Memory decline is a concern for aging populations across the globe. Positive affect plays an important role in healthy aging, but its link with memory decline has remained unclear. In the present study, we examined associations between positive affect (i.e., feeling enthusiastic, attentive, proud, active) and memory (i.e., immediate and delayed…

Numerous event-related potential (ERP) studies have examined adults' neural responses to child emotional expressions to understand the neurobiological mechanisms contributing to caregiving. It is unclear, however, whether one emotion evokes an enhanced response across components, and whether this pattern differs based on parent status or other…

Caregivers' sensitive responses to infant cry have long-term consequences for adaptive child development. Although mounting evidence suggests that parents who experience high emotionality to infant cry respond less sensitively to infant cry, there is a dearth of knowledge on potential mechanisms underlying individual differences in emotionality to…

Background: Intellectual disability research has concentrated on self-reported explicit attitudes with little focus on implicit attitudes. Such attitudes are evaluations which occur with or without conscious awareness, respectively. This investigation examined participants' (N = 234) attitudes towards individuals with intellectual disabilities…

Compassion is known to predict prosocial behavior and moral judgments related to harm. Despite the centrality of compassion to social life, factors predicting adulthood compassion are largely unknown. We examined whether qualities of parent-child-relationship, namely, emotional warmth and acceptance, predict offspring compassion decades later in…

This study investigated age differences in longitudinal effects of volunteering on three facets of subjective well-being (SWB), i.e. positive affect (PA), negative affect (NA), and life satisfaction (LS). Both direct and indirect effects with self-efficacy as mediator were tested. Longitudinal structural equation modeling was used on 5,564…

This study examined gender differences in responses to sexual coercive experiences in mixed-sex (male-female) relationships. Participants were 112 women and 28 men who had experienced sexual coercion and completed measures of cognitive (attributions to self, attributions to the coercer, internal attributions) and affective (guilt, shame)…

Objective: Cardiovascular reactivity to laboratory stressors was investigated as (a) a moderator of associations of partner aggression with affective functioning, alcohol problems, and parenting; and (b) a consequence of partner aggression. Method: Cohabiting adult couples (N = 453) with 3- to 7-year-old children were recruited by random digit…

Studies of education and childhood studies in general tend to focus on the experiences and cultures of toddlers and school-age children. The experiences and cultures of babies and infants are often excluded from the scope of the studies of children. In Gilles Deleuze's (and Felix Guattari's) thinking, a child, and especially a baby or an infant,…

In adulthood, twice as many women as men are depressed, a pattern that holds in most nations. In childhood, girls are no more depressed than boys, but more girls than boys are depressed by ages 13 to 15. Although many influences on this emergent gender difference in depression have been proposed, a truly integrated, developmental model is lacking.…

Objective: To analyze sex differences among adult, never-treated patients referred for central stimulant treatment of ADHD. Method: Data for 600 consecutive patients from northern Norway referred for evaluation by an expert team during 7 years were analyzed. General background information, diagnostic and social history, and symptom profiles were…

The ACT Against Violence Parents Raising Safe Kids program (ACT-PRSK) is an interactive violence prevention program developed by the American Psychological Association for parents of young children. The program teaches and supports parents in the areas of child development, roots and consequences of violence, anger management for adults and…

A sample of 196 participants (mean age 45.94 years, 54% women) completed inventories assessing upward and downward positive and negative social comparisons and general well-being. Widows and widowers were higher on upward negative comparisons than divorced or married persons while being lower on well-being measures of life satisfaction and…

We examine affective closeness, contact, and helping among adult siblings using data for over 1,500 respondents in 2-child families from the National Survey of Families and Households. Using this subsample allows us to investigate differences by gender of respondent and of individual siblings using a nationally representative sample. We find that…

Using daily telephone interviews, 82 midlife parents (mean age = 57.4) of children with disabilities (mean age = 29.9) were compared with a closely matched sample of unaffected parents (N = 82) to elucidate the daily experience of non-normative parenting. In addition, salivary cortisol samples were obtained to examine whether parents of children…