Predictors of discordance among Chilean families

Parent-youth agreement on parental behaviors can characterize effective parenting. Although discordance in families may be developmentally salient and harmful to youth outcomes, predictors of discordance have been understudied, and existing research in this field has been mostly limited to North American samples. This paper addressed this literature gap by using data from a community-based study of Chilean adolescents. Analysis was based on 1,068 adolescents in Santiago, Chile. The dependent variable was discordance which was measured by the difference between parent and youth’s assessment of parental monitoring. Major independent variables for this study were selected based on previous research findings that underscore youth’s developmental factors, positive parental and familial factors and demographic factors. Descriptive and multivariate analyses were conducted to examine the prevalence and associations between youth, parental and familial measures with parent-youth discordance. There was a sizable level of discordance between parent and youth’s report of parental monitoring. Youth’s gender and externalizing behavior were significant predictors of discordance. Warm parenting and family involvement were met with decreases in discordance. The negative interaction coefficients between parental warmth and youth’s gender indicated that positive parental and familial measures have a greater effect on reducing parent-youth discordance among male youths. Results support the significance of positive family interactions in healthy family dynamics. Findings from this study inform the importance of services and interventions for families that aim to reduce youth’s problem behavior and to create a warm and interactive family environment.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4181713/Accepted manuscrip

High-dimensional neutrino masses

For Majorana neutrino masses the lowest dimensional operator possible is the Weinberg operator at $d=5$. Here we discuss the possibility that neutrino masses originate from higher dimensional operators. Specifically, we consider all tree-level decompositions of the $d=9$, $d=11$ and $d=13$ neutrino mass operators. With renormalizable interactions only, we find 18 topologies and 66 diagrams for $d=9$, and 92 topologies plus 504 diagrams at the $d=11$ level. At $d=13$ there are already 576 topologies and 4199 diagrams. However, among all these there are only very few genuine neutrino mass models: At $d=(9,11,13)$ we find only (2,2,2) genuine diagrams and a total of (2,2,6) models. Here, a model is considered genuine at level $d$ if it automatically forbids lower order neutrino masses {\em without} the use of additional symmetries. We also briefly discuss how neutrino masses and angles can be easily fitted in these high-dimensional models.Comment: Coincides with published version in JHE