Multimodal Communication, Idealization, and Relational Quality in College Students\u27 Parental Relationships: A Model of Partner Idealization in Ongoing Relationships

This study tested the partner idealization component of the hyperpersonal perspective, and extended this perspective to the study of an ongoing relationship – college students and their parents. We proposed a model to encompass the cognitive and behavioral idealization mechanisms that past research identified as provoking positive relational outcomes. Results indicated that mediated communication frequency was positively related to both idealization and relational quality, and that idealization partially mediated the statistical relationship between mediated communication frequency and relational quality. Face-to-face communication frequency was inversely related to one indicator of idealization (positive affect thinking), but was not directly related to relational quality. That said, indirect effects were detected, such that face-to-face communication frequency was negatively and indirectly related to relational quality as a function of positive affect thinking. These results were interpreted using concepts from interpersonal, family, and computer-mediated communication, and research future directions were discussed

High School Adolescents’ Perceptions of the Parent–Child Sex Talk: How Communication, Relational, and Family Factors Relate to Sexual Health

This research focuses on how high school adolescents’ (n= 159) perceptions of parent– adolescent communication about sex, including communication frequency, parent–child closeness, parents’ communication competence and effectiveness, as well as the larger family environment relates to sexual risk-taking and permissive sexual attitudes. Findings show that perceived parental communication competence and effectiveness were the strongest negative predictors of adolescents’ permissive sexual attitudes and sexual risk-taking, whereas peer communication frequency was a significant positive predictor. In contrast with previous research, adolescents’ perception of parent communication frequency and family communication climate (e.g., conversation orientation and conformity orientation) was unrelated to adolescents’ sexual risk

Go Talk to Your Employee: A Sequential Mediation Analysis of Leader Communication Frequency and Employee Turnover Intent

Employee turnover has significant negative costs to healthcare organizations. While leadership communication styles and quality have been empirically supported to reduce turnover intentions, our understanding of specific modalities of leader intervention is not well understood. This paper sought to understand how the specific act of communication frequency reduces turnover. Through the lens of Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) and role dynamic theories, mediating effects of LMX quality and job satisfaction were investigated to further understand this proposed relationship in a sample of healthcare workers in the Midwest/US. Results indicate that communication frequency was negatively related to turnover intent. Furthermore, while LMX and job satisfaction failed to mediate the relationship individually, they did sequentially mediate the relationship between communication frequency and turnover intent. These findings provide evidence for the need of investigation into specific leadership practices that enact positive employee attitudes and ultimately reduce turnover intent. As the current Covid- 19 pandemic has revealed the need for scalable and effective solutions for retaining staff in healthcare organizations, this study seeks to understand the impact of leaders’ communication frequency

Teacher Perceptions Of Parent-Teacher Communications And Practice

It has been established in prior research that parent involvement and school-family partnerships have the potential to positively impact student achievement; however, creating and maintaining positive and productive parent-teacher communication can be difficult. Since teachers function as the link between school and the home, there is an increased need to study the perspectives and experiences of teachers. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between teacher perceptions of parent-teacher relationships, teacher conversation competence, and teacher communication frequency with parents. This study involved an online survey distributed to 234 participants via Amazon Mechanical Turk. The following results were found to be significant: teacher relationship beliefs and the presence of a teacher contact mandate had a negative correlation with communication frequency, and teacher conversation competence had a positive correlation with communication frequency. In regression analysis, relationship beliefs and contact mandate were suggested to be significant negative predictors of communication frequency, whereas conversation competence was a significant positive predictor. SEM analysis suggested that only conversation competence was a significant predictor of communication frequency, which raises questions about the potential for mediation. The major limitation of this study was the lack of convergent validity, which could have arisen due to issues with individual measures and exacerbated by a heterogeneous and potentially uncommitted online sample pool. Potential implications of this study include providing information to inform current teaching practice and improving teacher education and professional development. If teachers feel more prepared entering into parent-teacher dialogue, student achievement could be improved

Balancing the Communication Load of Asynchronously Parallelized Machine Learning Algorithms

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is the standard numerical method used to solve the core optimization problem for the vast majority of machine learning (ML) algorithms. In the context of large scale learning, as utilized by many Big Data applications, efficient parallelization of SGD is in the focus of active research. Recently, we were able to show that the asynchronous communication paradigm can be applied to achieve a fast and scalable parallelization of SGD. Asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent (ASGD) outperforms other, mostly MapReduce based, parallel algorithms solving large scale machine learning problems. In this paper, we investigate the impact of asynchronous communication frequency and message size on the performance of ASGD applied to large scale ML on HTC cluster and cloud environments. We introduce a novel algorithm for the automatic balancing of the asynchronous communication load, which allows to adapt ASGD to changing network bandwidths and latencies.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1505.0495