Assessing Representations of Close Relationships Among Chinese and Japanese Adolescents and Young Adults: Commonalities and Differences in the Two Confucian Cultures

This article proposed an affective relationships model with its assessment instrument and examined how Chinese and Japanese adolescents and young adults construct mental representations of their close relationships, and the influence of Confucian cultural beliefs on these representations. The participants were 1,565 students aged 14 to 24 years living in China or Japan. The students were asked about their relationships with four figures: mother, father, closest friend, and romantic partner. We found that: (a) adolescents and young adults in both cultures constructed constellations of relationships containing multiple figures, and they articulated reasons for each figure's significance; and (b) there were between-group differences in the relationships with the father and the romantic partner for Chinese versus Japanese adolescents and young adults. These differences were partly explained by the influence of Confucianism on the Chinese participants’ cultural beliefs that retained the patriarchal values.     

An Investigation of the Efficacy of Online Expressive Writing for Trauma-Related Psychological Distress in Hispanic Individuals

This study compared the efficacy of 2 online expressive writing protocols for a traumatic/stressful life event in a Hispanic student sample. Participants who had reported a traumatic event were randomly assigned to either the emotion-focused group or the fact-focused group. The emotion-focused group focused their written accounts on emotions and feelings as well as facts about a stressful/traumatic experience, whereas the fact-focused group focused on facts of a stressful/traumatic event. Both groups completed 3 online writing sessions scheduled for 3 consecutive days, a 1-week online follow-up assessment, and a 5-week online follow-up assessment. Both groups statistically significantly reduced trauma symptoms over time with the emotion-focused group demonstrating statistically significantly greater trauma symptom reductions than the fact-focused group at the 5-week follow-up assessment.     

Some determinants of remote behavioral history effects in humans

Undergraduates were exposed to a series of reinforcement schedules: first, to a fixed-ratio (FR) schedule in the presence of one stimulus and to a differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate (DRL) schedule in the presence of another (multiple FR DRL training), then to a fixed-interval (FI) schedule in the presence of a third stimulus (FI baseline), next to the FI schedule under the stimuli previously correlated with the FR and DRL schedules (multiple FI FI testing), and, finally, to a single session of the multiple FR DRL schedule again (multiple FR DRL testing). Response rates during the multiple FI FI schedule were higher under the former FR stimulus than under the former DRL stimulus. This effect of remote histories was prolonged when either the number of FI-baseline sessions was small or zero, or the time interval between the multiple FR DRL training and the multiple FI FI testing was short. Response rates under these two stimuli converged with continued exposure to the multiple FI FI schedule in most cases, but quickly differentiated when the schedule returned to the multiple FR DRL.     

A meta-analytic study of self-help interventions for anxiety problems

The present study examined the effectiveness of self-help (SH) interventions for individuals with anxiety problems. Thirty-three studies, targeting a variety of anxiety disorders and problems, met criteria for inclusion with 1,582 clinical and subclinical participants. Self-help formats included books, audio/videotapes, and computer/Internet-based programs. The average effect sizes (Cohen's ds) comparing SH interventions to control groups for target symptoms were .62 at posttreatment and .51 at follow-up. When compared to therapist-directed interventions (TDIs), the average effect sizes (Cohen's ds) for target problems were -.42 at posttreatment and -.36 at follow-up. Format of SH materials, type of target disorder, presence of minimal therapist contact, and other study parameters were examined for their effect on treatment outcome. The results were discussed from the perspective of a stepped-care approach for anxiety problems.     

A unified approach to multiple‐set canonical correlation analysis and principal components analysis

Multiple‐set canonical correlation analysis and principal components analysis are popular data reduction techniques in various fields, including psychology. Both techniques aim to extract a series of weighted composites or components of observed variables for the purpose of data reduction. However, their objectives of performing data reduction are different. Multiple‐set canonical correlation analysis focuses on describing the association among several sets of variables through data reduction, whereas principal components analysis concentrates on explaining the maximum variance of a single set of variables. In this paper, we provide a unified framework that combines these seemingly incompatible techniques. The proposed approach embraces the two techniques as special cases. More importantly, it permits a compromise between the techniques in yielding solutions. For instance, we may obtain components in such a way that they maximize the association among multiple data sets, while also accounting for the variance of each data set. We develop a single optimization function for parameter estimation, which is a weighted sum of two criteria for multiple‐set canonical correlation analysis and principal components analysis. We minimize this function analytically. We conduct simulation studies to investigate the performance of the proposed approach based on synthetic data. We also apply the approach for the analysis of functional neuroimaging data to illustrate its empirical usefulness.     

Parallelism Between Sentence Structure and Nominal Phrases in Japanese: Evidence from Scrambled Instrumental and Locative Adverbial Phrases

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - The present study investigated the canonical position of instrumental and locative adverbial phrases in both Japanese sentences and noun phrases to determine...     

Additive structure in qualitative data: An alternating least squares method with optimal scaling features

A method is developed to investigate the additive structure of data that (a) may be measured at the nominal, ordinal or cardinal levels, (b) may be obtained from either a discrete or continuous source, (c) may have known degrees of imprecision, or (d) may be obtained in unbalanced designs. The method also permits experimental variables to be measured at the ordinal level. It is shown that the method is convergent, and includes several previously proposed methods as special cases. Both Monte Carlo and empirical evaluations indicate that the method is robust.This research was supported in part by grant MH-10006 from the National Institute of Mental Health to the Psychometric Laboratory of the University of North Carolina. We wish to thank Thomas S. Wallsten for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Copies of the paper and of ADDALS, a program to perform the analyses discussed herein, may be obtained from the second author.