An Integral Psychology Response to Helminiak's (2001) “Treating Spiritual Issues in Secular Psychotherapy”

This article is a response to D. A. Helminiak's (2001) “Treating Spiritual Issues in Secular Psychotherapy” from the perspective of K. Wilber's integral psychology. The article consists of 3 sections: (a) a selective summary of integral psychology, including the perennial philosophy, 10 levels of development, lines of development, temporary states, types of orientations, the self, and the 4 quadrants; (b) various conceptual issues; and (c) usefulness to mental health practitioners (MHPs). Although D. A. Helminiak's endeavor to formulate a clear and functional definition of spirituality is commended, his claim of novelty is shown to be unwarranted. It is argued that K. Wilber's integral model is more comprehensive, clear, coherent, and helpful to MHPs.     

Perceived neighborhood environments and physical activity in an elderly sample

Increasing evidence indicates the importance of environmental variables in explaining physical activity. This study evaluated sex differences in perception of home and neighborhood environmental support and assessed which neighborhood environmental variables were associated with reported physical activity of elderly people. A sample of 126 women (M age = 79.1 +/- 6.6 yr.) and 55 men (M age = 76.6 +/- 7.7 yr.) were healthy, community-dwelling individuals. A questionnaire about environmental variables was administered. Physical activity was assessed on the Baecke Questionnaire. Logistic regression analysis showed that Neighborhood Safety was related to total physical activity, activity in leisure time, and sport activities. Men were also likely to be more active in leisure time than women. Neighborhood Personal Safety was associated with physical activity of these elderly people, showing a potential influence of the environmental domain in physical activity.     

History of the Hospital Real y General de Nuestra Señora de Gracia in Saragossa: Occupational Therapy Pioneer in Neurology and Psychiatry in Spain

In this article the authors describe the program of the Hospital Real y General de Nuestra Señora de Gracia in Saragossa (Spain) and its importance in the history of occupational therapy. It is believed to be the first hospital in the world to use occupations as therapy for psychiatric patients. Pinel knew about this new trend through a report by Iberti and wrote about it in his book Medico-Philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation.     

Psychometric Properties of the Mental Health Continuum-Short Form: A Study of Portuguese Speaking Children/Youths

The development of measures of children and adolescents’ subjective well-being is crucial to the conceptualization and evaluation of positive mental health. The aim of this study was to investigate the factorial structure and invariance of the Mental Health Continuum-Short Form (MHC-SF—adolescents) across children and youths. Participants were from two different samples: 208 elementary school children (sample 1) and 216 middle school youths (sample 2). Results confirmed the three-dimensional structure of subjective well-being in both samples. The three sub-scales of the MHCSF yielded high internal consistency and results from the HTMT85 indicated discriminant validity. Measurement invariance testing across three different age groups (7–8, 9–10 and 11–14 years) confirmed the full metric and approximate scalar invariance of the MHC-SF. Full scalar invariance was achieved across gender. The study also compared the latent means for mental well-being in the three age groups, and found that the younger groups showed significantly higher levels of wellbeing. The present research study strongly suggests that the MHC-SF (adolescents) is an appropriate instrument to measure the positive mental health and well-being of children and pre-adolescents as multidimensional construct.     

Preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis

Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences ([la petite ferme ] [est très jolie] ‘the small farm is very nice’ vs. [la petite] [ ferme la fenêtre] ‘the little girl closes the window’ – brackets indicate prosodic boundaries). Although these sentences start with the same three words, ferme is a noun (farm) in the former but a verb (to close) in the latter case. The only difference between these sentence beginnings is the prosodic structure, that reflects the syntactic structure (with a prosodic boundary just before the critical word when it is a verb, and just after it when it is a noun). Crucially, all words following the homophone were masked, such that prosodic cues were the only disambiguating information. Children successfully exploited prosodic information to assign the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, in both an oral completion task (4.5‐year‐olds, Experiment 1) and in a preferential looking paradigm with an eye‐tracker (3.5‐year‐olds and 4.5‐year‐olds, Experiment 2). These results show that both groups of children exploit the position of a word within the prosodic structure when computing its syntactic category. In other words, even younger children of 3.5 years old exploit phrasal prosody online to constrain their syntactic analysis. This ability to exploit phrasal prosody to compute syntactic structure may help children parse sentences containing unknown words, and facilitate the acquisition of word meanings.     

Cumulative risk disparities in children's neurocognitive functioning: a developmental cascade model

The current longitudinal study examined the role of cumulative social risk on children's theory of mind (ToM) and executive functioning (EF) across early development. Further, we also tested a cascade model of development in which children's social cognition at 18 months was hypothesized to predict ToM and EF at age 4.5 through intermediary language skills at age 3. We then examined whether this developmental mechanism varied as a function of social risk status. Participants were 501 children recruited when they were newborns, at which point eight psychosocial risk factors were assessed and combined into a metric of cumulative social disadvantage. Families were followed up at 18 months, at which point four social‐cognitive skills were assessed using developmentally sensitive tasks: joint attention, empathy, cooperation, and self‐recognition. Language was measured at age 3 using a standardized measure of receptive vocabulary. At age 3 and 4.5, EF and ToM were measured using previously validated tasks. Results showed that there were notable cumulative risk disparities in overall neurocognitive skill development, and these effects became more differentiated over time. Support was also found for a developmental mechanism wherein the effect of social cognition at 18 months on ToM and EF in the preschool period operated specifically through children's receptive language ability at age 3. This pathway functioned similarly for children with both low‐ and high‐risk backgrounds. These results extend previous findings by documenting the role of cumulative social disadvantage on children's neurocognition and the pathways that link key neurocognitive abilities across early development.