The quality of sucking in infants with colic

Feeding problems have been reported in infants with colic. The purpose of this study was to examine the nutritive sucking pattern of infants identified as having colic. Twenty-nine infants (16 with colic and 13 controls) between the ages of 1 to 3 months, being bottle-fed by their mothers, were observed by a blind examiner. We hypothesized that infants with colic would show greater disorganization in nutritive sucking and show greater variability in sucking rate than infants without colic, as assessed by the revised Neonatal Oral Motor Assessment Scale (NOMAS). Infants with colic were found to present a disorganized sucking pattern; namely, a lack of rhythmical movement and a difference in amount of sucks per burst than infants without colic. Methods of intervention are suggested.     

Assessing interactional competencies: The early social-communication scales

Interactional competencies that develop in the first two years of life provide a foundation for all further social and communicative developments. Their normal acquisition, especially in the handicapped, can not be taken for granted. If delays in social-communicative development can be identified early in life and changes made in how the social environment interacts with the child, intervention may effectively facilitate social development. However, to accomplish this, both a model for describing and an instrument for assessing interactional competencies are needed. A recently developed set of scales, organized according to a cognitive-developmental framework and drawing upon recent research literature, is described in terms of its organization and content. Results that support the cognitive model underlying the set of scales are reported. The paper concludes with a consideration of potential criticisms that may apply to such a theoretically based instrument.     

Promoting the underestimated: A vignette study on the importance of the need for affiliation to successful leadership

Research on the relationship of implicit motives and effective leadership emphasises the importance of a socialised need for power, whereas high levels of the need for affiliation are assumed to thwart a leader’s success. In our study, we experimentally analysed the impact of leaders’ socialised need for power and their need for affiliation on perceptions of transformational leadership and various success indicators. Using paper-people vignettes, we contrasted leaders characterised by either motive with those concerned with personalised power or achievement. Results based on N?=?80 employees show that leaders high in socialised power were rated more successful and elicited more identification and organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) in followers, and that in most cases this effect was mediated by perceptions of transformational leadership. For all outcomes but OCB, findings remained unchanged when affiliation-motivated leaders were considered. Exploratory analyses contrasting socialised power-motivated and affiliation-motivated leaders show that with regard to attitudinal outcomes affiliation-motivated leaders were, on average, as effective as socialised power-motivated ones.

     

What moderates the attainment gap? The effects of social identity incompatibility and practical incompatibility on the performance of students who are or are not Black,Asian or Minority Ethnic

Social Psychology of Education - A successful journey through higher education is, for many, a once in a lifetime opportunity for social mobility. Unfortunately, one notable feature of higher...     

Taxonomies of aggressive behavior: A preliminary report

It has been widely and regularly suggested that aggression is not a unitary concept but rather an omnibus term concealing important and distinct subclasses of behavior. Psychologists have offered various categorical schemes highlighting motivation and form as distinguishing criteria. Many writers have also noted the social relativity of dermitions of classes of aggression and called for a consideration of lay conceptions of aggressive behavior. The present paper explores the correspondence between psychologists' and laypersons' categorizations of aggressive acts. Ten short scenarios of aggression were generated to embody systematic permutations of form and motive as suggested by the published work of social psychologists. Subjects rated every pairwise combination in terms of perceived similarity. The data were subjected to three-factor, multidimensional scaling. The resulting structure indicated that subjects' ratings were not random and reflected consideration of motive (hostile, normative, instrumental, status) and of direct versus indirect form. The data were thus in close correspondence with the classifications generated by psychologists. The desirability of refining this technique and extending it to other cultural and subcultural groups is discussed.     

Rules versus cognitive structure as bases for children's performances on probability problems

The present study compared two hypotheses about children's solutions to Piaget and Inhelder's (1975) two-set alternative choice probability problems. The first was that children follow rules that specify a temporally ordered sequence of tests and decisions (Siegler, 1981). One prediction of rules is that children who know strategies that combine variables within sets (e.g., ratio or subtraction strategies) will only use them on problems that require such strategies (conflict problems), whereas lower level (nonconflict) problems will be solved by directly comparing the values of variables between sets. The second hypothesis was that once children develop knowledge of within-set solutions to probability problems, they apply them to both conflict and nonconflict problems. The results supported the latter hypothesis. The majority of children who solved conflict problems using within-set strategies explained at least one nonconflict problem by referring to within-set combinations. Results were discussed in terms of their implications for cognitive development and for instruction.     

Creative Change: The Life and Work of Four Novelists: Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Barbara Pym, and Henry Roth

Robert Kastenbaum has argued that we need to take a life-span approach to the lives of artists in order to determine what factors affected their creativity. To that end, I briefly review the lives of four writers, Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Barbara Pym, and Henry Roth. Each followed a different pattern: Austen wrote productively until her early death; Forster ceased to write novels after his midlife success; Barbara Pym continued to write until her death from cancer; and Henry Roth restarted his moribund career in his seventies. These differences suggest that creativity is closely connected to life events and the artist's psychological state of mind.