Trajectories leading to school-age conduct problems

The present study applied a semiparametric mixture model to a sample of 284 low-income boys to model developmental trajectories of overt conduct problems from ages 2 to 8. As in research on older children, 4 developmental trajectories were identified: a persistent problem trajectory, a high-level desister trajectory, a moderate-level desister trajectory, and a persistent low trajectory. Follow-up analyses indicated that initially high and low groups were differentiated in early childhood by high child fearlessness and elevated maternal depressive symptomatology. Persistent problem and high desister trajectories were differentiated by high child fearlessness and maternal rejecting parenting. The implications of the results for early intervention research are discussed, with an emphasis on the identification of at-risk parent-child dyads.     

Arguments for adjuncts

It is commonly assumed across the language sciences that some semantic participant information is lexically encoded in the representation of verbs and some is not. In this paper, we propose that semantic obligatoriness and verb class specificity are criteria which influence whether semantic information is lexically encoded. We present a comprehensive survey of the English verbal lexicon, a sentence continuation study, and an on-line sentence processing study which confirm that both factors play a role in the lexical encoding of participant information.     

Preference for human direct gaze in infant chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

We studied gaze perception in three infant chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), aged 10-32 weeks, using a two-choice preferential-looking paradigm. The infants were presented with two photographs of a human face: (a) with the eyes open or closed, and (b) with a direct or an averted gaze. We found that the chimpanzees preferred looking at the direct-gaze face. However, in the context of scrambled faces, the infants showed no difference in gaze discrimination between direct and averted gazes. These findings suggest that gaze perception by chimpanzees may be influenced by the surrounding facial context. The relationship between gaze perception, face processing, and the adaptive significance of gaze perception are discussed from an evolutionary perspective.     

Learning about life and death in early childhood

have argued that young children initially understand biological phenomena in terms of vitalism, a mode of construal in which "life" or "life-force" is the central causal-explanatory concept. This study investigated the development of vitalistic reasoning in young children's concepts of life, the human body and death. Sixty preschool children between the ages of 3 years, 7 months and 5 years, 11 months participated. All children were initially given structured interviews to assess their knowledge of (1) human body function and (2) death. From this sample 40 children in the Training group were taught about the human body and how it functions to maintain life. The Control group (n=20) received no training. All 60 children were subsequently reassessed on their knowledge of human body function and death. Results from the initial interviews indicated that young children who spontaneously appealed to vitalistic concepts in reasoning about human body functioning were also more sophisticated in their understanding of death. Results from the posttraining interviews showed that children readily learned to adopt a vitalistic approach to human body functioning, and that this learning coincided with significant development in their understanding of human body function, and of death. The overall pattern of results supports the claim that the acquisition of a vitalistic causal-explanatory framework serves to structure children's concepts and facilitates learning in the domain of biology.     

Influence of consonantal context on the pronunciation of vowels: a comparison of human readers and computational models

In two experiments, we found that college students' pronunciations of vowels in nonwords are influenced both by preceding and following consonants. The predominance of rimes in previous studies of reading does not appear to arise because readers are unable to pick up associations that cross the onset-rime boundary, but rather because English has relatively few such associations. Comparisons between people's vowel pronunciations and those produced by various computational models of reading showed that no model provided a good account of human performance on nonwords for which the vowel shows contextual conditioning. Possible directions for improved models are suggested.     

An experiential approach to the inpatient anger management group

Groups that target aggression on the inpatient milieu usually use psycho-educational and cognitive-behavioral techniques. In contrast, this article presents an experiential approach that targets the moment-by-moment experience within the inpatient group. It makes unique use of group-closing relaxation exercises that facilitate cohesion, consolidate the affectively charged material generated during the session, and reorganize patients' emotional/cognitive understanding of themselves and the world around them. These groups also give patients the opportunity to negotiate the affective residue associated with past aggressive acts, and the opportunity to examine the personal meaning and underlying assumptions behind ongoing group interactions. We describe several techniques or modes of intervention. The authors also use case examples to illustrate the theory, technique, and impact the approach can have on its members.     

The construct validity of depressive personality disorder

This study examined the construct validity of depressive personality disorder (DPD: American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Adult psychiatric outpatients (N = 900) underwent comprehensive Axis I and II evaluations and provided data on 4,768 of their 1st-degree relatives. Despite modest overlap, DPD was not redundant with any Axis I or II disorder. Participants with DPD exhibited more Axis I and Axis II comorbidity, and greater psychosocial dysfunction, than participants without DPD. Relatives of participants with DPD had higher rates of mood disorders, alcohol abuse, and antisocial personality. Results are consistent with findings of several other similar investigations. The authors argue that DPD is a valid construct and should be conceptualized as a personality disorder as opposed to a mood disorder.     

Effects of daily events on mood states in major depressive disorder

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is characterized by high negative affect (NA) and low positive affect (PA), but little is known about emotional reactivity in daily life. The authors used experience sampling methodology to investigate changes in NA and PA following minor daily events in MDD compared with healthy participants. Contrary to expectation, MDD participants did not report more frequent negative events, although they did report fewer positive events. Multilevel regression showed that both NA and PA responses to negative events were blunted in the MDD group, whereas responses to positive events were enhanced. NA responses to negative events persisted longer in MDD participants. Depressed participants with a positive family history or longer current episodes showed relatively greater NA responses to negative events.