Behavioral Sciences

Residential early parenting services in Australia provide psychoeducational programs for unsettled infant behaviour, which is reported by up to 35% of parents in their child’s first year and can negatively affect parenting self-efficacy. This study aimed to evaluate changes in infant behaviour and parenting self-efficacy following a five-night residential early parenting program and to identify demographic, social, and psychological predictors of parenting self-efficacy. An observational pre-post study using routinely collected medical record data from parents and infants aged up to 24 months was analysed. Parenting self-efficacy was assessed pre-admission and post-discharge using seven items from the Karitane Parenting Confidence Scale. Infant sleeping and cry/fuss behaviour was measured at pre-admission, pre-discharge, and at the 6-week follow-up using study-specific questions. N = 1243 completed the program and provided pre-admission and pre-discharge data. N = 540 provided follow-up data. Overall, improvements were observed following participation. Infant sleeping and cry/fuss behaviour improved pre-discharge and remained largely stable at follow-up. Parenting self-efficacy increased from pre-admission to follow-up. An older maternal age, infants aged ≤ 4 months, and the reporting of more borderline personality disorder symptoms were associated with lower improvements in parenting self-efficacy. Residential early parenting programs improve infant behaviour and parental self-efficacy, though targeted follow-up services are indicated to sustain outcomes for vulnerable subgroups.

Lifetime HIV non-testing remains common among men who have sex with men (MSM) in Brazil, and its sociodemographic, psychosocial, and behavioral correlates have rarely been examined together. In a 2025 online survey of 1210 Brazilian cisgender and transgender MSM aged 18 or older, we examined lifetime non-testing with bivariate tests, modified Poisson regression (prevalence ratios, PR), and conditional inference trees. Overall, 9.5% (95% CI [8.0, 11.3]) had never been tested. Bivariately, never-tested men were younger, less educated, and lower income, more often students, single, living with family, and without a formal religion; they reported lower self-esteem, extraversion, and conscientiousness and greater loneliness, depressive symptoms, and internalized homonegativity; and they less often attended religious services or reported drug use during sex (erectogenic drugs or chemsex). Trees partitioned the sample only by education and age (38.9% [30.5, 48.2] among less educated men aged 24 or younger), by self-esteem (higher with low self-esteem), and by drug use during sex combined with religious attendance and alcohol use (highest, 18.4% [14.2, 23.4], among men reporting no drug use during sex, no religious attendance, and infrequent alcohol use; lowest among men reporting erectogenic drugs or chemsex). The domains appear complementary; the profiles may inform complementary testing strategies.

This study examines the associations among transformational leadership, emotional labor strategies, self-efficacy, and job-related well-being among 355 employees of a Turkish insurance company. Drawing on Social Cognitive Theory and Conservation of Resources Theory, data were collected using convenience sampling and analyzed with SPSS 22 and SmartPLS 4. The findings indicate that transformational leadership is not significantly associated with deep acting but is negatively associated with surface acting. Both deep acting and surface acting are significantly associated with self-efficacy, which is strongly positively associated with job-related well-being. The results also reveal a significant serial indirect association linking transformational leadership, surface acting, self-efficacy, and job-related well-being, whereas the corresponding pathway involving deep acting is not significant. Self-efficacy further appears to mediate the associations between emotional labor strategies and job-related well-being. Participants’ specific job functions and levels of customer contact were not recorded; therefore, the findings should not be interpreted as specific to customer-facing roles. Overall, these findings challenge the assumption that transformational leadership is uniformly associated with positive emotional labor strategies and offer a more nuanced understanding of the associations among leadership, emotional labor, and employee well-being.