The mental health trajectories of male prisoners and their female (ex-)partners from pre- to post-release.

Background: There are high rates of mental disorders among prisoners. Prisoners are also likely to have difficulties with intimate relationships, perhaps related to the imprisonment, but their mental health may be relevant. There is a dearth of research on intimate relationship qualities and mental health of offenders and their partners over time.

The impact of contextual family risks on prisoners' children's behavioural outcomes and the potential protective role of family functioning moderators.

Research suggests that children of prisoners have an increased risk for behavioural and emotional problems. However, in a resilience approach, one should expect heterogeneous outcomes and thus apply a contextualized perspective. As this is rarely acknowledged in empirical research, the present study sought to fill this gap using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study on 801 children of imprisoned fathers.

Effects of social gaze on visual-spatial imagination.

Previous research suggests that closing one's eyes or averting one's gaze from another person can benefit visual-spatial imagination by interrupting cognitive demands associated with face-to-face interaction (Markson and Paterson, 2009). The present study further investigated this influence of social gaze on adults' visual-spatial imagination, using the matrix task (Kerr, 1987, 1993). Participants mentally kept track of a pathway through an imaginary 2-dimensional (2D) or 3-dimensional (3D) matrix.

Effects of gaze-aversion on visual-spatial imagination.

Research suggests that averting gaze from an interlocutor can improve both children's and adults' performance in a range of cognitive tasks. With the present experiments, we investigated the effect of gaze aversion on adults' visual-spatial imagination, using a methodology adapted from Kerr (1987). Participants mentally kept track of a pathway through an imaginary matrix, while either maintaining eye-contact with the experimenter, closing their eyes, gazing at a static or a dynamic visual stimulus (in Experiment 1), or fixating an upright or inverted image of the experimenter's face (in Experiment 2).