Mother-infant emotional availability through the COVID-19 pandemic: Examining continuity,stability, and bidirectional associations

The COVID-19 pandemic may impact the development of infants' social communication patterns with their caregivers. The current study examined continuity, stability, and bidirectional associations in maternal and infant dyadic Emotional Availability (EA) before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants were 110 Israeli mother-infant dyads (51% girls) that were assessed prior to (Mage = 3.5 months) and during (Mage = 12.4 months) the pandemic. At both time points, mother-infant interactions were observed during play (nonstressful context) and tasks designed to elicit infant frustration (stressful context). Maternal and child EA were coded offline. Maternal EA demonstrated no significant mean-level changes from before to during the COVID-19 pandemic, whereas infant responsiveness and involvement increased over time. Stability and bidirectional associations in EA differed by context and were evident only in the stressful context. Mothers' perceived levels of social support further moderated these associations. Specifically, infants' pre-pandemic responsiveness and involvement predicted maternal EA during the pandemic only when mothers reported low levels of social support. Our findings suggest that maternal and child EA were not adversely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, patterns of EA demonstrated moderate-to-no stability over time, suggesting considerable individual differences in trajectories of EA.     

The beneficial effects of different types of exercise interventions on motor and cognitive functions in older age: a systematic review

The decline in cognitive and motor functions with age affects the performance of the aging healthy population in many daily life activities. Physical activity appears to mitigate this decline or even improve motor and cognitive abilities in older adults. The current systematic review will focus mainly on behavioral studies that look into the dual effects of different types of physical training (e.g., balance training, aerobic training, strength training, group sports, etc.) on cognitive and motor tasks in older adults with no known cognitive or motor disabilities or disease. Our search retrieved a total of 1095 likely relevant articles, of which 41 were considered for full-text reading and 19 were included in the review after the full-text reading. Overall, observations from the 19 included studies conclude that improvements on both motor and cognitive functions were found, mainly in interventions that adopt physical-cognitive training or combined exercise training. While this finding advocates the use of multimodal exercise training paradigms or interventions to improve cognitive-motor abilities in older adults, the sizeable inconsistency among training protocols and endpoint measures complicates the generalization of this finding.     

Nonstandard Work and Marital Instability: Evidence From the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth

This article replicated and extended Harriet Presser's (2000) investigation of the linkages between nonstandard work and marital instability. We reexplored this question using data from a sample of 2,893 newlywed couples from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and using different analytic techniques. In contrast to Presser, we found that the key dimension of husbands' and wives' employment was nonemployment. Similar to Presser, we found that wives' working of fixed night shifts increased the risk of divorce, driven by the experience in marriages over 5 years in duration. However, we did not replicate Presser's finding that the effect is significant only among households with children; rather, wives' fixed night shifts were associated with divorce only among those without children.     

Tests of odds ratio homogeneity with improved power in sparse fourfold tables

Some new tests of odds ratio homogeneity for fourfold tables are compared with the mixture model score test in the sparse-data case (many tables, small margins per table). Based on general empirical Bayes inequalities, the new tests have competitive power for 1:R matched designs, and superior power for more balanced designs.     

Self-Care—New Challenge to Individual Health

Abstract

We are beginning to recognize that further improvements in health care are best achieved through the development of the lay resource in health in contrast to the professional resource. Recent research has shown that the vast proportion of health care still remains in the hands of lay people, and that efforts aimed at improving this resource can have a powerful effect on health and the health care industry. It is important now that health professionals recognize a new public interest in demystifying medicine and deprofessionalizing health care.

With this increased recognition we can begin the road back to establishing a health competent society, less dependent on unnecessary professional intrusion. We can also look forward to a broader-based perspective on health and health care, which may very well involve new concepts of health that are at variance with present professional views and practices. We can also expect to achieve a new level of equity in responsibility for the production of health care as well as its consumption.     

Seasonality of Sexual Debut

This study brings together insights from two bodies of scholarship that have heretofore existed as parallel research literatures, namely, research on the social antecedents of sexual debut and scholarship on the seasonality of coital activity. The authors use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to discover two seasonal peaks in the reported onset of first intercourse, one in the early summertime months for adolescents in general (the summer effect) and another during December for romantically involved adolescents (the holiday season effect). The authors explore the social contours of these patterns by analyzing the effects of gender, race, and partner relationship context (romantic vs. nonromantic) on each peak. Summertime debuts typically occur between nonromantic partners, and wintertime debuts typically occur between romantic partners.     

Will It Help? Identifying Socialization Discourses That Promote Sexual Risk and Sexual Health Among African American Youth

Because much of the existing research examining sexual communication to African American youth focuses on demographic and parental factors predicting sexual risk behaviors, less is known about factors predicting sexual health, and little is understood about the contributions of peer communications. The current study aimed to expand existing approaches by assessing which socialization discourses communicated by parents and peers contribute to sexual risk and health outcomes (sexual assertiveness, positive sexual affect, and condom self-efficacy). Participants were 631 African American undergraduates (73% female) who indicated the extent to which they had received from their parents and peers each of 28 messages representing four cultural discourses: abstinence, relational sex, sex positive, and gendered sexual roles. As expected, parents were perceived to emphasize relational sex and abstinence messages more than peers, and peers were perceived to communicate sex-positive and gendered sex role messages more than parents. Greater exposure to abstinence messages predicted lower levels of sexual experimentation, whereas exposure to sex-positive messages predicted higher levels. In addition, exposure to relational sex and sex-positive messages predicted higher levels of sexual assertiveness and positive sexual affect. Implications are discussed concerning sexual communications that could help Black youth develop healthy sexual perspectives.     

Religion and Mental Health Among Israeli Jews: Findings from the SHARE-Israel Study

This study investigates the impact of religiousness on mental health indicators in a population sample of Israeli Jews aged 50 or older. Data are from the Israel sample of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE-Israel), collected from 2005 to 2006. Of the 1,287 Jewish respondents, 473 (36.8 %) were native-born Israelis and 814 (63.2 %) were diaspora-born. Religious measures included past-month synagogue activities, current prayer, and having received a religious education. Mental health outcomes included single-item measures of lifetime depression and life satisfaction, along with the CES-D and EURO-D depression scales, the CASP-12 quality of life scale, and the LOT-R optimism scale. Participation in synagogue activities was found to be significantly associated with less depression, better quality of life, and more optimism, even after adjusting for effects of the other religious measures, for sociodemographic covariates, for the possibly confounding effect of age-related activity limitation, and for nativity. Findings for prayer were less consistent, including inverse associations with mental health, perhaps reflecting prayer’s use as a coping response. Finally, religious education was associated with greater optimism. These results underscore a modest contribution of religious participation to well-being among middle-aged and older adults, extending this research to the Israeli and Jewish populations.