Processes Linking Social Class and Racial Socialization in African American Dual-Earner Families

We examined the links between social class, occupational self-direction, self-efficacy, and racial socialization in a sample of 128 two-parent African American couples raising adolescents. A series of multivariate, multilevel models revealed that mothers' SES was connected to self-efficacy via its association with occupational self-direction; in turn, self-efficacy partially explained the association between occupational self-direction and racial socialization. The link between maternal self-efficacy and racial socialization depended on whether or not children had experienced discrimination. For fathers, a strong link between SES and occupational self-direction emerged, but significant associations were not found between occupational self-direction and self-efficacy, or self-efficacy and racial socialization. The discussion focuses on mother-father differences and the role of child effects in racial socialization.     

Do Positive Feelings Hurt? Disaggregating Positive and Negative Components of Intergenerational Ambivalence

Ambivalence has become an important conceptual development in the study of parent–adult child relations, with evidence highlighting that intergenerational relationships are characterized by a mix of positive and negative components. Recent studies have shown that ambivalence has detrimental consequences for both parents' and adult children's psychological well‐being. The underlying assumption of this line of research is that psychological distress results from holding simultaneous positive and negative feelings toward a parent or child. The authors question this assumption and explore alternative interpretations by disaggregating the positive and negative dimensions commonly used to create indirect measures of intergenerational ambivalence. Data for the analyses were collected from 254 older mothers and a randomly selected adult child from each of the families. The findings suggest that the negative component is primarily responsible for the association between indirect measures of ambivalence and psychological well‐being. Implications of these findings for the study of intergenerational ambivalence are discussed.     

Maternal Antecedents to Adolescent Girls’ Neural Regulation of Emotion

The purpose of this study was to investigate contributions of maternal emotional resources to individual differences in adolescents’ functional connectivity during emotion regulation. Participants included 35 adolescent girls who completed an implicit emotion regulation task during fMRI. Mothers reported on the quality of their adult attachment and emotional awareness when youth were in elementary school. Higher anxious attachment and lower emotional awareness were significantly correlated with more positive amygdala–right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex connectivity, a pattern linked in prior research with ineffective emotion regulation and emotional difficulties. Further, there was an indirect effect of anxious attachment on adolescent connectivity through emotional awareness. These results suggest that compromised maternal emotional resources in childhood may be linked to atypical neural processing of emotions.     

A pilot evaluation of older adolescents' sexual reference displays on Facebook

Many older adolescents display sexual references on their social networking site profiles; this study investigated whether these references were associated with self-reported sexual intention, sexual experience, or risky sexual behavior. Public Facebook profiles of undergraduate freshmen were identified within 1 large U.S. university Facebook network. Profile owners who displayed sexual references (Displayers) and did not display references (Non-Displayers) were invited to complete surveys. Surveys measured sexual intention, using the Postponing Sexual Intercourse (PSI) scale, and sexual experiences. A higher PSI score was inversely related to intention to initiate sexual intercourse. Of the 118 profiles that met inclusion criteria, 85 profile owners completed surveys. Profile owners were mostly female (56.5%) and Caucasian (67.1%). The mean PSI score for Displayers was 6.5?±?1.6, and the mean PSI score for Non-Displayers was 10.2?±?0.6 (p?=?.02). There were no differences between Displayers and Non-Displayers regarding lifetime prevalence of sexual behavior, number of sexual partners, or frequency of condom use. Display of sexual references on college freshmen's Facebook profiles was positively associated with reporting intention to initiate sexual intercourse. Facebook profiles may present an innovative cultural venue to identify adolescents who are considering sexual activity and may benefit from targeted educational messages.     

"It Was Basically College to Us": Poverty, Prison, and Emerging Adulthood

With the tremendous rise in the United States' incarceration rates over the last four decades, historically high numbers of young African Americans are spending their "emerging adulthood" (as theorized by Arnett) in close contact with the penitentiary. In contrast to the exploration of future possibilities facilitated by academic, military, and professional institutions geared toward people in this life stage, imprisonment typically restricts one's social, occupational, and civic opportunities during and after confinement. In this article, I draw on in-depth interviews with young men who had recently exited state prison and their intimate partners to probe the meanings of incarceration for emerging adults in the neoliberal era. This investigation invokes Merton and Barber's concept of sociological ambivalence, Blankenship's discussion of sociological thriving, and Bourdieu's notion of amor fati to analyze the paradoxically positive accounts offered by young people when describing their early experiences with the prison. I argue that these narratives must be interpreted in the broader context of diminished social welfare and intensified socioeconomic disadvantage that force poor people to turn to a punitive institution as a "resource" for the social goods distributed through valorized channels to their more privileged peers. This analysis invites further research by highlighting the necessity of developing a thorough understanding of the dominant role of the prison as a shaping institution at a critical juncture in the lives of those born into poverty.