Overestimating Self-Blame for Stressful Life Events and Adolescents’ Latent Trait Cortisol: The Moderating Role of Parental Warmth

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Cognitive interpretations of stressful events impact their implications for physiological stress processes. However, whether such interpretations are related to...     

Size matters: the need for human-scale economic institutions for development

Current mainstream development thinking, with the exception of a few areas like microcredit, tends to favour size over substance. This article aims to challenge the belief that large-scale companies, markets, and institutions are the most effective means of ‘delivering development’. We argue that, by designing institutions to meet different needs at different scales, long-term sustainable development outcomes are more likely. Through an analysis of ‘new economics’ thinking, we look specifically at how the concept of subsidiarity could be applied to development thinking at the community and business levels, and we draw on some examples of where the concept is already manifest in practice, such as energy and commodity production.     

Exposure to Interparental Violence and Childhood Physical and Emotional Abuse as Related to Physical Aggression in Undergraduate Dating Relationships

The present study examined whether witnessing interparental violence and experiencing childhood physical or emotional abuse were associated with college students’ perpetration of physical aggression and self-reports of victimization by their dating partners. Participants (183 males, 475 females) completed the Adult-Recall Version of the Revised Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS2-CA; Straus 2000), the Exposure to Abusive and Supportive Environments Parenting Inventory (EASE-PI; Nicholas and Bieber 1997), and the Revised Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS2; Straus et al. 1996). Results of zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) regressions demonstrated that being female and having experienced higher levels of childhood physical abuse were associated with having perpetrated physical aggression at least once. Among women, exposure to mother-to-father violence and childhood physical abuse were related to the extent of dating aggression. Among men, witnessing father-to-mother violence and childhood emotional abuse were associated with the extent of dating aggression. Witnessing interparental violence and experiencing childhood physical abuse increased the likelihood that women would report victimization, whereas childhood emotional abuse decreased the likelihood that respondents reported dating victimization. Viewing father-to-mother violence and experiencing childhood emotional abuse increased the extent that men reported being victimized by their dating partners, whereas witnessing mother-to-father violence and experiencing physical abuse decreased the extent that men reported being victimized by their dating partners. Results suggest the importance of parent and respondent gender on dating aggression.     

Early Life Socioeconomic Disparities in Children’s Sleep: The Mediating Role of the Current Home Environment

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Despite identified concurrent socioeconomic disparities in children’s sleep, little research has examined pathways explaining such associations. This study...     

Susceptibility of Current Adaptive Behavior Measures to Feigned Deficits

The current study examined the susceptibility of the Adaptive Behavior Assessment System—2nd edition (ABAS-II; Harrison & Oakland, 2003) and the Scales of Independent Behavior—Revised (S1B-R; Bruininks, Woodcock, Weatherman, & Hill, 1996) to the feigning of adaptive functioning deficits. Using four different instruction sets, the authors evaluated whether the provision of diagnostic information (a form of coaching) improved participants’ ability to simulate adaptive deficits commensurate with a diagnosis of mental retardation. The authors found that the ABAS-II was quite vulnerable to believable manipulation by raters, while the SIB-R was not. In fact, exaggeration on the SIB-R was easily detected regardless of the information provided. Implications regarding the use of these measures in Atkins mental retardation evaluations are discussed.

Individual and Day-to-Day Differences in Active Coping Predict Diurnal Cortisol Patterns among Early Adolescent Girls

Prior work has identified alterations in activity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis as a potential mechanism underlying stress-induced emotional health problems, which disproportionately impact girls beginning in mid-adolescence. How adolescent girls differ from one another in dispositional coping tendencies and shift specific coping strategies in response to varying stressors have been theorized as important predictors of their adaptation, health, and well-being during this dynamic period of development. The goal of this study was to examine whether individual and day-to-day (within-person) differences in adolescent girls’ coping responses are associated with daily patterns of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activity, indexed by cortisol. Participants were 122 early adolescent girls (M _age?=?12.39) who provided three saliva samples per day for 3 days and completed daily coping reports, as well as a standard coping survey. Participants and primary caregivers also completed objective life stress interviews. On average, girls who were more likely to respond to interpersonal stress with voluntary engagement (active) coping exhibited generally adaptive daily physiological regulation—steeper diurnal cortisol slopes, lower total diurnal cortisol output, and lower cortisol awakening responses. Chronic interpersonal stress level significantly moderated these associations in different ways for two distinct components of the diurnal pattern—the slope and cortisol awakening responses. Regarding within-person differences, using active coping more than usual was associated with higher waking cortisol the following morning, which may help to prepare adolescent girls for perceived daily demands. These findings highlight the interactive influence of stress and coping in the prediction of daily hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activity and support the stress-buffering role of active coping for adolescent girls.