Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Displaying selective attachment behaviours is an important developmental milestone for children with severe or profound intellectual disabilities (SPID). In the current study, between-child differences in their selective emotional responses to comfort provided by parents versus strangers were observed. We explored links between these differences and parental sensitivity and motor competence. A home-based experimental observation was conducted in 38 parent-child dyads, exposing children to four naturalistic stressors and to comfort provided by either their parents or a stranger. Emotional behaviour (arousal and valence) was micro-coded and differentiation variables were constructed, reflecting the children’s level of differentiation between the parent and the stranger. Parental sensitivity was coded using the Emotional Availability Scales. Results showed that these children’s differentiated responses to comfort were related to children’s motor competencies (particularly their fine motor skills), but not to parental sensitivity. This study shows the need to go beyond sensitivity to understand individual differences in the most basal aspects of attachment for children with SPID.

Bullying is a public health issue that persists and occurs across several contexts. In this narrative review, we highlight issues and challenges in addressing bullying prevention. Specifically, we discuss issues related to defining, measuring, and screening for bullying. These include discrepancies in the interpretation and measurement of power imbalance, repetition of behavior, and perceptions of the reporter. The contexts of bullying, both within and outside of the school setting (including the online environment), are raised as an important issue relevant for identification and prevention. The role of medical professionals in screening for bullying is also noted. Prevention and intervention approaches are reviewed, and we highlight the need and evidence for social architectural interventions that involve multiple stakeholders, including parents, in these efforts. Areas in need are identified, such as understanding and intervening in cyberbullying, working more specifically with perpetrators as a heterogeneous group, and providing more intensive interventions for the most vulnerable youth who remain at risk despite universal prevention efforts.

This study examined the moderating role of intolerance of uncertainty (IU) in the association between narcissism (i.e., grandiose, vulnerable, psychopathic) and aggression (i.e., proactive, reactive). The sample consisted of 310 participants, ages 18 to 30. Consistent with previous research, the three dimensions of narcissism were associated with both functions of aggression. Additionally, IU significantly moderated the relations of vulnerable and psychopathic narcissism with proactive aggression such that the highest aggression was endorsed among participants with high levels of narcissism and IU. The same pattern was evident for self-reported IU in social situations when overall IU was controlled. These findings indicate that IU can affect the relation between narcissism and proactive aggression.

It is generally agreed that concept learning involves the abstraction of some general representation or schema. Just what is abstracted, however, and how it is used in the classification of sets of stimuli in the natural world or in the laboratory, remain outstanding questions. In this paper a hypothesis involving contingency abstraction is described as a possible solution to these questions. An experiment which manipulated measured contingency in a concept-learning task, and which offered empirical support for the hypothesis, is reported. The advantages of a contingency-abstraction theory of concept learning are briefly discussed.

Although previous studies have demonstrated that appearance plays an important role in the avoidance of social contact among adolescent girls, the reasons for this remain unclear. The purpose of the study was to investigate this issue from the perspective of objectification theory. We investigated self-objectification, appearance comparison, self-esteem, and social avoidance among 262 Chinese middle adolescent girls (Mage = 15.97 years, ranging from 14 to 17) living in Guangdong province, China. The results showed a positive correlation between self-objectification and social avoidance, which was further mediated by appearance comparison and self-esteem. Moreover, girls with high levels of self-objectification were more likely to compare their appearance to others, which in turn, was linked to lower self-esteem, and subsequently correlated with greater social avoidance. These findings suggest that self-objectification may adversely influence adolescent girls’ interpersonal well-being. Based on our results, interventions addressing social avoidance among adolescent girls may include reducing self-objectification, decreasing appearance comparison, and improving self-esteem. The findings of the present study provide a better understanding of the negative consequences of self-objectification by incorporating social avoidance.

Bullying victimization has several consequences for the psychological well-being of marginalized people, including body dysmorphic concerns and paranoid ideation, a relatively stable way of thinking characterized by suspiciousness and mistrust of others. Men who have sex with men (MSM) report a greater risk of homophobic bullying victimization (HBV), and previous research has indicated that MSM face a higher risk of body dysmorphic concerns, particularly in reference to their muscles. The aim of this study is to examine the association between HBV and muscle dysmorphic concerns in a sample of MSM, and to test the hypothesis that paranoid ideation mediates the association between HBV and muscle dysmorphic concerns. The sample consisted of 270 Italian-speaking MSM aged 18–64 years (M = 34.3; SD = 11.4). We administered an anonymous online questionnaire to collect data about sociodemographics, previous HBV experiences, muscle dysmorphic concerns and paranoid ideation using internationally validated instruments. Our results suggest that HBV positively predicts both higher levels of paranoid ideation and muscle dysmorphic preoccupation. Moreover, the results indicate that paranoid ideation is a mediator of the relationship between HBV and MD. Implications for research and clinical practice are discussed.

This study investigates the mediating and moderating effects of loneliness on the link between social support and life satisfaction among empty nesters. The data are collected from 1424 empty nesters (973 males and 451 females) from 16 randomly selected rural villages in western China. Pearson correlations suggest that social support is significantly correlated with life satisfaction. More importantly, a mediational analysis indicates that loneliness partly mediated the relationship between social support and life satisfaction. Additionally, hierarchical regression analysis for testing the moderating effect shows that loneliness also serves as a moderator in the relationship between social support and life satisfaction. These findings provide a more comprehensive understanding of overall mental health among empty nesters.

Previous studies of multiple object tracking suggested that spatiotemporal features (e.g., speed, direction, location) and surface features (e.g., color, shape, size) can guide perceptual grouping. However, it is still unclear how target-distractor distinctiveness and target-background similarity affect grouping effects in attentive tracking. To address these two questions, three experiments have been carried out in the current study. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the target-distractor distinctiveness and found that tracking performance logarithmically improved when the target-distractor distinctiveness linearly increased. In Experiment 2a and 2b, we varied the target-background similarity and found that too high or too low target-background similarity damaged the tracking performance, while only the middle target-background similarity resulted in the best tracking performance. These findings reveal that not only target-distractor distinctiveness but also target-background similarity plays a vital role in guiding the attention of perceptual grouping in attentive tracking. The guidance induced by target-distractor distinctiveness is constrained by the spatial resolution, while the guidance induced by target-background similarity is constrained by the efficiency of object segmentation. Additionally, our results showed that tracking capacity varied with the target-distractor distinctiveness and the target-background similarity, even though the number of targets being tracked was fixed. It suggests that there may be a trade-off between the difficulty of tracking and the number of targets that can be tracked. Thus, tracking capacity is more likely to be limited by the flexible attention resources rather than the number of fixed slots.

Threat-based awe such as those elicited by natural disasters could also elicit a sense of a small self as positive awe did, further promoting prosociality. Inspired by this finding and research on sense of global community, we intended to examine the potential mediating roles of sense of a small self and sense of global community in the relation between natural disaster-elicited awe and willingness to help people in afflicted areas. Six hundred and eighty undergraduate students in their first year (Mage = 18.52) were conveniently chosen as participants. After viewing a 4-min video successively displaying four types of natural disasters (i.e., earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunami, typhoon) with their massive destruction, participants reported on items regarding their feelings of awe over the disasters, sense of a small self, sense of global community, and their willingness to help people in the disaster-stricken areas. Results indicated that all the direct paths and indirect paths in the hypothesized meditational model were significant, suggesting that temporary disaster-induced awe might produce a self-diminishing effect and enhance people’s sense of global community, which finally enhance their willingness to help people in the disaster-stricken areas.