Attributional theory and empirical evidence suggest that a tendency to make stable, global self-causal attributions for undesirable events is associated with negative outcomes. However, existing self-report measures of parental attributions do not account for the possibility that dysfunctional parent-causal attributions for child misbehavior might be important predictors of poor family functioning. To address these concerns, the authors developed and tested a new measure of both parent-causal and child-responsible attributions for child misbehavior in a sample of 453 community couples. Structural validity, convergent validity, discriminant validity, internal consistency, and temporal stability of the new measure were examined. As expected, confirmatory factor analysis resulted in 2 factors, Child-Responsible (9 items) and Parent-Causal (7 items); the final model was cross-validated in a holdout sample. The final scale demonstrated adequate internal consistency (alphas = .81-.90), test-retest reliability (rs = .55-.76), and convergent and discriminant validity. Dysfunctional parent-causal and child-responsible attributions significantly predicted parental emotional problems, ineffective discipline, parent-child physical aggression, and low parenting satisfaction. Associations with parent-child aggression and parenting satisfaction were generally larger than with partner aggression and relationship satisfaction.

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We study black-box testing for stochastic systems and arbitrary ωregular specifications, explicitly including liveness properties. We are given a finite-state probabilistic system that we can only execute from the initial state. We have no information on the number of reachable states, or on the probabilities; further, we can only partially observe the states. The only action we can take is to restart the system. We design restart strategies guaranteeing that, if the specification is violated with non-zero probability, then w.p.1 the number of restarts is finite, and the infinite run executed after the last restart violates the specification. This improves on previous work that required full observability. We obtain asymptotically optimal upper bounds on the expected number of steps until the last restart. We conduct experiments on a number of benchmarks, and show that our strategies allow one to find violations in Markov chains much larger than the ones considered in previous work.

We establish a framework for signal processing on product spaces of simplicial and cellular complexes. For simplicity, we focus on the product of two complexes representing time and space, although our results generalize naturally to products of simplicial complexes of arbitrary dimension. Our framework leverages the structure of the eigenmodes of the Hodge Laplacian of the product space to jointly filter along time and space. To this end, we provide a decomposition theorem of the Hodge Laplacian of the product space, which highlights how the product structure induces a decomposition of each eigenmode into a spatial and temporal component. Finally, we apply our method to real world data, specifically for interpolating trajectories of buoys in the ocean from a limited set of observed trajectories.