age range composed of siblings of children with no diagnosed disorders completed measures of psychological functioning. A significant multivariate difference was observed on these measures across groups. Post hoc investigation of the univariate means revealed one significant group difference, which occurred on a measure of Trait Anger. This finding suggests that future research on family members of children with ADHD may be warranted.     

Comparing the construct validity of scales derived from the Narcissistic Personality Inventory: A reply to

Rosenthal and Hooley (2010) suggested that the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) includes items that are tangential to narcissism. They demonstrated that the removal of these items resulted in scores that are not confounded by self-esteem. We tested whether NPI scales derived from Rosenthal and Hooley’s included (NPI-N) and excluded (NPI-X) items manifest divergent relations with self-esteem, entitlement, distress, NPD, and general traits in two samples of undergraduates. The scales generated similar patterns of correlations, although the NPI-N items were more strongly related to (dis)Agreeableness, whereas the NPI-X items were more strongly related to Extraversion. Ultimately, the NPI-X items bore significant relations to constructs central to grandiose narcissism and do not seem to have caused problems in the assessment of narcissism.