Intimate relationships : adult attachment, emotion regulation, gender roles, and infidelity

textThis study explored individual differences in rates of infidelity by examining the associations among attachment styles, gender roles, emotion regulation strategies, and experiences of infidelity. While both indirect and direct support has been found between several of these variables when assessed separately, no known studies have examined emotion regulation as a partial mediator between attachment styles and infidelity and between gender roles and infidelity. Moreover, infidelity is still a relatively newly studied construct. The current study examined four types of infidelity and is the first known study to examine the construct of anonymous infidelity. Four hundred and six participants were recruited through the Educational Psychology subject pool, Facebook, and local newspaper ads, resulting in a predominantly college student population. A mixed methods approach was utilized and included the collection of quantitative data via a secure, online questionnaire, as well as a qualitative component examining open-ended responses from 50 participants to offer a more complete understanding of the different forms of infidelity. As predicted, path analyses revealed that individuals higher in certain attachment styles engaged in higher levels of infidelity, including emotional, combined, and anonymous infidelity. Femininity was also found to be linked to lower rates of combined infidelity. As predicted, secure attachment, preoccupied attachment, and femininity were negatively linked to the use of suppression, while fearful attachment was positively linked to the use of suppression. Surprisingly, masculinity was negatively linked with the use of suppression. Furthermore, the use of suppression was linked to higher incidents of combined infidelity. However, contrary to predictions, there was no support for emotion regulation serving as a mediator between either attachment styles or gender roles and infidelity. The qualitative analysis uncovered salient themes related to the definition and experience of infidelity, as well as conditions potentially conducive to experiences of infidelity and consequences of infidelity. Anonymous infidelity emerged as an interesting construct within the college culture of dating. These findings are discussed in the context of attachment theory and theories of gender identity, and the implications of the findings for prevention and intervention efforts within clinical practice are described.Educational Psycholog

An Exponential Growth Learning Trajectory: Students' Emerging Understanding of Exponential Growth Through Covariation

This article presents an Exponential Growth Learning Trajectory (EGLT), a trajectory identifying and characterizing middle grade students' initial and developing understanding of exponential growth as a result of an instructional emphasis on covariation. The EGLT explicates students' thinking and learning over time in relation to a set of tasks and activities developed to engender a view of exponential growth as a relation between two continuously covarying quantities. Developed out of two teaching experiments with early adolescents, the EGLT identifies three major stages of students' conceptual development: prefunctional reasoning, the covariation view, and the correspondence view. The learning trajectory is presented along with three individual students' progressions through the trajectory as a way to illustrate the variation present in how the participants made sense of ideas about exponential growth

Quantifying exponential growth: Three conceptual shifts in coordinating multiplicative and additive growth

This article presents the results of a teaching experiment with middle school students who explored exponential growth by reasoning with the quantities height (y) and time (x) as they explored the growth of a plant. Three major conceptual shifts occurred during the course of the teaching experiment: (1) from repeated multiplication to initial coordination of multiplicative growth in y with additive growth in x; (2) from coordinating growth in y with growth in x to coordinated constant ratios (determining the ratio of f(x(2)) to f(x(1)) for corresponding intervals of time for (x(2)) > 1), and (3) from coordinated constant ratios to within-units coordination for corresponding intervals of time for (x(2)) < 1. Each of the three shifts is explored along with a discussion of the ways in which students' mathematical activity supported movement from one stage of understanding to the next. These findings suggest that emphasizing a coordination of multiplicative and additive growth for exponentiation may support students' abilities to flexibly move between the covariation and correspondence views of function. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved