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Anecdotal evidence suggests an increase in entitled attitudes and behaviors of youth in school and college settings. Using a newly developed scale to assess ''academic entitlement'' (AE), a construct that includes expectations of high grades for modest effort and demanding attitudes towards teachers, this research is the first to investigate the phenomenon systematically. In two separate samples of ethnically diverse college students comprised largely of East and Southeast Asian American, followed by Caucasians, Latinos, and other groups (total N = 839, age range 18-25 years), we examined the personality, parenting, and motivational correlates of AE. AE was most strongly related to exploitive attitudes towards others and moderately related to an overall sense of entitlement and to narcissism. Students who reported more academically entitled attitudes perceived their parents as exerting achievement pressure marked by social comparison with other youth and materially rewarding good grades, scored higher than their peers in achievement anxiety and extrinsic motivation, and engaged in more academic dishonesty. AE was not significantly associated with GPA.

This study examined perceived parent-adolescent relationships and depressed mood among 173 early adolescents and 297 college students, all of European or Asian American background. Ethnic differences in depressed mood, not evident in the early adolescent sample, emerged in the college sample, with Asian Americans reporting more symptoms. Ethnic differences in depressed mood were reduced to nonsignificance when quality of parent-adolescent relationships was statistically controlled. The magnitude of associations between measures of parent-adolescent relationships and depressed mood was strikingly similar for European and Asian Americans at the same phase of adolescence. As anticipated, perceived parent-adolescent relationships accounted for more of the variance in depressed mood in early adolescence than in late adolescence: 44% to 51% for the junior high samples and about 10% for the college samples.Depressed mood has been described as the key affective disturbance of normal adolescence (Weiner, 1980). Indeed, some evidence suggests that depressed mood is more common in this pivotal life period than in either childhood or adulthood (Radloff, 1991;Steinberg, 1993), and developmental research has contributed important insights into those factors associated with dysphoria during the adolescent years. Three important and sometimes intersecting lines of research have examined the effects of pubertal changes, other stressful life events, and family relationships on adolescents' experience of depressed mood.Researchers have shown, for example, that certain hormonal changes are linked with increases in depressed mood (e.g., Susman, Dorn, & Chrousos, 1991). Early pubertal onset-an event of biological, psychological, and social significance-has been implicated in girls' depressed mood, and pubertal onset accompanied by other stressors, such as school changes, has been related to higher levels of depressive symptomatology in both sexes (e.g., Petersen, Sarigiani, & Kennedy, 1991). Independent of pubertal events, adolescents who experience a greater number of stressful life events report more depressed mood-a relationship that is moderated by individual differences in reactivity to stressors (e.g., Compas, 1987;Ge, Lorenz, Conger, Elder, & Simons, 1994). These and other researchers also have uncov-

Some researchers contend that the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale taps two dimensions of self-image, whereas others argue that the two dimensions (positive and negative) are merely an artifact of item wording. To directly test these competing views, we had 741 ethnically diverse university undergraduates take one of three versions of the 10-item Rosenberg Scale: the original version comprised of five positively worded and five negatively worded items, or one of two alternative versions comprised of 10 positively worded or 10 negatively worded items. Analyses indicated that the original version fit a two-factor model, whereas the reworded versions generally fit a one-factor model. All three versions had high validity for different ethnic groups, but the revised-positive version had less overlap with a measure of depression, and both revised versions had less overlap with a measure of self-deception. #