Denise Daniels

Assessing Life Stressors and Social Resources among Adolescents Applications to Depressed Youth

A growing body of evidence points to the importance of life stressors and social resources in adolescent functioning. This article describes the Life Stressors and Social Resources Inventory-Youth Form (LISRES-Y), which provides an integrated assessment of life stressors and social resources in eight domains: physical health, home/money, parent, sibling, extended family, school, friend, and boy/girlfriend. The indices were developed on data obtained from four groups of youth: depressed youth, youth with conduct disorder, youth with rheumatic disease, and healthy youth. As expected, depressed youth reported more acute and chronic stressors and fewer social resources than did healthy youth. In addition, the indices were predictably associated with individual differences in depressed mood, anxiety, behavior problems, and self-confidence. Negative life events, ongoing stressors in different domains, and stable social resources all contributed unique variance to the functioning criteria. The findings point to the value of an integrated measure of adolescent life context.

Differential experiences of siblings in the same family as predictors of adolescent sibling personality differences.

In the area of personality development, environmental influences operate to make siblings in the same family different rather than similar to each other. The goal of the present study was to determine whether differential experience of siblings can be used to explain the marked personality differences of siblings. The Sibling Inventory of Differential Experience (SIDE) along with personality information (the EAS Temperament Inventory and questions about career expectations) was administered to 50 biological sibling pairs and 98 adoptive sibling pairs in adolescence and young adulthood. The results indicated that differential sibling interaction and differential peer characteristics as self-reported on the SIDE explain 6%-26% of the variance in sibling personality difference scores. For example, the sibling who reports more sociability as compared to his sibling also experiences more sibling closeness and more peer popularity as compared to his sibling. Comparison between adoptive and biological siblings indicates that the SIDE relations are mediated environmentally rather than genetically.

Genetics and Shyness

Heredity plays a larger role in shyness than in other personality traits in infancy (Plomin & Rowe, 1979), early childhood (Plomin & Rowe, 1977), middle childhood (O’Connor, Foch, Sherry, & Plomin, 1980), adolescence (Cheek & Zonderman, 1983), and adulthood (Horn, Plomin, & Rosenman, 1976). The purpose of this chapter is to review evidence concerning the etiology of individual differences in shyness and to consider conceptual and clinical implications of findings that indicate genetic influence.

Psychosocial functioning of siblings of children with rheumatic disease

The potential impact of an ill child on other siblings in the family was examined by comparing 72 siblings of children with rheumatic disease with 60 siblings of healthy children from demographically matched families. Psychosomatic, behavioral, emotional, and social problems, as reported by both the parents and the siblings, were investigated. Although siblings of patients with rheumatic disease generally were functioning as well as siblings of healthy children, they reported having more allergies and asthma. A set of vulnerability and protective factors was tested as predictors of sibling functioning. Cohesive and expressive family environments in which mothers and patients with rheumatic disease were functioning adequately promoted better adaptation among the siblings.

The evolution of concealed ovulation and self-deception

Abstract Humans are strikingly unusual among primates and most mammals because females do not reveal their critical period of ovulation. This phenomenon, concealed ovulation, can be best understood in the perspective of evolutionary theory. It would seem that stimulus signs are essential to reproductive success because activities would be drawn to maximizing the probability of copulation when the female is fertile. Human reproductive success and survival, however, is dependent not only on lack of physical cues of ovulation, but also on lack of psychological awareness. Through exploring the meaning of this apparent incongruity, this article shows that concealed ovulation is adaptive and proposes that concealed ovulation is an example of psychological self-deception. In addition, several theories of concealed ovulation are reviewed and compared.

Fitness behaviors and anthropometric characters for offspring of first-cousin matings.

The purpose of this article is to describe a unique inbreeding study and to discuss the effects of first-cousin matings on polygenic, multifactorial characters. Francis Galton collected behavioral and anthropometric data on a large sample of individuals in Victorian England over 100 years ago. These data permit control of possible effects of socioeconomic status bias in inbreeding studies. The measures included variables apparently related to fitness, such as visual and auditory acuity, as well as anthropometric characters. On the average, the mean of the inbred group is one-tenth of a standard deviation lower than the mean of the control group for the behavioral as well as the anthropometric characters. These results are consistent with those of other inbreeding studies of cognitive abilities and birth characteristics. Mean differences of this magnitude are to be expected given a polygenic and multifactorial system of inheritance. Samples greater than 1000 in each group are required to detect such differences reliably at statistically significant levels. It is puzzling that characters which would be assumed to have been subjected to strong directional selection, such as visual and auditory acuity, show no greater inbreeding depression than other characters.