ISSN : 1229-0718
This study examined the extent to which dispositional traits within the Big Five and the adult developmental construct of generativity are associated with aging anxiety in midlife adults. Four hundred and ten midlife adults participated in the survey. Hierarchical regression analyses confirmed that the Big Five personality significantly predicted aging anxiety after controlling demographical variables; generativity significantly predicted aging anxiety after controlling for demographic variables and the Big Five personality traits. And Our analysis showed that generativity was the strongest predictor for aging anxiety. Moreover, neuroticism was the most significant predictor among the Big Five personality traits. Discussion focuses on Future directions for research and interventions to reduce aging anxiety in midlife were discussed.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between marital satisfaction, life satisfaction, and care for a spouse in middle-aged married couples. Eighty-two husbands and wives were asked to rate their degrees of care for their spouse and of their expectation for desired care by their spouse, using 27 components of care. The results can be summarized as follows: first, there was no difference between husbands and wives in the degree of care for a spouse. However, there was a difference in the degree of expectation for desired care; wives had higher expectations of care than did husbands. An examination of husbands and wives’ care for each other revealed that both husbands and wives cared for a spouse less than they desired to be cared by their spouse. The results from the regression analysis demonstrated that, for husbands, their care for their wives and their desired degree of care affected marital satisfaction. Meanwhile, for wives, marital satisfaction was affected not only by their care for their husbands and their desired degree of care, but also by the husbands’ care for their wives and desired degree of care. In terms of life satisfaction, for husbands, only their care for their wives affected their satisfaction; whereas for wives, their satisfaction was affected by care for their husbands and their husbands’ care for them.
This study investigated the development of children’s reasoning about the temporal order of past and future events and its relationship to the executive function. Ninety 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children were given two reasoning tasks and three tasks that measured three aspects of executive function: inhibitory control, working memory and switching. 1) For the temporal-reasoning task, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children succeeded in the task that involved reasoning about the order of past events; whereas only 5-year-old children were successful in the future reasoning task. 2) For the event order tasks, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children did not succeed in the past events task, and only 5-year-old children succeeded in the future task. 3) Children’s performance in tasks that involved future events were not related to their performance in tasks that involved past events in both reasoning tasks. 4) Reasoning about the temporal order of past events indicated a significant positive relationship to switching, even when age and comprehension of the word ‘before’ and ‘after’ were taken into account. On the contrary, reasoning about future events was related to none of the three aspects of executive function.
The current research investigated whether 12-month-old infants can predict the goals of others' pointing actions before the onset of the actions. Infants participated in three types of trials: familiarization, pretest-display, and test trials. In the two-object condition, infants watched an actor repeatedly point to one of two objects during familiarization trials. During the pretest-display trial, the locations of the two objects were switched. During the test trial, the actor simply sat between the objects. The procedure for the one-object condition was identical except that there was only one object during the familiarization trials. In the two-object condition, the infants who could produce pointing actions looked longer at the prior-goal object than at the non-prior-goal object; whereas infants in the one-object condition did not. The current findings demonstrated that 12-month-old infants could anticipate an actor's goal using information regarding the goal of previous pointing actions.
The purpose of this study was to examine direct and indirect effects of empathic parenting on school adjustment. A total of 413 middle school students (247 boys and 166 girls) responded to questions regarding their perceptions of their parents’ empathic parenting, their own empathy, and school adjustment. First, empathic parenting had a direct effect on adolescents’ school adjustment. Adolescents who perceived higher levels of empathic parenting exhibited higher levels of school adjustment. Second, empathic parenting had an indirect effect on school adjustment through adolescents’ empathy. Adolescents who perceived higher levels of empathic parenting demonstrated higher levels of empathy, and adolescents who reported higher levels of empathy demonstrated better school adjustment. Finally, multi-group analyses revealed that there were significant gender differences in both direct and indirect pathways from empathic parenting to adolescents’ school adjustment. These findings suggest that both environmental and individual factors need to be considered together to explain the school adjustment of adolescents.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between coping strategies and college life adjustment in relation to self-esteem and self-compassion in college freshmen. The SACQ, COPE, RSES, and SCS were administered to 264 college freshmen. The results can be summarized as follows: self-esteem and self-compassion demonstrated differential effects on freshmen's coping strategies and college life adjustment. First, self-esteem had strong effects on problem-focused coping and avoidant coping strategies; while, self-compassion had a powerful impact on the reduction of negative emotions and seeking social support as coping strategies. Second, results from the regression analysis regarding the effects of self-esteem and self-compassion on college life adjustment indicated that self-esteem strongly affected most components of college life adjustment, but self-compassion affected only the personal-emotional adjustment. Path analysis suggested self-esteem directly influenced college life adjustment, and self-compassion directly influenced personal-emotional adjustment. The role of self-compassion as a regulator of negative emotion was discussed.
Successful word learning requires retaining a newly learned connection between the label and the referent, as well as mapping of the referent to the label. Prior research has demonstrated that unlike their impressive mapping abilities, 2-year-olds display a great deal of difficulty in retaining newly learned referent-label associations, even after a 5-minute delay between mapping and retention tasks. The present study examined whether watching adults interact with the target referent during mapping can help Korean-learning 2-year-olds to retain newly mapped words after a 5-minute delay. Eleven 2-year-olds with very low scores on an earlier retention task scored much higher in the retention test when they mapped the novel words after watching two adults interact with the referent object. Furthermore, the child’s attention level was rated higher during the mapping task with a social interaction cue than during mapping without a social cue. These results suggest that adults’ interactions with the target referent help direct and maintain the child’s attention to the target referent, and this facilitates the retention of newly mapped words among young word learners.