Skyler T. Hawk

Privacy coordination between adolescents and their parents is difficult, as adolescents' changing roles require adjustments to expectations about family boundaries. Adolescents' perceptions of privacy invasion likely provoke conflicts with parents, but higher levels of conflict may also foster invasion perceptions. This longitudinal study assessed relations between privacy invasion and conflict frequency among adolescents, mothers, and fathers (N = 309). Bidirectional relations were present; all reports showed that invasion provoked conflict in later adolescence, but the timing and direction of conflict-to-invasion relations differed between respondents and measurement waves. The findings suggest a functional role for conflict in adolescent-parent privacy negotiations, in that it both draws attention to discrepant expectations and provides youths with a means of directly managing perceived boundary violations.

The authors compared the accuracy of emotion decoding for nonlinguistic affect vocalizations, speech-embedded vocal prosody, and facial cues representing 9 different emotions. Participants (N = 121) decoded 80 stimuli from 1 of the 3 channels. Accuracy scores for nonlinguistic affect vocalizations and facial expressions were generally equivalent, and both were higher than scores for speech-embedded prosody. In particular, affect vocalizations showed superior decoding over the speech stimuli for anger, contempt, disgust, fear, joy, and sadness. Further, specific emotions that were decoded relatively poorly through speech-embedded prosody were more accurately identified through affect vocalizations, suggesting that emotions that are difficult to communicate in running speech can still be expressed vocally through other means. Affect vocalizations also showed superior decoding over faces for anger, contempt, disgust, fear, sadness, and surprise. Facial expressions showed superior decoding scores over both types of vocal stimuli for joy, pride, embarrassment, and "neutral" portrayals. Results are discussed in terms of the social functions served by various forms of nonverbal emotion cues and the communicative advantages of expressing emotions through particular channels.

Mothers living with HIV/AIDS face the challenge of disclosing their illness to their uninfected children. This literature review devotes specific attention to rates and predictors of maternal disclosure, justifications for (non)disclosure, how mothers plan and execute disclosures, and postdisclosure adjustment in families. Although no research has conclusively shown that maternal disclosures are detrimental to children's wellbeing, findings on adjustment may differ depending on child age and whether mothers or children are the informants in research. Suggestions for further studies include the implications of mothers' specific communication strategies; age-related differences in, and adjustment to, disclosures; differentiating between short- and long-term functioning; and the further development of structured interventions to aid mothers and their families in both the pre- and postdisclosure period.

Previous research on sexual arousal resulting from auditory stimuli indicates that visual imagery acts as a mediator between stimulus input and resulting arousal. This leads to the question of whether imagery, and subsequent arousal, can be manipulated by providing differing information to hold in semantic memory. This research hypothesizes that attractive images, held within semantic memory and pattern matched with an erotic auditory stimulus, facilitate higher and more rapid self-reported arousal than do unattractive images. Participants in an unattractive condition experienced slower rates and lower mean levels of arousal in response to an auditory stimulus compared with participants in an attractive or no picture condition. No differences existed between groups in maximum arousal scores or the tendency to visualize the target during the listening task. Implications for the role of imagery in sexual response, possible measurement issues, and suggestions for future research are addressed in the discussion.

Most work on adolescents’ contact with sexuality in mainstream media has been framed in terms of media effects upon the sexual self‐concepts, attitudes, and behaviors of youth, even when such causality cannot be inferred. Rarely examined are the sexual characteristics of adolescents that may predict contact with sexual media. Using Steele's (1999) Media Practice Model as a foundation, we reported on these associations for 2,184 Dutch adolescents. This study emphasized sex differences in the characteristics that predict such contact and the role of youths’ critical evaluations of information about sex in the media. Correlation and regression analyses revealed several sex differences in the characteristics related to sexual media contact, with individual characteristics accounting for more variance in females and critical evaluations accounting for more variance in males. This study underscores the need for more comprehensive, longitudinal studies of adolescents’ media consumption and its connections to sexual development in youth.