A Dyadic Perspective on Childhood Maltreatment for Women With Provoked Vestibulodynia and Their Partners: Associations With Pain and Sexual and Psychosocial Functioning

Childhood maltreatment is robustly associated with adult-onset vulvodynia, a common form of female genito-pelvic pain/penetration disorder. However, little is known about the impact of childhood maltreatment on current sexual, psychological, and relationship adaptation for couples with provoked vestibulodynia (PVD). This study examined the associations between childhood maltreatment and sexual and psychosocial functioning and pain in women with PVD, the most common subtype of vulvodynia, and their partners. A total of 49 couples (M_age women = 27.80, SD = 6.05; M_age men = 30.04; SD = 6.48) with PVD completed the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ), as well as measures of sexual functioning, couple satisfaction, and anxiety. Women also reported on their pain during intercourse. Analyses were guided by the actor–partner interdependence model. Women’s higher reports of childhood maltreatment were associated with their lower sexual functioning and higher anxiety. Partners’ higher reports of childhood maltreatment were associated with their lower sexual functioning, lower couple satisfaction, and higher anxiety, as well as women’s lower couple satisfaction and higher anxiety. Both women’s and partners’ higher reports of childhood maltreatment were associated with higher affective pain for women. Findings suggest childhood maltreatment experienced by women with PVD and their partners should be considered as part of treatment planning.     

Managing the challenges of combining mobilities of care and commuting: an Australian perspective

Women face particular travel challenges when combining commuting with broader caring responsibilities. This policy note considers the issues associated with meeting the transport needs of working women as they navigate their daily ‘mobilities of care’. We extend the concept of ‘mobilities of care’ by combining an intersectional understanding of the transport task with the principles embodied in the child-friendly cities agenda. These are discussed with respect to the provision of public transport services and infrastructure in Australia to illuminate the ways that such an approach could deliver transport benefits to those commuting with young children in their care, most often mothers. We also argue that transport policy, planning and provision must make an explicit connection between intersectional factors such as disability, class, as well as gender, and the substantive impact they can have on women and children’s mobilities and modal choices.     

Barriers and Enablers to Safeguarding Children and Adults within a Disability Services Context: Insights from an Australian Delphi Study

Research conducted in the 1990s revealed the tragic irony that exposure to the disability support system, and particularly to its institutional forms, was a major risk factor related to the neglect and abuse of children and adults with a disability. Subsequently, a range of policies have been introduced to minimize risk. However, recurring events of abuse and neglect in the disability services sector in high and middle income countries demonstrate that processes geared to safeguard children and adults with a disability from abuse and neglect remain insufficient. To establish the wider fabric of organizational factors that contribute to effective safeguarding practices within the Australian disability support sector, a modified online Delphi study was conducted, capturing the views of disability services staff and managers (n = 249) regarding barriers and enablers to effective safeguarding. This study identified issues concerning organizational culture, management practice, workforce development, client capacity building and contextual factors. During Round Two of the Delphi, participants were asked to rate the categorized enabler statements according to importance on a 10‐point Likert scale, to ascertain the degree of consensus. A total of 262 of the statements were regarded as important or very important. The Delphi result highlighted the considerable gap between the wider systemic and cultural processes that, in the eyes of disability services staff and management, contribute to good safeguarding practice and the safeguarding measures currently in place. The article calls for a holistic approach to safeguarding that addresses procedural issues and to the transformation of the wider systemic and cultural fabric of an organization.     

Resolving the (Apparent) Talker Recognition Paradox in Developmental Speech Perception

The infant literature suggests that humans enter the world with impressive built‐in talker processing abilities. For example, newborns prefer the sound of their mother's voice over the sound of another woman's voice, and well before their first birthday, infants tune in to language‐specific speech cues for distinguishing between unfamiliar talkers. The early childhood literature, however, suggests that preschoolers are unable to learn to identify the voices of two unfamiliar talkers unless these voices are highly distinct from one another, and that adult‐level talker recognition does not emerge until children near adolescence. How can we reconcile these apparently paradoxical messages conveyed by the infant and early childhood literatures? Here, we address this question by testing 16.5‐month‐old infants (N = 80) in three talker recognition experiments. Our results demonstrate that infants at this age have difficulty recognizing unfamiliar talkers, suggesting that talker recognition (associating voices with people) is mastered later in life than talker discrimination (telling voices apart). We conclude that methodological differences across the infant and early childhood literatures—rather than a true developmental discontinuity—account for the performance differences in talker processing between these two age groups. Related findings in other areas of developmental psychology are discussed.     

The `Game' of Leadership: Exercise, Games, Sports, and Leadership

The relationship between leadership and sports was analyzed. Peer influence was most important, with that of teachers and parents seeming to have a second-order effect as perceived through peers. Each gender benefitted more in leadership when mentored by their own gender, especially so for women. In work settings, men reported more leadership learning and encouragement than did women. Women experienced more frustration in participating in games and sports in school, the encouragement and continued mentoring being insufficient. Harragan's 1977 thesis that the corporate world and the playing field of sports and high-level policy-making have a male schema was borne out.     

A New Understanding of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: Alternate Concepts and Interventions

This paper explores alternate concepts for increasing our understanding of the intra/interpersonal difficulties that are observed in those with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Language theory in correlation with under inhibition of responses, (not inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity), is explained, and demonstrates how those with ADHD are more vulnerable for developing intra/interpersonal struggles. Comorbidity as it presents with ADHD is examined as the resulting psychopathological symptomolgy possibly caused by untreated psychological, social and cognitive distress. This is in contrast to the prevailing idea that comorbid symptoms are always separate and distinct diagnoses. The psychoanalytic theories of object relations and affect attunement are defined and are linked to under inhibition of responses via dynamic intra/interpersonal processes and the presenting psychological, social and cognitive problems. Interventions are proposed that are behavioral and psychopharmacological, with a systems approach. Two cases are presented to illustrate how these treatment techniques translate into actual practice. All proposed interventions are aimed to address and anticipate the potential that individuals and families with ADHD experience under inhibition of responses with accompanying, maladaptive intra/interpersonal functioning.     

Non-parametric Curve Estimation by Wavelet Thresholding with Locally Stationary Errors

An important aspect in the modelling of biological phenomena in living organisms, whether the measurements are of blood pressure, enzyme levels, biomechanical movements or heartbeats, etc., is time variation in the data. Thus, the recovery of a 'smooth' regression or trend function from noisy time-varying sampled data becomes a problem of particular interest. Here we use non-linear wavelet thresholding to estimate a regression or a trend function in the presence of additive noise which, in contrast to most existing models, does not need to be stationary. (Here, non-stationarity means that the spectral behaviour of the noise is allowed to change slowly over time). We develop a procedure to adapt existing threshold rules to such situations, e.g. that of a time-varying variance in the errors. Moreover, in the model of curve estimation for functions belonging to a Besov class with locally stationary errors, we derive a near-optimal rate for the -risk between the unknown function and our soft or hard threshold estimator, which holds in the general case of an error distribution with bounded cumulants. In the case of Gaussian errors, a lower bound on the asymptotic minimax rate in the wavelet coefficient domain is also obtained. Also it is argued that a stronger adaptivity result is possible by the use of a particular location and level dependent threshold obtained by minimizing Stein's unbiased estimate of the risk. In this respect, our work generalizes previous results, which cover the situation of correlated, but stationary errors. A natural application of our approach is the estimation of the trend function of non-stationary time series under the model of local stationarity. The method is illustrated on both an interesting simulated example and a biostatistical data-set, measurements of sheep luteinizing hormone, which exhibits a clear non-stationarity in its variance.     

Adaptive governance to promote ecosystem services in urban green spaces

Managing urban green space as part of an ongoing social-ecological transformation poses novel governance issues, particularly in post-industrial settings. Urban green spaces operate as small-scale nodes in larger networks of ecological reserves that provide and maintain key ecosystem services such as pollination, water retention and infiltration, and sustainable food production. In an urban mosaic, a myriad of social and ecological components factor into aggregating and managing land to maintain or increase the flow of ecosystem services associated with green spaces. Vacant lots (a form of urban green space) are being repurposed for multiple functions, such as habitat for biodiversity, including arthropods that provide pollination services to other green areas; to capture urban runoff that eases the burden on ageing wastewater systems and other civic infrastructure; and to reduce urban heat island effects. Because of the uncertainty and complexities of managing for ecosystem services in urban settings, we advocate for a governance approach that is adaptive and iterative in nature—adaptive governance—to address the ever changing social order underlying post-industrial cities and offer the rise of land banks as an example of governance innovation.     

Email subject lines and response rates to invitations to participate in a web survey and a face-to-face interview: the sound of silence

This paper investigates the relationship between blank and non-blank email subject lines on levels of response to a solicitation to participate in an interview, and on participation in a web survey. Email use has grown substantially in recent years, presenting significant opportunity to the empiricist seeking research respondents. However, response to emails may be low because growth in the sheer volume of messages that individuals receive per day has led to a sense of ‘email overload’, and faced with the challenge of personal email management, many recipients choose to ignore some messages, or do not read them all fully. Drawing on information gap theory, we expected that sending an invitation with a blank subject line would induce a sense of curiosity in recipients that would improve email response and willingness to participate in research studies. However, findings from research with two samples with different propensities to participate in research (academics and business owners) revealed that an email invitation with a blank subject line does not increase overall response rates to a web survey and a face-to-face interview over either an informative subject line or a provocative subject line, but that it does prompt a greater number of active refusals. Based on this finding, recommendations for researchers are outlined.     

Nonverbal Decoding on Facebook: Applying the IPT-15 and the SSI to Personality Judgments

This study uses the lens model paradigm to explore whether two interpersonal sensitivity tests [i.e., Interpersonal Perception Task (IPT-15), Social Skills Inventory (SSI)] are associated with the accuracy of personality judgments made from Facebook (FB) profile pages. Target participants’ (N = 100) personality, self-monitoring, and FB honesty were self-reported, and the FB profile of each target was downloaded. Observers (N = 35) completed the IPT-15 and SSI and then estimated each profile owner’s personality from the profile pages. Observers’ scores on the IPT-15 were positively associated with the accuracy of estimates of targets’ extraversion and neuroticism. Observers’ SSI-ES scores were positively associated with the accuracy of estimates of targets’ agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. Characteristics of targets, such as self-monitoring, FB honesty, and overall FB use, also affected the accuracy of estimates. Results demonstrate that offline measures of sensitivity are associated with the accuracy of online personality judgments.