Dyadic adjustment and parenting stress in internationally adoptive mothers and fathers: the mediating role of adult attachment dimensions.

Previous research has shown that a positive marital functioning represents a resource in adoptive families, leading to a decrease in parenting stress, but little is known about the factors mediating such a relationship. This study aimed to explore whether adult attachment avoidance and anxiety mediate the effect of dyadic functioning on parenting stress in 90 internationally adoptive couples (mothers and fathers) who had adopted a child (aged 3–10 years) in the last 36 months. Participants completed self-report measures of dyadic adjustment, adult attachment, and parenting stress. A series of path analyses supported the mediation hypothesis, but differentially for mothers and fathers. Among mothers, there was a direct and negative relationship between dyadic adjustment and parenting stress. In addition, a better dyadic adjustment was related to lower levels of attachment anxiety, which in turn were associated with less parenting stress. Among fathers, increased dyadic adjustment was related to lower levels of attachment avoidance, which in turn were associated with reduced parenting stress. These findings suggest the importance of including both mothers and fathers in adoption research. Adoptive parents could benefit from specific interventions aimed at reducing attachment avoidance and anxiety by supporting parental sense of competence and involvement for mothers and fathers, respectively

WRI's Governance Strategy, 2016-2020

Transparent, effective, accountable governance is critical to ensuring that development benefits people and the planet. The Governance Center of Excellence works with civil society, governments, development agencies, businesses, and other institutions to improve decision-making processes and legal frameworks. Our goal is to empower people and strengthen institutions to foster environmentally sound and socially equitable decision-making.In many countries, citizens and communities face social and environmental injustices that can leave them without a say in the development decisions that affect their lives and the resources they depend on.As a global leader on environmental governance, the Governance Center uses data and research to institutionalize fundamental democratic principles - such as transparency, participation, and accountability - into decision-making processes, policies, and legal frameworks. The Governance Center is divided into five practice areas—climate resilience, environmental democracy, energy governance, natural resource governance and urban governance— where our work is concentrated on six priority issues: climate, energy, food, forests, water, and cities

Cancer-related masculinity threat in young adults with testicular cancer: the moderating role of benefit finding.

Background and Objectives: Perceiving benefit from a health-related stressor such as cancer has been associated with better psychological adjustment in various cancer populations; however, it has not been studied in the context of young adulthood or gender-related cancer threat. This study investigated the role of benefit finding in psychological adjustment among young adults with testicular cancer, and whether BF moderates cancer-related masculine threat.Design: This study utilizes a cross-sectional design with a diverse sample of young adult testicular cancer survivors.Methods: Men with a history of testicular cancer (N = 171; M age = 25.2, SD = 3.32) completed questionnaires of benefit finding, cancer-related masculine threat, and indicators of psychological adjustment.Results: Multiple regression analysis revealed that cancer-related masculine threat was associated with worse adjustment across indicators and that benefit finding was related to higher positive affect and lower depressive symptoms. Benefit finding attenuated the potentially adverse effect of cancer-related masculine threat on negative affect and depressive symptoms such that cancer-related masculine threat demonstrated a stronger association with negative affect and depressive symptoms for people with relatively low BF.Conclusions: For young adult men with testicular cancer, finding benefit appears to promote well-being in the face of masculine cancer threat

Personal Disability Identity Measurement: Self-Worth and Personal Meaning

In this study, I examined validity evidence for a new disability identity scale, Personal Disability Identity Scale–Self-Worth and Meaning, in a sample of 525 adults with visual impairment (VI) or blindness. Personal disability identity (PDI) refers to feelings about having a disability as well as incorporation of disability status into overall self-concept (Dunn & Burcaw, 2013). Pre-existing measures of PDI (Darling & Heckert, 2010; Hahn & Belt, 2004) operationalize three factors of the PDI concept (i.e., Affirmation, Denial, Pride), which has been theorized to encompass more domains (Dunn & Burcaw, 2013; Forber-Pratt, Lyew, Samples, & Mueller, 2017). The Self-Worth and Meaning subscales were intended to capture previously unexplored PDI domains, including self-worth as a person with a disability (Putnam, 2005) and personal meaning found in the experience of disability (Dunn & Burcaw, 2013). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported the structural validity of Self-Worth and Meaning scores as well as an overarching four-factor structure of PDI scores composed of Pride/Affirmation, Acceptance (versus Denial), Self-Worth, and Positive Personal Meaning (i.e., Meaning). Correlational analyses between Self-Worth, Meaning, and existing PDI measures supported the convergent and divergent validity of Self-Worth and Meaning scores. Further correlational analyses between Self-Worth and Meaning subscales and indicators of well-being (i.e., satisfaction with life, anxiety/depression) offered support for the external validity of Self-Worth and Meaning. This dissertation contributes to the literature on disability identity by offering an expanded empirical model of PDI as well as a new PDI measure that is derived from models of disability identity that had not been explored empirically (Dunn & Burcaw, 2013; Putnam, 2005)

Embedding knowledge and value of a brand into sustainability for differentiation

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in the Journal of World Business (under the provisional title "Embedding sustainability into brand knowledge and brand value for brand differentiation"). The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2012 Elsevier B.V.Organisations offer products to consumers, buyers often question if the product or its production process are linked to the environmental, social or economic challenges being faced by mankind. Inquisitiveness of customers in this direction points towards an opportunity for marketers to create differentiation based on the concerns of brand towards overall issue of sustainability. The authors have synthesized knowledge from various domains with a positivistic approach to understand sustainability from the perspective of branding. Using empirical knowledge this study recommends embedding sustainability into brand knowledge and brand value for creating a differentiation for the brand in a competitive market

Vocation, motivation and approaches to learning: a comparative study

Purpose – The individual characteristics of students can have a strong influence on the success of the adopted innovations in terms of their transferability and sustainability. The purpose of this paper is to compare the motivations and approaches to learning on degrees with differing vocational components. Design/methodology/approach – Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and approaches to learning framework were used as theoretical background. Questionnaires were used to generate data. The sample was composed by 270 students enroled on differing degrees in term of motivation (accounting and nursing). Findings – The results reveal differences in the approaches to learning and motivation between nursing and accounting students. Nursing degree seem to attract more internally motivated students, presenting significantly higher scores in terms of deep approach and lower scores on surface approach. Significant relationships where found between motivation and approaches. Research limitations/implications – Data are obtained from students studying at a specific university in two degrees. Practical implications – The result suggest that different degrees could attract students with different motivations and approaches to learning. Educators must be aware of which type of students are being attracted to their classrooms, because the inconsistencies between the students’ motives and approaches, the way the contents are presented, the pedagogy and the assessment system could result in poorer learning and failure to transfer or sustain innovations. Originality/value – This paper adds to the very scarce literature linking motivation and approaches. The implications for curriculum design and delivery and specifically for assessment design are of interest for educators.Junta de Andalucía – FEDER (Proyectos de Excelencia: SEJ-02670

Interdependencies between Romanian fiscal policies and inflationary tensions in the current Europe

Macroeconomic policies are meant to achieve non-inflationary, stable growth. There are two major groups of policy instruments to achieve the purpose; one is related to monetary conditions and the other to fiscal conditions. Monetary instruments are employed by the central bank and fiscal instruments are employed by ministry of finance. The policy coordination has to be supported by concrete institutional and operating arrangements like monetary and fiscal coordination board.fiscal policies, inflationary tensions, monetary policy, inflation targeting

Incremental Consistency Guarantees for Replicated Objects

Programming with replicated objects is difficult. Developers must face the fundamental trade-off between consistency and performance head on, while struggling with the complexity of distributed storage stacks. We introduce Correctables, a novel abstraction that hides most of this complexity, allowing developers to focus on the task of balancing consistency and performance. To aid developers with this task, Correctables provide incremental consistency guarantees, which capture successive refinements on the result of an ongoing operation on a replicated object. In short, applications receive both a preliminary---fast, possibly inconsistent---result, as well as a final---consistent---result that arrives later. We show how to leverage incremental consistency guarantees by speculating on preliminary values, trading throughput and bandwidth for improved latency. We experiment with two popular storage systems (Cassandra and ZooKeeper) and three applications: a Twissandra-based microblogging service, an ad serving system, and a ticket selling system. Our evaluation on the Amazon EC2 platform with YCSB workloads A, B, and C shows that we can reduce the latency of strongly consistent operations by up to 40% (from 100ms to 60ms) at little cost (10% bandwidth increase, 6% throughput drop) in the ad system. Even if the preliminary result is frequently inconsistent (25% of accesses), incremental consistency incurs a bandwidth overhead of only 27%.Comment: 16 total pages, 12 figures. OSDI'16 (to appear

Acculturative Stress and Latino Depression: The Mediating Role of Behavioral and Cognitive Resources

Although research has found that acculturative stress is significantly associated with adverse psychological adjustment among Latinos, the mechanism by which this relationship exists is not clearly understood. The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of behavioral and cognitive resources—active coping and self-efficacy, respectively—as mediators of the relationship between acculturative stress and depression among a sample of Latina/o adults (N = 469). Multiple mediator analysis indicated that active coping partially mediated the relationship between acculturative stress and depression symptom severity. The indirect relationship of acculturative stress to depression symptom severity through self-efficacy was not significant. The results suggest that acculturative stress directly relates to Latino psychological adjustment, and lower behavioral active coping partially accounts for this relationship. Results are discussed in the context of culturally based stress and coping models, wherein the relationship between stressors and subsequent psychological adjustment is influenced by the degree of fit between stressor demands and individuals’ resources. Implications for treatment and theory are discussed