What Can We Learn from the Study of Mexican‐Origin Families in the United States?

Mexican‐origin families are a large and rapidly increasing subgroup of the U.S. population, but they remain underrepresented in family scholarship. This paper introduces a special section of four papers on Mexican‐origin families designed to contribute to the advancement of research on how cultural, family, and gender socialization processes unfold across key developmental periods and life transitions in this cultural context. Two longitudinal studies of Mexican‐origin families provided the data for these four papers: (a) The Juntos Project, an 8‐year longitudinal study of mothers, fathers, and adolescent sibling pairs in 246 Mexican‐origin families; and (b) The Supporting MAMI Project, a study following 204 adolescent mothers and their mother figures from the third trimester of pregnancy through their young children's 5th birthdays. In this introductory paper, we highlight four themes, including (a) differential acculturation and reciprocal socialization, (b) interdependence in families, (c) the intersection of culture and gender, and (d) methodological issues. We end with suggestions for future research.     

Development of an Attitudes and Intentions Scale for Construction Skills Training Programs

Attrition is a major problem in construction skills training programs for young adults, with dropout rates ranging between 45% and 65%. Training resources could be used more efficiently if trainees' completion rates were increased. Understanding and measuring the psychological characteristics contributing to attrition allows training practitioners to implement interventions to reduce dropout. This article reports the development of an instrument designed to measure constructs that inform participants' performance and success within the construction training domain. Instrument reliability and validity as well as areas of further research are discussed.     

Improving Route Directions: The Role of Intersection Type and Visual Clutter for Spatial Reference

In this study, we ask whether references to paths and landmarks in route directions (RDs) are influenced by environmental complexity, zooming in on two aspects of the visual surroundings, namely intersection structure and visual clutter. Speakers are asked to produce (Experiment 1), understand (Experiment 2) and evaluate (Experiment 3) turn‐by‐turn RDs in a naturalistic setting (Google Street View panoramic pictures). We find that increased levels of visual clutter and intersections with complex structures trigger more references to landmarks and paths when participants produce RDs, longer decision times to determine what the next correct step in a route is and increased preference for landmarks. Finally, we discuss possible implications for automatic RD generation.Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Attentional capture by items that match episodic long-term memory representations

A remarkable ability of the human visual system is the implementation of attentional control settings (ACSs) that govern what stimuli capture or hold attention. We provide evidence that ACSs can be specified by episodic long-term memory representations. In all experiments, participants memorized 30 images of objects that they then monitored for in an attention task, inducing an episodic-based ACS. In Experiments 1a and 1b, only studied cues in a cueing task captured attention. We confirmed these cueing effects reflect capture by testing for inhibition of return in Experiment 2a, and controlled for perceptual masking by cues in Experiment 2b. In Experiment 3 we determined that ACSs are specifically supported by episodic retrieval, by dividing studied images into two sets and designating one as the targets in a rapid serial visual presentation task: Only target-set matching distractors produced a spatial blink (captured attention). These results extend our understanding of the representations specifying ACSs.     

The time course of visual influences in letter recognition

This study builds on a specific characteristic of letters of the Roman alphabet—namely, that each letter name is associated with two visual formats, corresponding to their uppercase and lowercase versions. Participants had to read aloud the names of single letters, and event-related potentials (ERPs) for six pairs of visually dissimilar upper- and lowercase letters were recorded. Assuming that the end product of processing is the same for upper- and lowercase letters sharing the same vocal response, ERPs were compared backward, starting from the onset of articulatory responses, and the first significant divergence was observed 120 ms before response onset. Given that naming responses were produced at around 414 ms, on average, these results suggest that letter processing is influenced by visual information until 294 ms after stimulus onset. This therefore provides new empirical evidence regarding the time course and interactive nature of visual letter perception processes.     

Health-Related Quality of Life,Functioning and Social Experiences in People with Psychotic Disorders

Applied Research in Quality of Life - To inform development of a model for health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in people with psychotic disorders, we aimed to assess correlations between...     

Emotion Regulation of Events Central to Identity and Their Relationship With Concurrent and Prospective Depressive Symptoms

Dispositional emotion regulation is related to the severity and maintenance of depressive symptoms. However, whether emotion regulation specific to an event highly central for an individual’s identity is predictive of depressive symptoms has not been examined. Nonclinical participants (N = 220) reported the extent to which they employed a selection of emotion regulation strategies when recalling low- and high-centrality events. Dispositional emotion regulation and depressive symptoms were also assessed. A 7-week follow-up was conducted. High-centrality events were associated with more emotion regulation efforts. Greater brooding and expressive suppression in relation to high-centrality memories predicted concurrent depressive symptoms after controlling for event valence and dispostional emotion regulation. Effects were absent for low-centrality memories. Emotion regulation in response to high-centrality memories did not predict depressive symptoms at follow-up beyond baseline depressive symptoms. Overall, the findings showed that maladaptive emotion regulation in response to memories of high-centrality events is important for explaining depressive symptomatology.     

Centre-embedded structures are a by-product of associative learning and working memory constraints: evidence from baboons (Papio Papio)

Influential theories have claimed that the ability for recursion forms the computational core of human language faculty distinguishing our communication system from that of other animals (Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002). In the present study, we consider an alternative view on recursion by studying the contribution of associative and working memory processes. After an intensive paired-associate training with visual shapes, we observed that baboons spontaneously ordered their responses in keeping with a recursive, centre-embedded structure. This result suggests that the human ability for recursion might partly if not entirely originate from fundamental processing constraints already present in nonhuman primates and that the critical distinction between animal communication and human language should more likely be found in working memory capacities than in an ability to produce recursive structures per se.     

Interactive electronic storybooks for kindergartners to promote vocabulary growth

The goals of this study were to examine (a) whether extratextual vocabulary instructions embedded in electronic storybooks facilitated word learning over reading alone and (b) whether instructional formats that required children to invest more effort were more effective than formats that required less effort. A computer-based "assistant" was added to electronic storybooks. The assistant posed extratextual vocabulary questions. Questions were presented in a multiple-choice format so that children could respond by clicking on the picture that best represented the target word. In Experiment 1 (N=20), children read stories with and without questions. Children learned more words when reading with questions than without. Expressive vocabulary was particularly affected by question insertion. In Experiment 2 (N=27), we used two methods for teaching words: one requiring more effort on the part of children (questions) and one requiring less effort ("hotspots" that provide definitions). Results revealed that questions were more beneficial than just providing a definition or synonym of the target word. Implications for designing new e-book apps are discussed.