Negative (But Not Positive) Parenting Interacts with Infant Negative Affect to Predict Infant Approach: Evidence of Diathesis‐Stress

Temperament by parenting interactions may reflect that individuals with greater risk are more likely to experience negative outcomes in adverse contexts (diathesis‐stress) or that these individuals are more susceptible to contextual influences in a “for better or for worse” pattern (differential susceptibility). Although such interactions have been identified for a variety of child outcomes, prior research has not examined approach characteristics—excitement and approach toward pleasurable activities—in the first year of life. Therefore, this study investigated whether 6‐month maternal reported infant negative affect—a phenotypic marker of risk/susceptibility—interacted with 8‐month observed parenting behaviors (positive parenting, negative parenting) to predict 12‐month infant behavioral approach. Based on a sample of mothers and their infants (N = 150), results indicated that negative parenting was inversely associated with subsequent approach for infants with high, but not low, levels of negative affect. Similar results did not occur regarding positive parenting. These findings better fit a diathesis‐stress model rather than a differential susceptibility model. Implications and limitations of these findings are discussed.     

Machine Learning for Drug Overdose Surveillance

ABSTRACT

We describe two recently proposed machine learning approaches for discovering emerging trends in fatal accidental drug overdoses. The Gaussian Process Subset Scan (Herlands, McFowland, Wilson, & Neill, 2017 Neill, D. B. (2017). Multidimensional tensor scan for drug overdose surveillance. Journal of Public Health Informatics, 9(1), e20. doi:10.5210/ojphi.v9i1.7598[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) enables early detection of emerging patterns in spatio-temporal data, accounting for both the complex, correlated nature of the data and the fact that detecting subtle patterns requires integration of information across multiple spatial areas and multiple time steps. We apply this approach to 17 years of county-aggregated data for monthly opioid overdose deaths in the New York City metropolitan area, showing clear advantages in the utility of discovered patterns as compared to typical anomaly detection approaches. To detect and characterize emerging overdose patterns that differentially affect a subpopulation of the data, including geographic, demographic, and behavioral patterns (e.g., which combinations of drugs are involved), we apply the Multidimensional Tensor Scan (Neill, 2017 Neill, D. B. (2017). Multidimensional tensor scan for drug overdose surveillance. Journal of Public Health Informatics, 9(1), e20. doi:10.5210/ojphi.v9i1.7598[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) to 8 years of case-level overdose data from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. We discover previously unidentified overdose patterns which reveal unusual demographic clusters, show impacts of drug legislation, and demonstrate potential for early detection and targeted intervention. These approaches to early detection of overdose patterns can inform prevention and response efforts, as well as understanding the effects of policy changes.     

When Father Steps Forward and Mother Steps Back: The Moderating Role of Simultaneity in Parents' Coparenting Behaviors in the Development of Anxiety in 4‐ to 30‐Month‐Olds

Infant negative affectivity predicts child anxiety. Coparenting might influence the development of anxiety by weakening this association in the case of supportive coparenting, or by strengthening this association in the case of undermining coparenting. Parents can display coparenting behaviors simultaneously (both parents being supportive or undermining), or divergently (only one parent being supportive or undermining). In our longitudinal study, we investigated whether coparenting moderated the relation between infant negative affectivity at 4 months and child anxiety symptoms 2 years later. Hundred‐sixteen couples dressed up their firstborn infants in a clothes‐changing task. We coded cooperative, mutual, neutral, and competitive coparenting behaviors. Both parents rated infant negative affectivity and child anxiety symptoms. Infant negative affectivity significantly predicted child anxiety. This association was moderated by parents' divergent cooperative coparenting: It was stronger when mothers were cooperative while fathers were neutral, and weaker when fathers were cooperative while mothers were neutral. When fathers step forward (i.e., being cooperative) and mothers step back (i.e., leaving space), they may protect their at‐risk child from developing anxiety.     

When the Lord builds the house: An autoethnographic account of working in an evangelical for-profit organizational culture

Religion is often perceived as a private topic, thus belonging outside the traditional conceptualization of a work environment. However, religion is a pervasive organizing framework and an understanding of its role in the workplace is needed from a communicative perspective. In the following autoethnography, I describe my experience working for a Christian for-profit homebuilder – starting with new employee orientation and moving through my final day at Local Homes. I focus on instances where tension emerges between expectations and reality as I learn about and interact within the overtly evangelical Christian organizational culture. The tension is illustrated through four vignettes that correspond to the traditional phases of socialization. Through writing this autoethnographic account, I attempt to move beyond my personal experience and situate my story within larger disciplinary and societal conversations about the socialization process in a religious organization. With this goal in mind, I conclude with methodological and theoretical implications.     

Implicit Valuation of the Near-Miss is Dependent on Outcome Context

Gambling studies have described a “near-miss effect” wherein the experience of almost winning increases gambling persistence. The near-miss has been proposed to inflate the value of preceding actions through its perceptual similarity to wins. We demonstrate here, however, that it acts as a conditioned stimulus to positively or negatively influence valuation, dependent on reward expectation and cognitive engagement. When subjects are asked to choose between two simulated slot machines, near-misses increase valuation of machines with a low payout rate, whereas they decrease valuation of high payout machines. This contextual effect impairs decisions and persists regardless of manipulations to outcome feedback or financial incentive provided for good performance. It is consistent with proposals that near-misses cause frustration when wins are expected, and we propose that it increases choice stochasticity and overrides avoidance of low-valued options. Intriguingly, the near-miss effect disappears when subjects are required to explicitly value machines by placing bets, rather than choosing between them. We propose that this task increases cognitive engagement and recruits participation of brain regions involved in cognitive processing, causing inhibition of otherwise dominant systems of decision-making. Our results reveal that only implicit, rather than explicit strategies of decision-making are affected by near-misses, and that the brain can fluidly shift between these strategies according to task demands.     

Why are social sciences and humanities needed in the works of IPBES? A systematic review of the literature

Despite the increased attention, which has been given to the issue of involving knowledge and experts from the social sciences and humanities (SSH) into the products and works of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), little is known on what the expectations towards the involvement of SSH in IPBES actually are. The aim of this paper is to close this gap by identifying the range of possible SSH contributions to IPBES that are expected in the literature, and discuss the inherent challenges of and concrete ways to realize these contributions in the particular institutional setting of IPBES. We address these two points by: firstly, assessing the literature dealing with IPBES and building a typology describing the main ways in which contributions from SSH to IPBES have been conceived between 2006 and 2017. We discuss these expected contributions in light of broader debates on the role of SSH in nature conservation and analyse some of the blind spots and selectivities in the perception of how SSH could substantially contribute to the works of IPBES. Then, secondly, by looking at one particular example, economics and its use in the first thematic assessment on pollinators, pollination and food production, we will concretely illustrate how works in a given discipline could contribute in many different and unprecedented ways to the works of IPBES and help identify paths for enhancing the conservation of biodiversity. Finally, we propose a range of practical recommendations as to how to increase the contribution of SSH in the works of IPBES.     

Wealth and inheritance in Britain from 1896 to the present

Personal wealth has grown since the 1970s twice as fast in real terms as national income. Has this rise in the wealth-income ratio led to a corresponding increase in the wealth being passed on from one generation to the next? Are we returning to the levels of inheritance found in the 19th century? The aim of this paper is to construct UK evidence on the extent of the transmission of wealth in the form of estates and gifts inter vivos. It takes a long-run view of inheritance, starting from 1896, when the modern Estate Duty was introduced, and exploits the extensive estate data published over the years. Construction of a long-run time series for more than a century is challenging, and there are important limitations. The resulting time-series demonstrates the major importance of inheritance in the UK before the First World War, when the total transmitted wealth represented some 20 per cent of net national income. In the inter-war period, the total was around 15 per cent, falling to some 10 per cent after the Second World War, and then falling further to below 5 per cent in the late 1970s. Since then, there has indeed been an upturn: a rise from 4.8 per cent in 1977 to 8.2 per cent in 2006. This increase was more or less in line with the increase in personal wealth, and has to be interpreted in the light of the changing net worth of the corporate and public sectors of the economy.     

From classes to copulas: wages,capital, and top incomes

Public debates about the rise in top income shares often focus on the growing dispersion in earnings, and the soaring pay for top executives and financial-sector employees. But can the change in the marginal distribution of earnings on its own explain the rise in top income shares? Are top executives replacing capital owners in the group of top-income earners, or are we rather witnessing a fusion of top capital and top earnings? This paper proposes an extension of the copula framework and uses it for exploring the changing composition of top incomes. It illustrates that changes in top income shares can easily be decomposed into respective changes in the marginal distributions of labour and capital income and the changing association between the two types of income. An application using tax record data from Norway shows that the association between top labour and capital incomes grew stronger between 1995 and 2005 in the top half of the wage and capital income distribution, though it declined for the top 1% of capital income receivers. A gender decomposition demonstrates that the association of wage and capital incomes at the top is particularly striking for men, whilst women are largely under-represented in the top halves of the two marginal distributions.     

Synthetic double sampling s chart

This study proposes a synthetic double sampling s chart that integrates the double sampling (DS) s chart and the conforming run length chart. An optimization procedure is proposed to compute the optimal parameters of the synthetic DS s chart. The performance of the synthetic DS s chart is compared with other existing control charts for monitoring process standard deviation. The results show that the synthetic DS s chart is more effective for detecting increases in the process standard deviation for a wide range of shifts. An example is provided to illustrate the operation procedure of the synthetic DS s chart.