Mothers' attitudes toward fat, weight, and dieting in themselves and their children

We examined how a mother's view of her body, and fatness in general, affects her attitude toward her child's weight and eating. Mothers (N = 118) of 3–5-year-old children filled out a questionnaire designed to assess weight satisfaction, anti-fat attitudes, and how concerned and restrictive they are with regards to their child's weight and eating. We found mothers who were more fearful of being or becoming overweight themselves worried more for their children, although fearful attitudes did not predict restricting a child's eating. These results suggest that maternal attitudes toward their own weight affect their beliefs about their children's weight.     

Structure of intelligence in intellectually precocious children and in their parents

Students representing the top 0.03% of their age group in intellectual ability, who were identified by the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (Benbow & Stanley, 1980), were tested along with their parents using a battery of specifically designed cognitive tests. These highly intelligent children had less intelligent, but yet quite bright parents. Vernon's (1961) model of intelligence best fits our results. His following two factors explained most of the variance in the performance of the students and parents: verbal-educational and practical-spatial-mechanical. Moreover, there was potential evidence for a general factor. Among the children, who were mostly past puberty, age related to development of verbal abilities, but not spatial or mechanical abilities. Sex differences favoring the males were found on the spatial ability and mechanical comprehension tests.     

Acquisition of arbitrary conditional discriminations by young normally developing children

Three experiments investigated conditions designed to facilitate acquisition of arbitrary conditional discriminations in 3- to 6-year-old normally developing children. In Experiment 1, 6 subjects failed to master the arbitrary match-to-sample task under conditions of differential reinforcement alone, but 7 subjects did so when instructions or instructions and sample naming were added. In Experiment 2, sample naming introduced in a blocked-trial arrangement resulted in acquisition, but only when the sample name was a nonsense syllable provided by the experimenter (5 of 7 subjects) and not when the sample name was generated by the subject (0 of 5 subjects). Experiment 3 demonstrated the effectiveness of a training sequence involving thematically related stimuli as an intermediate step facilitating the transition from identity to novel arbitrary relations. The difficulties in mastering arbitrary conditional discriminations shown here imply that further analyses with young children will be particularly important in efforts to investigate the development of theoretically important stimulus relations.     

Assessment of intellectually disabled sexual offenders: The current position

Treatment relies on appropriate assessment, guided by the ‘What Works’ approach. As such, the assessment of sexual offenders with intellectual disabilities has three primary purposes: addressing the risk, needs, and responsivity principles. The aim of this paper is to examine different assessment methods for this population. Existing risk assessment protocols are discussed, as well as specific dynamic risk assessment tools for sexual offenders with an intellectual disability. The paper also investigates use of existing, adapted and new psychological tests to assess treatment needs. Assessment of responsivity specific to this population is discussed in terms of intellectual and adaptive functioning, as well as comprehension. Suggestions are made for moving towards a comprehensive assessment strategy for this population.     

Differences in the memory-based searching of delayed and normally developing young children

The memory-based searching of developmentally delayed and normal 2-year-old children was compared. The results of the study confirmed the hypothesis that individual differences would be minimal in a relatively noneffortful memory task, but that substantial individual differences would occur when more cognitive effort was required. The performance of the delayed and normal children was very good and quite similar in the basic memory task, which simply involved remembering the location of a toy hidden in a distinctive, natural location in a room. Substantial individual differences were found, however, in the children's ability to draw inferences about plausible locations for a missing toy based on their memory for where it had been hidden. When they discovered that their toy was not where they remembered it had been hidden (it had been surreptitiously moved by the experimenter), a group of normal children searched for the toy in places that were nearby or otherwise related to the original location of the toy. They used their memory for where the toy had been hidden to generate plausible alternative locations to search. In contrast, delayed children, who discovered their toy to be unaccountably missing from a location, persevered in repeatedly searching that same place. Unlike the normal children, they did not try something new. An important aspect of the data reported is that they reveal an important difference-not just a delay-in the cognitive functioning of young delayed children.     

Enhancing children's attitudes toward disabled peers using a multi-media intervention

Interventions are being developed to enhance children's attitudes toward disabled peers and thereby facilitate mainstreaming in schools. This study evaluates the impact of Feeling Free, a multi-media program of disability-related films, activities, discussions, and books. Participants were children from 16 classrooms, grades 3 through 6. Two classes at each grade level (N = 8) were randomly assigned to the six-session program and were compared on five outcome measures to the eight remaining classrooms. Treatment children demonstrated increased knowledge about disabilities, more positive perceptions of disabled persons, and greater awareness of appropriate behavioral responses to disabled peers. There were no long-lasting treatment effects on two measures of children's acknowledged willingness to interact with disabled peers, although treatment girls demonstrated short-term gains on one measure. Suggestions are made for increasing program impact and providing services to other participants in the mainstreaming process.     

Concurrent verbal and emotion laterality effects exhibited by normally achieving and learning disabled children.

This study assessed both left- and right-hemisphere functions simultaneously when two-syllable words differing only in the initial stop consonant and spoken in different emotional tones were paired dichotically. Seventy-two right-handed normally achieving children, 12 boys and 12 girls at each of grades 1, 3, and 5, were instructed to detect either the presence of a specific word or of a specific emotion. In addition, 30 right-handed learning disabled (LD) children (age-matched to the normal controls) were assessed to determine whether LD children distribute verbal and nonverbal functions to different hemispheres. Results indicated that although both control and LD children demonstrated an overall REA for word stimuli and an LEA for emotional stimuli, and that emotional stimuli were easier to process than word stimuli, LD children were less accurate in processing both types of stimuli than their control counterparts. 'Complementary specialization,' as assessed through distribution of laterality effects, was found to be greater for control children than for LD children. However, the lack of consistency in complementary specialization found among the three developmental grade levels may be indicative that independent brain mechanisms underlying verbal and emotional processing have yet to be fully established in children. Further, in contrast to adult findings, a larger LEA was obtained for the emotion 'happy' than for the emotion 'sad.' It was concluded that whereas independent hemisphere processing for words and emotions is somewhat prevalent for control children, LD children might not be as strongly lateralized for opposite hemisphere processing of these functions.     

Integrating immigrant minorities: developing a scale to measure majority members' attitudes toward their own proactive efforts

The present study is based on the premise that the integration of ethnic minorities may involve more than the majority's expression of tolerance. In order to promote inclusion, the majority may have to play a more active role in the integration process. We describe the development and validation of a new psychometric scale which assesses majority members' attitudes toward their own proactive contribution to the integration of immigrants within three domains: cultural and structural efforts, and openness to diversity. The scale is investigated by analyses of internal structure and exploration of construct validity in relation to relevant social psychological and personality constructs in a sample of 486 Norwegian university students (28% male, mean age = 26.5, SD = 6.08). Factor analyses supported a unidimensional structure and the estimated reliability of an additive scale was satisfactory (Cronbach's α = 0.91). The scale correlated negatively with measures of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, and positively with global identity. It was weakly related to the personality traits agreeableness, intellect, extraversion, and conscientiousness. The potential utility of the scale in both applied and experimental social psychological studies are discussed.     

Factors influencing the selection of toys for handicapped and normally developing preschool children

Factors influencing the selection and purchase of toys for children's use were investigated. Subjects were 73 parents or adult friends of normally developing or handicapped preschool children. In addition to providing demographic information about themselves, the subjects rated the importance of 17 factors influencing their selection and purchase of toys. Contrary to previous research, the sex of the child was reported to be of only minor importance in toy selection, as was the picture on the toy package. Two factors, safety and teaching new skills, were rated as extremely important. There were no significant differences in ratings as a result of sex, ethnicity, or whether or not the subjects were parents of a handicapped child. The findings suggest a substantial degree of agreement among parents about what they consider important when choosing toys for children.     

The development of attitudes toward dialect in Italian children

In the Italian public school system, local dialects are explicitly discouraged and children are pressured to master standard Italian. In this study, 95 southern Italian children were given a series of tasks to determine their level of dialect production and their attitudes toward their local dialect. Production of dialect decreases sharply from the first to the third grade, but then tends to stabilize, with a slight increase in dialect use by fourth and fifth grade boys. Hence the schools have not been entirely successful in eradicating dialect. However, attitude measures indicate that by the third grade children prefer Italian over the dialect at close to the 100% level. The schools have placed many children in a conflict situation, in which they have learned negative attitudes toward their own code but cannot completely master standard Italian. Sex differences may be related to a tendency to view dialect as more masculine. Implications of this study for bidialectical school programs in Italy and the United States are discussed.     

The acquisition of complex predicates in japanese specifically language-impaired and normally developing children

Japanese exhibits two different types of morphological processes. Some morphologically complex predicates are generated within the domain of the lexicon, whereas others are generated outside the domain of the lexicon. An elicited production task involving both types of complex predicates was administered to six Japanese children with specific language impairment (JSLI) and six children with normal language development (JNLD). The JSLI children experienced significant difficulty forming the lexicon-external complex predicates but much less difficulty with the lexicon-internal complex predicates while the performance of the JNLD children exhibited no such asymmetry. These preliminary results suggest that the deficit of SLI affects the ability to construct implicit procedural rules for morphology that are generated outside the lexicon while their lexical operations for morphology that are generated within the domain of the lexicon remain relatively unimpaired.