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.     

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.     

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.     

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 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.     

Warmth and contingency and their relationship to maternal attitudes toward parenting

In this study, the authors addressed the question of whether maternal parenting behaviors in terms of sensitivity, warmth, and contingency with respect to small infants were equally represented in attitudes toward parenting. Sixty mothers from central Germany with middle-class socioeconomic backgrounds were videotaped with their 1st born 3-month-old infant in a free-play and a caregiving episode in their home. The different maternal parenting components were behaviorally analyzed. Maternal attitudes toward parenting were assessed with self-report measures. The results showed that behavioral sensitivity was significantly associated with attitudes related to contingency, whereas behavioral warmth and contingency were not associated with maternal attitudes. The authors interpreted differential associations as a reflection of intuitive and explicit parenting strategies, with only sensitivity being explicitly represented.     

Multiple object tracking in people with Williams syndrome and in normally developing children

Multiple object tracking is hypothesized to utilize visual indexes, which may provide rapid, parallel access to a limited number of visual objects, thereby supporting a variety of spatial tasks. We examined whether faulty indexing might play a role in the severe visuospatial deficits found in Williams syndrome. We asked observers to track from one to four targets in a display of eight identical objects. Objects remained stationary (static condition) or moved randomly and independently (moving condition) for 6 s, after which observers pointed to the objects they thought were targets. People with Williams syndrome were impaired in the moving condition, but not the static condition, compared with mental-age-matched control participants. Normal children who were younger than the mental-age-matched control children did not show the same profile as individuals with Williams syndrome, which suggests that the difference between the tasks in Williams syndrome did not reflect simple developmental immaturity. Error analysis revealed that all groups had "slippery" indexes, falsely identifying target neighbors, and further suggested that people with Williams syndrome deploy fewer indexes than do people without this disorder.     

Teacher attitudes toward educational and psychological services for conduct problem children

Ninety-nine teachers participated in a survey designed to assess teacher attitudes toward and experience with a variety of strategies for dealing with conduct problem children in regular classes. Results indicated that (a) a majority of teachers favored placing conduct problem children in regular rather than special classes; (b) current sources of assistance (school psychologists, clinical psychologists, principals, parents, and other teachers) were uniformly perceived as only slightly effective in helping teachers handle problem children; and (c) of 14 alternative educational and psychological assistance delivery strategies, teachers most frequently preferred smaller classes, teacher aides, increased counseling staff, and resource classrooms.This study was funded as part of Grant No. OEG-0-71-2872 from the U.S. Office of Education. The opinions expressed in this paper are in no way intended to reflect those of the granting agency. The suggestions of Marlene Schneider, Eleanor Wilcox, Ruth Shepard, and Susan O'Leary were extremely helpful in the initial formulation of the questionnaire used in this study. The authors are further indebted to Kenneth Kaufman, Marvin R. Goldfried, Leonard Krasner, Lillian Stevens, W. E. Hedley, and R. Mullaney for allowing us to use their continuing education courses as the sources of our sample of teachers, and to the many teachers who completed the questionnaire.     

Behavioural knowledge amongst staffing groups for the care of the intellectually disabled

A multiple choice inventory was used to assess the behavioural knowledge of staff providing services to people with an intellectual disability. The relationships between performance on the inventory and other staff related variables were investigated. Results support previous research and indicate a low level of behavioural knowledge amongst direct care staff. The implications of these results are discussed in relation to staff training and selection.     

Production of lexical categories in French children with SLI and in normally developing children matched for MLU

Free speech recording samples of two groups of French SLI children aged 48 and 62 months (matched for MLU, 1.70) and two groups of French normally developing children aged 26 and 36 month (matched for MLU, 3.2) were compared to determine whether they showed a difference in the use of lexical categories. A category-by-category comparison showed few significant differences. For low MLU children, SLI produced significantly fewer infinitives, past participles, copulas, and demonstrative pronouns. For high MLU children, the difference persisted only in past participles use. As for English SLI children, French SLI children were delayed in their acquisition of verbs. However, the differences in the syntactic structure of English and French ruled out a syntactic explanation of the deficit. Phonetic problems seem to decrease with age, so they cannot be the only explanation behind the difficulties of SLI children, which probably involve cognitive problems such as processing limitations.     

Comprehension of reversible relative clauses in specifically language impaired and normally developing Greek children

This paper aims to investigate the syntactic comprehension of reversible relative clauses in a group of eight Greek children with specific language impairment (SLI) and two control groups of normally developing children matched on chronological and language age, respectively. An experiment using an acting out procedure was undertaken. Group analysis revealed that SLI children's performance is qualitatively different than that of both control groups. Interpreting the data, processes involved in syntactic comprehension are taken into consideration. It is claimed that processing demands impede SLI children's performance due to a deficit in their competence grammar.