Observed parent-adolescent coalitions and family hostilities during family discussions: Associations with marital aggression.

This study investigated bidirectional associations between observed parent-youth coalitions-wherein one parent and a child align themselves against the other parent-and family hostilities as they evolved in real-time during triadic family conflict discussions. Participants were 102 families with an adolescent child (50% girls, M  = 15.3 years, SD = 0.

Attitudes, Norms, and the Effect of Social Connectedness on Adolescent Sexual Risk Intention.

Background: Risky sexual behaviors put adolescents at increased risk of adverse outcomes. Parents, school-based adults, and peers play important roles in influencing these sex intentions.

Methods: This work explored the influence of parent-child sex communication on adolescent attitudes, perceived norms, and intentions to have sex, including the moderating role of social support from school-based adults, in a sample of 21,731 adolescents in California.

Stepping Up, Sticking Together: Military Adolescents' Support of Their Civilian Parents and Concurrent Depression Symptoms.

The purposes of this study were to assess the ways adolescents in active-duty military families provide emotional and instrumental support to civilian mothers and to investigate the implications of such support for their own symptoms of depression. Eighty adolescents from active-duty military families provided self-report ratings of emotional and instrumental support rendered to their civilian mothers. Mother-adolescent dyads engaged in a 10-min discussion of military experiences, which was coded for adolescents' emotional validation of their mothers.

Cortisol Reactions During Family Conflict Discussions: Influences of Wives' and Husbands' Exposure to Family-of-Origin Aggression.

Objective: Though family-of-origin aggression (FOA) is a known risk for later emotional and physical problems in adulthood, little is known about how early exposure to aggression influences physiological reactivity in the domain-specific context of family conflict experienced as an adult. This study investigates whether report of FOA influences spouses' hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis responses during conflict discussions with their family-of-procreation and also whether current hostilities, observed during a family discussion, moderate those responses.

Method: In a sample of 91 families, we measured parents' HPA responses through salivary cortisol total output and discussion-related increase surrounding 15-minute hot-topic discussions that trained observers coded for family members' hostility.

Military service absences and family members' mental health: A timeline followback assessment.

Although military service, and particularly absence due to deployment, has been linked to risk for depression and anxiety among some spouses and children of active duty service members, there is limited research to explain the heterogeneity in family members' reactions to military service stressors. The current investigation introduces the Timeline Followback Military Family Interview (TFMFI) as a clinically useful strategy to collect detailed time-linked information about the service member's absences. Two dimensions of parent absence--the extent to which absences coincide with important family events and cumulative time absent--were tested as potential risks to family members' mental health.

Parental incarceration, transnational migration, and military deployment: family process mechanisms of youth adjustment to temporary parent absence.

The temporary absence of a parent (e.g., due to incarceration, migration, or military deployment) is experienced by many youth and can have profound effects.

Wives' and husbands' cortisol reactivity to proximal and distal dimensions of couple conflict.

Poor marital quality has been linked repeatedly to spouses' health problems, with alterations to physiological stress response systems, such as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis, as one putative mechanism. This study assessed wives' and husbands' HPA axis (i.e.

Siblings of Military Servicemembers: A Qualitative Exploration of Individual and Family Systems Reactions.

How does having a sibling in the military affect young adults? Despite increasing attention to the challenges faced by spouses and children of servicemembers, the siblings of servicemembers have been largely ignored. This qualitative investigation uses unstructured narratives to explore siblings' perceptions of changes in their lives and changes in the family of origin associated with having a family member enlist in the United States military. Thematic analyses revealed an acute period of conflict followed by reorganization, awareness of the parents' distress, changes in the emotional climate of the family, shifts in family roles, admiration for the military sibling, and increased meaning and purpose for the family following the servicemember's enlistment.

Reading between the lines: the lay assessment of subclinical depression from written self-descriptions.

This study investigated how laypersons assess subclinical depression in others from 2 forms of written self-descriptions: personal diaries and online blogs. Fifty-seven target participants wrote essays describing their personality as they would in each context. Naïve judges then rated targets' depression from the 2 sets of self-descriptions.