Infant Socioeconomic Position and Quality of Life in Midlife: A 50-Year Follow-Up Study of 2079 Individuals in Denmark

Applied Research in Quality of Life - During the last decades, an important line of public health research has focused on the influence of socioeconomic position (SEP) on the quality of life (QoL)...     

The Development of Implicit Epistemologies During Early and Middle Adulthood

This study examined the development of implicit epistemologies of Finnish adults during the last ten years. It was hypothesized that specific adult experiences are stimulating for development. Moreover, a person's exploratory orientation was hypothesized to be related to development. Kitchener and King's model and method of Reflective Judgment provided tools to study adolescents' and adults' epistemologies and their possible development. Participants (N = 59) were given initial (1986–1988) and follow-up (1993–1994) Reflective Judgment interviews. The age range was from 24–50 years in the follow-up groups. The Reflective Judgment mean stage scores clearly increased during the two study periods (M₁ = 4.64,M₂ = 5.10; F(1, 58) = 32.82, p = .000). Education, in particular education beyond a person's primary profession/occupation, was a strong predictor of development. Also, encountering diversity and exploratory orientation were related to development, but their connections were more complicated. No gender differences were found. The results support the idea that positive changes in thinking and reasoning take place during adulthood.     

Following Changes in Living Conditions and Happiness in Post Communist Russia: the Russet Panel

This paper discusses the design of the Russian panel study used in this Volume. It is shown that a standard sampling procedure is used to get a representative sample of the Russian population. The questionnaire has been designed in such a way that the consequences of socio-economic changes in Russia can be observed while also reactions of the people are registered. It has also been shown that satisfaction varies considerably between people, across different domains of life and across time in Russia much more than in Western Democracies.Furthermore, we have shown that happiness and SWB questions do not measure the same. In Russia the first is more related to personal factors as the success of their marriage,while the second is more related to economic factors as the financial situation of the household. Given this difference we concluded that it makes more sense to study changes in satisfaction than happiness because the former is more connected to the socio-economic changes in the society.     

Remembering Early Childhood: How Much, How, and Why (or Why Not)

In this article, we consider recent research on three questions about people's memories for their early childhood: whether childhood amnesia is a real phenomenon, whether implicit memories survive when explicit memories do not, and why early episodic memories are sketchy. The research leads us to form three conclusions. First, we argue that childhood amnesia is a real phenomenon, as long as the term is defined clearly. Specifically, people are able to recall parts of their lives from the period between ages 2 and 5 years, but they recall less from that period than from other periods. Second, we conclude that implicit memories from early childhood may be evident even when explicit memories are not, a finding that suggests early experience may affect behavior in ways that people do not consciously recognize. Third, we argue that although young children are well known to be wonderfully efficient learners of semantic information, they have difficulty in either encoding or retrieving the interlinked aspects of events that lend them their autobiographical character. Although more evidence is needed, the relative lack of episodic memories of early childhood may be linked to maturation of prefrontal cortex.     

Evidence for frequency-based constituents in the mental lexicon: collocations involving the word of

In this paper, it is hypothesized that units larger than the traditional word, such as two-word collocations and phrases, may be stored in the mental lexicon and accessed holistically. Following previously published work on the Network or Usage-based model of lexical storage (Bybee, 1985, 1995), we suggest that the mechanism determining this constituency is the frequency with which items occur together in natural, connected speech: the collocational frequency. The present study uses a word-monitoring paradigm to investigate reaction times to the English function word of in collocations of varying levels of frequency. A significant effect of collocational frequency was observed; response latencies were longer when the target word of occurred in the very frequent collocations, indicating holistic processing of the frequent phrases. Furthermore, response latencies presented here are considerably longer than those reported in previous studies. This is explained as a result of the hypothesized holistic representation as well as a function of the use of stimuli extracted from natural conversation.