Occupational Stress: The Role of Psychological Resilience in the Ecological Transactional Model

The present study adopts an ecological approach to examining occupational stress, which incorporates both a trait and a transactional perspective to offer a more comprehensive conceptualization of the antecedents and outcomes of stress with psychological stress as a moderator. Data collected from 182 job incumbents supported the hypothesized relationships among primary appraisal, secondary appraisal, psychological resilience, and maladaptive outcomes. Results from structural equation modeling revealed that primary appraisal affected secondary appraisal, and secondary appraisal, in turn, contributed to maladaptive outcomes. In addition, the relationship between primary appraisal and maladaptive outcomes was partially mediated by secondary appraisal. Consistent with our hypothesis that resilience plays an adaptive role in the stress process, the results indicated that resilience had a direct influence on secondary appraisal. Resilience also affected maladaptive outcomes of stress but this relationship was partially mediated by secondary appraisal.

The Impact of Exposure To Violence On a Trajectory of (Declining) Parental Monitoring

Five waves of longitudinal data collected from 348 African American youth living in extreme poverty are used to examine the impact of exposure to violence on parenting over time. Semiparametric group-based modeling is used to identify trajectories of parental monitoring and exposure to violence from Time 1 (T1) to Time 5 (T5). Results indicate that for youth (a) 48% had a trajectory of declining parental monitoring and (b) 7% had sharply increasing exposure to violence from T1 to T5. Multivariate findings are consistent with the ecological—transactional model of community violence. Exposure to violence T1 was a precursor of a trajectory of declining parental monitoring T1 to T5. Youth with a trajectory of stable and sharply increasing exposure to violence were more than 200% more likely to have declining parental monitoring T1 to T5. The theoretical implications of these findings as well as areas for future research are also discussed.

Psychological Issues and Treatment Strategies in Popular Musicians: A Review, Part 2

Part 1 of this review [MPPA 1999;14:171-9] described the overall goals of the paper as follows: to increase the reader’s understanding of what types of common psychological problems popular musicians face; how individual, family, and sociocultural factors interact in the development and maintenance of these problems; and how interventions need to address all of these factors. The ecological transactional model developed by developmental psychologists Cicchetti and Toth was presented as the contextual background for understanding the development of an individual’s psychological resiliency or vulnerability to symptoms. The model posits four interacting levels as crucial to an individual’s “ecology”: the self, the family, the community, and the culture. The first part of this review explored aspects of each of these levels, including occupational risk factors as characteristic of the community and culture of popular musicians. Part 1 ended with a brief discussion of the creative process, similarly from an interactive systems perspective.