How Mothers Encourage and Discourage Infants' Motor Actions

The content of mothers' emotional, verbal, and gestural communication to their infants was examined under conditions of potential physical risk in a laboratory motor task. Mothers encouraged and discouraged their 12‐ and 18‐month‐old infants to crawl or walk down a sloping walkway. Mothers expressed positive affect on nearly every trial. They rarely expressed purely negative affect in their faces and voices, even when discouraging. Instead, they discouraged infants with a mixture of positive and negative expressions. In both encourage and discourage conditions, mothers coupled their emotional messages with rich verbal and gestural information to elicit infants' attention, regulate their location, guide their actions, and describe the situation and potential consequences of their actions. The content of mothers' communication was attuned to infants' age and locomotor experience.     

Indiscriminate,Irrelevant, and Sometimes Wrong: Causal Misconceptions about Climate Change

Prior research demonstrates widespread persistence of beliefs about climate change causes and risks that are arguably misconceptions. They include believing pollution causes climate change, believing ozone depletion causes climate change, the combination of these two “green beliefs,” referred to as environmental problems, and believing natural climate variation significantly contributes to current climate trends. Each of these causal beliefs has the potential to weaken or divert support away from effective climate change risk mitigation policies. To assess this potential, we explore the nature and prevalence of these beliefs in the United States with a national sample of interviews (N = 77) and two national surveys (N = 1,013, N = 1,820), and apply regression and mediation analyses to explore whether they explain any of the variation in individuals’ concern or support for policy to mitigate climate change. Adherence to these beliefs—which reflect a variety of misconceptions illustrated in the interviews—differs by political ideology but is common, with over a third of interviewees mentioning one or more. Controlling for general knowledge, political ideology, and other factors, misconceptions about environmental problems are still associated directly with support for climate change policies. On average adherence to the belief that environmental problems cause climate change is associated with a 25% higher probability of policy support. In contrast, believing natural climate variability is a major recent cause of climate change is associated with a 7% lower probability of supporting climate policy, even after controlling for political ideology and other knowledge about climate change.     

Dads Tuning in to Kids: A randomized controlled trial of an emotion socialization parenting program for fathers

Fathers play an important role in shaping their children’s emotional competence although most literature has focused on the influence of mothers. Dads Tuning in to Kids (Dads TIK) is a parenting program that teaches fathers to coach their children in learning about emotions, while also helping fathers increase awareness and regulation of their own emotions. A randomized controlled efficacy trial of Dads TIK was conducted with a community sample of 162 fathers of a 4‐year‐old child attending preschool in Melbourne, Australia. Those allocated to the intervention attended a seven‐session manualized group program. Questionnaires were completed by fathers, the fathers’ partners and the children’s teachers at baseline and 6‐month follow‐up. Results were that fathers in the intervention condition but not control condition reported significant increases in emotion socialization, parenting satisfaction and efficacy, and reductions in their children’s difficult behaviors. Partners of fathers in the intervention condition reported reductions in their own emotion dismissing parenting and improvements in psychological well‐being. Partners and teachers reported significant improvements in children’s behavior across both intervention and control conditions. These findings suggest a father‐focused program appears to lead to changes in fathers’ emotion socialization skills that may have benefits for partners’ functioning and children’s behavior.     

Resolution of Delusional Parasitosis within Complicated Grief Group Therapy: A Case Analysis

In this article, the authors present the case of a 71-year-old female suicide survivor in our Complicated Grief Group Therapy research study who presented with delusional parasitosis (DP) that resolved over the course of treatment. The authors describe Complicated Grief Group Therapy for survivors of suicide and the effect of therapy on her DP symptoms. The unique treatment elements of Complicated Grief Group Therapy addressed the trauma features of her grief, her relationship with her deceased son, her social isolation, health care adherence, and progression to a healthy grief process.     

A screening tool for detecting eating disorder risk and diagnostic symptoms among college-age women

Objective: As eating disorders (EDs) often emerge during college, managing EDs would ideally integrate prevention and treatment. To achieve this goal, an efficient tool is needed that detects clinical symptoms and level of risk. This study evaluated the performance of a screen designed to identify individuals at risk for or with an ED. Participants: Five hundred forty-nine college-age women. Methods: Participants completed a screen and diagnostic interview. Results: Using parsimonious thresholds for ED diagnoses, screen sensitivity ranged from 0.90 (anorexia nervosa) to 0.55 (purging disorder). Specificity ranged from 0.99 (anorexia nervosa) to 0.78 (subthreshold binge eating disorder) compared to diagnostic interview. Moderate to high area under the curve values were observed. The screen had high sensitivity for detecting high risk. Conclusions: The screen identifies students at risk and has acceptable sensitivity and specificity for identifying most ED diagnoses. This tool is critical for establishing stepped care models for ED intervention.     

Family Structure Transitions and Changes in Maternal Resources and Well-being

This article uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine whether family instability is associated with changes in perceived social support, material hardship, maternal depression, and parenting stress among mothers of young children. In addition to accounting for the number of transitions that a mother experiences during the first five years of her child’s life, we pay close attention to the type and timing of these transitions. We find that mothers who transition to cohabitation or marriage with their child’s biological father experience declines in material hardship and that those who transition to cohabitation or marriage with another man exhibit modest declines in both material hardship and depression. Mothers who exit cohabiting or marital relationships encounter decreases in perceived social support and increases in material hardship, depression, and parenting stress. Overall, our results suggest that both the type and, to a much lesser degree, the timing of family structure transitions may influence maternal well-being.     

Exploring the role of experiential avoidance from the perspective of attachment theory and the dual process model

Avoidance can be adaptive and facilitate the healing process of acute grief or it can be maladaptive and hinder this same process. Maladaptive cognitive or behavioral avoidance comprises the central feature of the condition of complicated grief. This article explores the concept of experiential avoidance as it applies to bereavement, including when it is adaptive when it is problematic. Adaptive avoidance is framed using an attachment theory perspective and incorporates insights from the dual process model (DPM). An approach to clinical management of experiential avoidance in the syndrome of complicated grief is included.     

Evaluating leadership coaching: A review and integrated framework

Leadership coaching reflects an evolving dynamic between the client and coach that is qualitatively different from most approaches to leadership development and therefore holds particular challenges for evaluation. Based on reviews of academic and practitioner literatures, this paper presents an integrated framework of coaching evaluation that includes formative evaluations of the client, coach, client–coach relationship, and coaching process, as well as summative evaluations based on coaching outcomes. The paper also includes a quantitative synthesis examining evaluation methodologies in 49 leadership coaching studies. The results revealed that self-reported changes in clients' leadership behaviors are the most frequently assessed coaching outcome, followed by clients' perceptions of the effectiveness of coaching. Recommendations to advance coaching evaluation research include the creation of collaborative partnerships between the evaluation stakeholders (client, coach, client's organization, and coaching organization) to facilitate systematic formative evaluations, the collection of multi-source and multi-level data, and the inclusion of distal outcomes in evaluation plans.