Family Processes and Treatment Outcome in the MTA: Negative/Ineffective Parenting Practices in Relation to Multimodal Treatment

To elucidate processes underlying therapeutic change in a large-scale randomized clinical trial, we examined whether alterations in self-reported parenting practices were associated with the effects of behavioral, medication, or combination treatments on teacher-reported outcomes (disruptive behavior, social skills, internalizing symptoms) in children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Participants were 579 children with Combined-type ADHD, aged 7–9.9 years, in the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD (MTA). We uncovered 2 second-order factors of parenting practices, entitled Positive Involvement and Negative/Ineffective Discipline. Although Positive Involvement was not associated with amelioration of the school-based outcome measures, reductions in Negative/Ineffective Discipline mediated improvement in children's social skills at school. For families showing the greatest reductions in Negative/Ineffective Discipline, effects of combined medication plus behavioral treatment were pronounced in relation to regular community care. Furthermore, only in combination treatment (and not in behavioral treatment alone) was decreased Negative/Ineffective Discipline associated with reduction in children's disruptive behavior at school. Here, children in families receiving combination treatment who showed the greatest reductions in Negative/Ineffective Discipline had teacher-reported disruptive behavior that was essentially normalized. Overall, the success of combination treatment for important school-related outcomes appears related to reductions in negative and ineffective parenting practices at home; we discuss problems in interpreting the temporal sequencing of such process-outcome linkages and the means by which multimodal treatment may be mediated by psychosocial processes related to parenting.     

Facilitating 'Perspectival Reciprocity' in Medication: Some Reflections on a Failed Case

Mediation services arise in contexts where the notions of community cohesion, relationship integrity and social order are valued over their opposites (disorder, dissent, conflict etc). Yet it is not at all clear whether and how the mediation of conflict works to re-establish harmony or consensus. Indeed it is not at all clear that mediation is always effective or just. It has even been suggested that some conflicts (e.g. work-place, commercial and sexual assault) are either not resolved or not resolved justly by mediation. On the other hand, advocates maintain that mediation can bring resolution and repair to ongoing relationships, promote community harmony, and empower people to be self-determining in the construction and maintenance of their resolutions. Whether mediation is adjudged positively or not, all mediation is instantiated in, indeed performed through, talk. In this paper I examine mediations from an Australian mediation program, and use Conversation Analysis to expose the practical methods by which mediators achieve consensus between disputants. I then examine a case in which mediation has failed to produce the sought-after consensus, and explore one way of understanding the failure of mediation in that case.     

The total workload of male and female white collar workers as related to age, occupational level, and number of children

A questionnaire assessing various aspects of paid as well as unpaid forms of productive activity was mailed to stratified samples of male and female white collar workers, approximately matched for educational and occupational level. Data from 501 men and 679 women employed full time revealed traditional gender differences in terms of main responsibility for household duties, child care etc. In keeping with this, women reported higher levels of work overload, stress and conflict than men, which increased significantly with the number of children at home. The various stress indices reached a peak between the ages of 35 and 39. Men reported more autonomy in their paid work whereas women reported more control at home. Men and women at the upper managerial levels reported more control over their total work situation and less conflict between demands.     

Teacher's Encouragement on Creativity,Intrinsic Motivation,and Creativity: The Mediating Role of Creative Process Engagement

Drawing on Dewey's pragmatic perspective on talent cultivation and previous research on promoting employee creativity in industry, this study investigates student creativity performance in relation to teacher's encouragement, intrinsic motivation, and creative process engagement. Based on survey data collected from 140 vocational high school students who participated in a nation‐wide contest in Taiwan, path analyses were performed using structure equation modeling techniques. The results indicate that both teacher's encouragement and intrinsic motivation have a significant, although indirect, effect on student creativity, and that creative process engagement, as opposed to teacher encouragement or intrinsic motivation, has a direct and significant mediating effect on student creativity. This finding is in partial agreement with prior research which reports student creativity is positively associated with teacher encouragement and intrinsic motivation, highlighting the mediating role of creative process engagement in facilitating student creative performance.     

Forward inference in risky choice: Mapping gaze and decision processes

The study of cognitive processes is built on a close mapping between three components: overt gaze behavior, overt choice, and covert processes. To validate this overt–covert mapping in the domain of decision‐making, we collected eye‐movement data during decisions between risky gamble problems. Applying a forward inference paradigm, participants were instructed to use specific decision strategies to solve those gamble problems (maximizing expected values or applying different choice heuristics) during which gaze behavior was recorded. We revealed differences between overt behavior, as indicated by eye movements, and covert decision processes, instructed by the experimenter. However, our results show that the overt–covert mapping is for some eye‐movement measures not as close as expected by current decision theory, and hence question reverse inference as being prone to fallacies due to a violation of its prerequisite, that is, a close overt–covert mapping. We propose a framework to rehabilitate reverse inference.     

How Palestinian students invoke the category “human” to challenge negative treatment and media representations

Dehumanisation of opponents in conflict has been shown to be a common and damaging feature in the media. What is not understood is how this dehumanisation is challenged, which is the novel contribution that this research will make. Drawing on focus groups (four focus groups each with four to six participants) conducted in the West Bank in 2015 that discussed media coverage of international conflict, this article demonstrates the ways in which young Palestinian participants attempt to rehumanize themselves in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Discursive analysis demonstrates how this was achieved in a number of ways: categorising Palestinians as “human being”; by directly and explicitly challenging the suggestion that Palestinians are less than human; by drawing the enemy into the category “human”; and by embodying the “human.” These findings, the first to address the talk of young Palestinians about the reporting of violent conflicts around the world, demonstrate the importance of categorization and how, in this case, the specifics of the use of the (human) category work to rehumanize Palestinians in the face of (claims of) dehumanisation.     

The semantic structure of emotion words across languages is consistent with componential appraisal models of emotion

Appraisal theories of emotion, and particularly the Component Process Model, claim that the different components of the emotion process (action tendencies, physiological reactions, expressions, and feeling experiences) are essentially driven by the results of cognitive appraisals and that the feeling component constitutes a central integration and representation of these processes. Given the complexity of the proposed architecture, comprehensive experimental tests of these predictions are difficult to perform and to date are lacking. Encouraged by the “lexical sedimentation” hypothesis, here we propose an indirect examination of the compatibility of the theoretical assumptions with the semantic structure of a set of major emotion words as measured in a cross-language and cross-cultural study. Specifically, we performed a secondary analysis of the large-scale data set with ratings of affective features covering all components of the emotion process for 24 emotion words in 27 countries, constituting profiles of emotion-specific appraisals, action tendencies, physiological reactions, expressions, and feeling experiences. The results of a series of hierarchical regression analyses to examine the prediction of the theoretical model are highly consistent with the claim that appraisal patterns determine the structure of the response components, which in turn predict central dimensions of the feeling component.     

Building up resources in the relationship between work–family conflict and burnout among firefighters: moderators of guanxi and emotion regulation strategies

This study investigated the moderating effects of supervisor–subordinate “guanxi” alongside relevant emotional regulation strategies, including cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, undertaken by 402 firefighters experiencing burnout caused by work–family conflict, as revealed through the application and analysis of the job demands–resources model. According to the regression model for the moderating effects, high levels of supervisor–subordinate guanxi may improve the relationship between work–family conflict and burnout, while frequent suppression of expressivity may enhance this relationship. Moreover, when supervisor–subordinate guanxi is high, cognitive reappraisal may effectively mitigate the relationship between work–family conflict and burnout. To this end, both guanxi and cognitive reappraisal are crucial for supporting emotional regulation in the workplaces of ethnic Chinese societies.     

累并快乐着：服务型领导的收益与代价——基于工作-家庭资源模型视角

服务型领导被以往大量研究证实能够对下属产生积极的影响效果。然而, 我们对服务型领导如何影响领导者自己还知之甚少。基于此, 文章根据工作-家庭资源模型, 探讨了服务型领导的收益与代价。采用经验抽样法, 对广州市76名企业单位中的主管进行为期5天的日记研究, 并运用多层线性模型进行数据分析。结果表明：主管每日从事服务型领导行为既可以产生更多的积极情绪, 从而改善工作-家庭关系, 又可能会引发资源损耗, 从而恶化了工作-家庭关系。主管感知的组织支持是服务型领导行为双刃剑效应的“门阀”, 当主管感知到高的组织支持时, 从事服务型领导行为会带来更多的积极情绪, 而当主管感知到低的组织支持时, 从事服务型领导行为可能更容易增加资源损耗。以上结果能拓宽我们对服务型领导影响效果的认识, 并为如何干预服务型领导行为提供一些新的启发。