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Techno-stressors stemming from the use of information technology (IT) have become a major source of stress in the modern workplace. While research shows that techno-stressors negatively affect employees' work attitudes and performance, little is known about their effects on employees' non-work lives. This research investigates the impact of techno-stressors on work-life balance and examines job self-efficacy as a buffer of this negative impact via the attenuating effect of emotional exhaustion. We conducted two survey studies. Study 1 collected data through a paper-and-pencil survey from 316 IT workers in a northern China IT company. Study 2 replicated and strengthened Study 1 by collecting longitudinal data through an online survey platform from 646 southern China female workers across diverse occupations. The results showed that techno-stressors negatively affected work-life balance, but job self-efficacy buffered employees from this negative effect by reducing their emotional exhaustion. Our findings extend understanding of techno-stressors' effects on individuals' non-work domains and shed light on how to cope with techno-stressors. • Techno-stressors are becoming major sources of stress in the modern workplace. • Techno-stressors negatively affect work-life balance. • Employees with high job self-efficacy suffer less from techno-stressors. • The buffering role of job self-efficacy works through lowering emotional exhaustion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Parental investment and skill mediate caregiver mental health and child development. • Caregiver depression are more harmful to parenting practices and child development. • The variety of play material has significant mediation effect on child development. • Coercive parenting mediate caregiver mental health and child development. Parenting practices are associated with early childhood development (ECD), and some evidences suggest that mental health might affect parenting practices. However, the interrelationships of mental health, parenting practices, and ECD outcomes have not yet been well documented in developing contexts like rural China. This paper aims to investigate the interrelationships between the caregiver's mental health, parenting practices, and the child's ECD outcomes in rural China. A total of 1787 sample households in an undeveloped rural area of western China are enrolled in the study. A socioeconomic questionnaire, the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale, the Family Care Indicators, the Parent and Family Adjustment Scales, and the Bayley Scales of Infant Development version III were used to measure the socioeconomic characteristics of sample households, the caregiver's mental health, parental investments and parenting skills, and the child's development outcomes, respectively. Mediation model was then applied to estimate the interrelationships. The results showed that parental practices significantly mediated between the caregiver's mental health and the child's cognition, language, motor, and social–emotion development. Through parental investments, one standard deviation increases in the caregiver's mental health test score was associated with the decline in the child's four development scores by 0.6% standard deviation, respectively. Through parenting skills, one standard deviation increases in the caregiver's mental health test score was associated with the decline in the child's language and social-emotional score by 2% and 5% standard deviation, respectively. Different dimensions of caregiver mental health, parental investments and skills played heterogeneous roles in the interrelationships. Early interventions aimed at improving the caregiver's mental health, parental investments and skills are important and might be effective to improve early childhood development in rural China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Children with HFA have impairment in emotional prosody recognition. • Intensity increase did not improve children with HFA's overall emotion recognition. • Children with HFA have difficulty discriminating between emotions differing in valence. • Children with HFA have difficulty discriminating between emotions differing in arousal. This paper investigated the ability of Mandarin-speaking children with high-functioning autism (HFA) to recognize the four categories of emotional prosody, namely, happiness , anger , sadness and fear , in moderate- and high-intensity emotional conditions using auditory discrimination tasks. Thirty-four children with HFA between 5 and 7 years of age and 34 typically developing (TD) controls participated in this study. In moderate-intensity conditions, children with HFA scored lower than TD children in the recognition of the four categories of emotional prosody, indicating an overall impairment. With an increase in the intensity of emotion, children with HFA showed improved accuracy for anger, decreased accuracy for happiness, but no change in accuracy for either sadness or fear. An analysis of error patterns demonstrated that unlike TD children, children with HFA were inclined to mistake happiness for anger, with the two categories differing in valence, and this inclination deepened as the intensity increased. In discriminating between sadness and fear, which have a slight arousal difference, both groups showed difficulty in moderate-intensity conditions. In high-intensity conditions, TD children were inclined to perceive stimuli as exhibiting fear, which demonstrates comparatively high arousal; thus, they were more accurate for fear, while HFA children were not sensitive to increases in arousal, showing no noticeable effect. These findings indicated that children with HFA have a mechanism distinct from that of TD children in emotional prosody recognition, exhibiting various degrees of impairment in this regard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]