This study examined the relations between acculturative stress and psychological functioning, as well as the protective role of social support and coping style, in a sample of 148 Mexican American college students (67% female, 33% male; mean age ϭ 23.05 years, SD ϭ 3.33). In bivariate analyses, acculturative stress was associated with higher levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms. Moreover, active coping was associated with better adjustment (lower depression), whereas avoidant coping predicted poorer adjustment (higher levels of depression and anxiety). Tests of interaction effects indicated that parental support and active coping buffered the effects of high acculturative stress on anxiety symptoms and depressive symptoms. In addition, peer support moderated the relation between acculturative stress and anxiety symptoms. Implications for reducing the effects of acculturative stress among Mexican American college students are discussed.

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completed self-report measures of parent and peer attachment, sympathy, academic efficacy, aggression, anxiety, and depression. Adolescents were divided into four groups on the basis of their parent and peer attachment scores: those high on both, those low on both, those high on peer but low on parent attachment, and those high on parent but low on peer attachment. Discriminant function analyses revealed that the groups differed only along one dimension, suggesting that parent and peer attachment served similar functions in terms of the adjustment indices measured. Adolescents high on both peer and parent attachment were the best adjusted (i.e., least aggressive and depressed, most sympathetic) and those low on both were the least well adjusted. Furthermore, those high on peer but low on parent attachment were better adjusted than those high on parent but low on peer attachment, suggesting that peer attachment may be relatively more influential on adolescent adjustment than parent attachment.

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Precursors of adolescent sexual risk taking were examined in a multiethnic sample consisting of 443 children (51% girls) of National Longitudinal Survey of Youth participants. Respondents were 12-13 years old in 1994 and 16 -17 in 1998. Controlling for demographic and contextual factors, selfregulation-but not risk proneness-was significantly (modestly) associated with overall sexual risk taking 4 years later. Analyses of individual sexual behaviors indicated that self-regulation may affect choices made after becoming sexually active (e.g., number of partners) rather than the initiation of sexual activity. Measures of parent and peer influence had independent effects on sexual risk taking but did not moderate the effects of self-regulation and risk proneness. Findings add to the growing literature on implications of self-regulation for individual development. Self-Regulation and Risk PronenessTwo individual-level characteristics that may be linked to sexual risk taking are self-regulation and risk proneness. There is a fairly substantial body of literature on risk proneness, which is conceptualized as the propensity to be attracted to potentially risky

Compared to other ethnic groups in the USA, Latino populations are at high risk for negative sexual outcomes, including unplanned pregnancy and HIV/AIDS infection. The goal of this study was to explore the role of cultural beliefs and values in sexual socialization by focusing on the family socialization of adolescent romantic and sexual behavior described by 22 Latina/Hispanic women who took part in in-depth individual interviews. Four broad themes were explored: parental concerns regarding dating, family communication about sexual issues, family rules about dating, and actual dating and sexual experiences. Consistent with traditional cultural views, female romantic involvement outside of marriage was described as potentially dishonourable to the family. Because US-style dating was seen as a violation of traditional courtship styles, most of the respondents' families placed strict boundaries on adolescent sociosexual interaction. As a result, many respondents described adolescent experiences of dating characterized by tension and confl ict, and reported vulnerability in eventual sexual encounters. In order to better understand the sexual behavior of young Latina women in the USA, researchers must examine sexual socialization within the family of origin and take parents' culturally-infl uenced beliefs and practises into account.

Coercive control is central to distinguishing between Johnson’s (2008) 2 main types of intimate partner violence: (a) coercive controlling violence and (b) situational couple violence. Approaches to assessing coercive control, however, have been inconsistent. Using data from 2 projects involving divorcing mothers (N = 190), the authors compared common analytic strategies for operationalizing coercive control and classifying types of violence. The results establish advantages to measuring coercive control in terms of frequency versus number of tactics, illustrate the use of both hierarchical and k-means clustering methods to identify patterns of coercive control and evaluate clustering solutions, and offer a suggested cutoff for classifying violence types in general samples of separated women using the Dominance–Isolation subscale of the widely used Psychological Maltreatment of Women Inventory (Tolman, 1992). Finally, the authors demonstrate associations between types of violence and theoretically relevant variables, including frequency and severity of violence, harassment and violence after separation, fear, and perceived threat.

This study investigated daily states and time use patterns associated with depression. Four hundred eighty-three 5th to 9th graders reported on their experience when signalled by pagers at random times. Depressed youth reported more negative affect and social emotions, lower psychological investment, lower energy, and greater variability in affect. These differences were weaker for 5th and 6th graders, suggesting that self-reported feeling states are a poor indicator of depression prior to adolescence. No differences were found in the daily activities of depressed youths nor in the amount of time spent alone, but depressed youths experienced other people as less friendly and more often reported wanting to be alone, especially when with their families. They also spent less time in public places and more time in their bedrooms. Finally, depressed boys, but not girls, spent much less time with friends, particularly of the same sex, suggesting that social isolation is more strongly associated with depression for boys.Depression is diagnosed as a condition of psychological maladjustment to daily life. Diagnostic schemes, such as the revised third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-HI-R, American Psychiatric Association, 1987), identify cardinal symptoms that include distinct patterns of daily behavior (e.g. social isolation) and a list of psychological states (depressed mood, low energy, poor concentration, loss of interest in normal activities, feelings of fatigue, psychomotor agitation, and a sense of worthlessness) presumed to permeate much of a person's waking hours. Although there is an increasing recognition that depression may be expressed differently in childhood and adolescence than in adulthood (Carlson & Garber, 1986;Rutter, 1986), these features of daily