Siblings of children with cancer encounter stressors and challenges that can lead to severe distress and a host of psychological difficulties. Factors including age, gender, and disease characteristics of the child with cancer are reported to influence sibling adjustment. The majority of research, however, is dated, inconsistent, and marred by methodological problems. Guided by the disability-stress-coping model, the study examined the: (a) frequency of sibling and parent reported symptoms of anxiety and depression, internalizing and externalizing behavior problems, and somatic problems, (b) influence of sibling, family, and disease factors on sibling adjustment, (c) moderating effects of age on the relationship between sibling factors and sibling adjustment, and (d) mediating effect of primary cognitive appraisal on the relationship between self-esteem and sibling adjustment. One hundred and eight siblings (7-17 years; 51 males; 57 females) participated. Siblings completed the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children and the Children’s Depression Inventory to provide measures of sibling reported symptoms of anxiety and depression. Parents completed the Child Behavior Checklist to provide measures of parent reported internalizing behavior problems, externalizing behavior problems, and somatic problems. The communication and intrapersonal thoughts and feelings subscales of the Sibling Perception Questionnaire, completed by siblings, were used to assess perceived social support and primary cognitive appraisal. Self-esteem was assessed with the global self-worth subscale of the Self Perception Profile for Children/Adolescents, completed by siblings. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to assess the direct and indirect effects of sibling, family, and disease factors on psychological outcomes. Siblings and parents reported higher incidents of clinically significant symptoms of anxiety, internalizing behavior problems, and somatic problems than expected in a normative population. Sibling age and gender, diagnosis of the child with cancer, social support, self-esteem, and primary cognitive appraisal were significantly associated with sibling and parent reported psychological adjustment measures. Age moderated the relationship between gender, social support, and primary cognitive appraisal and several adjustment outcomes. Lastly, primary cognitive appraisal partially mediated the relationship between self-esteem and sibling reported anxiety and depression symptoms. These findings highlight the need for sibling psychosocial interventions and provide direction for the development and implementation of such groups.

The study explores the experience of individuals who have lost a number of close people in their life, through death, over the course of their adult lifetime. Twelve individual interviews (11 women, 1 man) are presented in narrative form and explored for their content and meaning. The experience of multiple loss was revealed to be unique and varied for each participant and each loss was experienced independently from the others, concomitant on the relationship to the deceased, the nature and timing of the death and the relevance to the participant’s identity. Similar themes occurred across and within cases that are attributable to having lost a number of close others. Common effects were seen in participants’ experiential knowledge of grief and its vicissitudes, death and its processes, and life and its meaningfulness. Participants believed that their losses have had a profound effect on them, changing their lives immutably. Changes were perceived in terms of impact on the way they view the world, themselves and their relationships. Individuals perceived both positive and negative effects. Analogous with current research and theories in the field many of the participants reported experiencing personal growth as a result of their losses. The present study extends past research findings by attributing these effects to the accumulation of losses. A model for understanding the process of meaning-making in multiple loss was devised. Respondents were apt to process one death at a time, incorporate its meanings and effects on them, compare the effects to each other by contrasting the distinct experiences, and create a framework for meaning that was mutable. There were typical features of these meanings that were characteristic to the tone of the narrative. Stories of multiple loss tended to have an unresolved, a transformational or a growth related tone. An enhanced model of meaning- making in loss is described that augments current models of meaning-making in coping with loss. The implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed.

Commonly employed executive function measures may be of limited use due to their modest ecological validity. A novel task was developed - the Multitasking in the City Test (MCT) - in an attempt to improve ecological validity. The MCT involves task demands that resemble the demands of everyday activities. In study one, healthy participants were recruited in order to explore ‘normal’ performance on the MCT and its relationship with other cognitive measures. The MCT showed poor associations with executive tests and significant correlations with non-executive tests. This suggested the MCT may evaluate executive functioning in a different way from other executive measures such that it does not simply measure component executive processes but the integration of these components into meaningful behaviour. Patients with stroke and traumatic brain injury were recruited for study two to further explore the ecological validity and MCT performance characteristics. Only the MCT and a semantic fluency task demonstrated good ecological validity via significant relationships with a behavioural rating scale. Patients and normals made qualitatively similar types of errors although patients made these errors more frequently. Patients demonstrated better planning ability but completed fewer tasks than normals on the MCT. This discrepancy was attributed to impaired initiation. In study three, the MCT and verbal fluency tasks were administered to brain-injured individuals both pre- and post-executive function rehabilitation to evaluate their utility as treatment outcome measures and to assess ecological validity via a different behavioural rating scale from the one used in study two. Strategies trained during treatment generalized to MCT but not verbal fluency performance. Both MCT and semantic fluency performance were found to have good ecological validity. Overall, the findings from this research project suggest the MCT and semantic fluency tasks have good ecological validity. They further suggest that several common executive function measures lack adequate ecological validity and may not be predictive of real world behaviour. Moreover, these results support the concept of an executive function ‘system’ that can be fractionated into a variety of executive processes and that impairments in one process (e.g., initiation) can exist alongside intact functioning in other processes (e.g., planning).

Although several studies have demonstrated that differential parenting has a negative impact on the children exposed to it, only a small number of studies have attempted to understand why differential parenting occurs within families. The goal of the present study was to examine the contextual correlates of differential parenting. Specifically, the association between parental socioeconomic status (SES) and differential parenting and the association between objective and subjective indices of neighbourhood quality and differential parenting were investigated. Data were collected as part of the Kids, Families, and Places (KFP) study and analyzed using multilevel modeling. Six hundred and fifty families provided data on 881 children. Five hundred and ninety nine families included a father in the home. Close to seventy five percent of children included in the sample were less than six years of age. Differential parenting was assessed separately for mothers and fathers and across positive and negative parenting outcomes. The findings revealed that parental SES was significantly associated with differential parenting for three of four parenting outcomes. For mothers, SES was negatively associated with differential positivity and negativity. For fathers, SES was negatively associated with differential positivity but not negativity. The objective quality of neighbourhoods in which families resided (i.e., measured as a composite score that combined census tract data on neighbourhood disadvantage and interviewer observations of neighbourhood physical and social disorder) was positively associated with maternal differential negativity; however, this association was also moderated by mothers’ subjective perceptions of their neighbourhoods (i.e., measured using maternal reports of neighbourhood collective efficacy). In other words, when mothers perceived their neighbourhoods to be highly cohesive and supportive, exposure to objectively unfavourable neighbourhood conditions was less strongly associated with differential negativity. Objective neighbourhood quality was not associated with the other three differential parenting outcomes of interest. These findings highlight the important relationship that exists between contextual influences both within and outside of the immediate family and differential parenting. Moreover, they speak to the importance of including both mothers and fathers in studies of differential parenting. The merits of using multilevel modelling to investigate differential parenting and suggestions for future research are discussed.

In order to assist people in making positive changes of problematic behaviour it is necessary to examine how people change and what factors influence the process. Criminal offenders represent a group of individuals who often have difficulty desisting from problematic behaviour and continue to engage in illegal activity. Offenders in provincial correctional institutions were administered questionnaires to determine stage of change and processes utilized as outlined in the Transtheoretical Model (TTM) of change (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1984). Additionally, offenders were asked about their visions of the future using the Possible Selves (PSs) Model (Markus & Nurius, 1986). Taken together, this study looked at the contribution of the PSs Model to our understanding of the TTM, which has been criticized in recent years as lacking therapeutic significance for treatment providers as they guide individuals through the change process. More specifically, this study compares chronic criminals with first time offenders on psychological variables such as readiness for change, vision of possible selves, and hope for the future, as well as on legal variables such as risk for recidivism and institutional behaviour. The results indicate that most offenders acknowledged their behaviour as problematic and some even reported they were actively taking steps to change; however, chronic offenders admitted having less hope than first time offenders. Interestingly, both groups rated similarly on the dimensions of PSs. The outcomes would suggest that research efforts to incorporate other complimentary theories of change into the TTM, like the PSs model, may be helpful for understanding the process of change. While it seems these models may not be useful for predicting institutional behaviour, the data perhaps demonstrates the complexity of criminal behaviour and speaks to the necessity of further research in this population.

The purpose of this study was to explore protective factors that help women resist societal pressures for thinness. The present study used a qualitative life history methodology to examine the experiences of women who identified themselves as resilient to pressures to be thin and as liking their bodies regardless of size. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 women, ages 18 to 25, representing diverse social and ethno-cultural backgrounds and body physiques. In the interviews, the participants were inquired about their experiences related to anything they felt was helpful for them in developing a positive body image from childhood, adolescence, and to present day. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed for themes using constructivist grounded theory methodology. Data analysis was informed by the feminist theoretical approach, with attention paid to social and contextual factors. Three core categories emerged from the analysis, which included protective factors associated with participants’ experiences of identity, ways of inhabiting their bodies, and the nature of social influences in their lives. This research highlighted the women’s active role in maintaining a resilient stance in the face of pressures for thinness as well as the importance of social factors that assist them in this process.

The present study examined the claim that neuropsychological deficits in set-shifting and emotional decision making are present in eating disordered patients, and to what extent these deficits relate to specific aspects of disordered eating. Sixteen eating disordered patients and 38 controls were given a battery of neuropsychological measures, as well as questionnaires measuring disordered eating. Compared to controls, patients demonstrated poorer performance on tasks of set-shifting, but not decision making, psychomotor speed, working memory, or IQ. Across groups, poor set-shifting was correlated with food-, shape-, and weight concerns, and restricting, whereas poor decision making was correlated to restricting. The study demonstrates that set-shifting deficits are present in eating disordered patients, and that specific relations exist between cognitive performance in different domains and disordered eating.

Behavioural symptoms, cognitive deficits, and findings from electrophysiological, neuroimaging and genetic studies all suggest atypical performance monitoring in ADHD. Performance monitoring involves error detection and post-error behavioural adjustment and is crucial to behavioural self-regulation and reinforcement learning, both of which are dysfunctional in ADHD. Therefore, post-error slowing was examined in children with ADHD and controls using a modified flanker task both with, and without, error detection provided. There was a significant main effect of group on post-error slowing across conditions and when error-detection was provided, significant post-error slowing deficits were found in children with ADHD. These findings suggest that the performance monitoring deficit in ADHD is specific to post-error behavioural adjustment and supports the inclusion of this deficit in the neurocognitive profile of ADHD. Findings are discussed in terms of current neurocognitive reinforcement learning models of ADHD.

The present study explored the influence of survivor weight and participant gender, rape myth acceptance and anti-fat attitudes on perceptions of sexual assault. Using an online survey tool, participants (N = 413) read a vignette describing a hypothetical sexual assault scenario and completed several self-report questionnaires. Generalized linear model analyses revealed that participants were more likely to hold the survivor responsible, excuse the perpetrator’s actions, and respond more negatively toward the survivor and more positively toward the perpetrator when the survivor was depicted as thin versus overweight. Interactions were found between rape myth acceptance and survivor weight, gender and survivor weight, and gender and anti-fat attitudes, for certain dependent variables. In addition, men and those with higher levels of rape myth acceptance and anti-fat attitudes were found to make more negative evaluations of the survivor and more positive evaluations of the perpetrator. Recommendations for future research and interventions are discussed.

The present study explored the influence of social support and psychological resources on depression in people living with HIV/AIDS. The mediating role of mastery and self-esteem was examined. Factor analysis of the MOS-SSS supported three dimensions of social support. Findings from a predominantly gay male sample of unemployed individuals living with HIV/AIDS in the Toronto-area indicated high levels of depressive symptomatology, which were negatively related to emotional/informational support, tangible support, and affectionate/interpersonal support. Mediation analyses indicated partial support of the Cognitive Adaptation Model, revealing significant mediating effects of mastery on the relationship between social support and depressive symptomatology. Self-esteem was not found to be a significant mediator of this relationship. Findings suggest the need for social support interventions that help to strengthen mastery in individuals living with HIV/AIDS in order to reduce depression. Attention should be paid to self-esteem and its relationship with gender and employment status in this population.