Emergent Literacy and Early Writing Skills

In the present study, the authors aimed to assess the short- and long-term predictive power of the various components of an emergent literacy model on early writing abilities in a language with a mainly transparent orthography (Italian). Emergent literacy skills were assessed in 72 children (M age = 5.05 years, SD = ± .03) who were followed longitudinally from preschool to the end of the first grade of primary school. Their early writing abilities (orthographic correctness in writing individual words) and their advanced writing abilities (orthographic correctness in text writing) were tested at the beginning and at the end of the school year. Multiple stepwise and logistic regression analyses were conducted to evaluate the predictive capacities of emergent literacy abilities on early and advanced writing competences. Results show that notational competence is a strong predictor of early writing skills and that phonological competence only has an effect insofar as it is integrated with notational competence. Emergent literacy competences do not significantly predict orthographic errors in advanced text writing. This research allows for reconsideration of the importance of phonological awareness and gives a central role to notational competence in predicting early writing competence.     

Pete the diesel: Psychotherapy with a severely disturbed five-year-old boy

The psychic significance of the figure of the grandmother in psychodynamic psychotherapy has received scant attention. This paper develops the concept of the ‘grandmaternal transference’ in parent–infant psychotherapy and explores its identification, its possible functions and its therapeutic significance. The grandmaternal transference has special relevance to parent–infant psychotherapy since the grandmother often represents both the mother’s mother and the child’s grandmother and offers a unique third position between mother and child. Three clinical vignettes illustrate how the grandmaternal transference may operate in this third position. In the first vignette, the therapist becomes in the transference a containing grandmother thereby facilitating maternal containment. In the second case, the therapist may be experienced as a differentiating grandmother able to help mother and infant with separation and individuation. In the third one, the therapist is transferentially experienced as a paternal grandmother who acts as a pseudo-father able to embody the paternal function. In each of these positions, the transference and countertransference – whether positive or negative – require that the therapist responds to rather than enacts the grandmaternal role. The three configurations of the grandmaternal transference have different clinical manifestations and offer different therapeutic ports of entry.     

Young at heart,old at work? Relations between age, (meta-)stereotypes,self-categorization,and retirement attitudes

The aims of this study were to examine how workers' negative age stereotypes (i.e., denying older workers' ability to develop) and negative meta-stereotypes (i.e., beliefs that the majority of colleagues feel negative about older workers) are related to their attitudes towards retirement (i.e., occupational future time perspective and intention to retire), and whether the strength of these relationships is influenced by workers' self-categorization as an “older” person. Results of a study among Dutch taxi drivers provided mixed support for the hypotheses. Negative meta-stereotypes, but not negative age stereotypes, were associated with fewer perceived opportunities until retirement and, in turn, a stronger intention to retire. Self-categorization moderated the relationships between negative age (meta-)stereotypes and occupational future time perspective. However, contrary to expectations, the relations were stronger among workers with a low self-categorization as an older person in comparison with workers with a high self-categorization in this regard. Overall, results highlight the importance of psychosocial processes in the study of retirement intentions and their antecedents.     

The Expanding World of Edward Tronick

Edward Tronick operates at the interface of empirical analysis of mother–infant communication, systems theories, and psychoanalysis. He has been a leader in the articulation of the implications of systems views for child development research. Systems views of mother–infant interaction, and of development more broadly, increasingly provide one theoretical underpinning for psychoanalysis. His work has enriched our understanding of interactive models of the dyad, of development, and of the mind. He has made a pivotal contribution to the development of a relational systems approach to infant research and its implications for adult treatment.     

Distinct and shared cognitive functions mediate event- and time-based prospective memory impairment in normal ageing

Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember to perform an action at a specific point in the future. Regarded as multidimensional, PM involves several cognitive functions that are known to be impaired in normal ageing. In the present study we set out to investigate the cognitive correlates of PM impairment in normal ageing. Manipulating cognitive load, we assessed event- and time-based PM, as well as several cognitive functions, including executive functions, working memory, and retrospective episodic memory, in healthy participants covering the entire adulthood. We found that normal ageing was characterised by PM decline in all conditions and that event-based PM was more sensitive to the effects of ageing than time-based PM. Whatever the conditions, PM was linked to inhibition and processing speed. However, while event-based PM was mainly mediated by binding and retrospective memory processes, time-based PM was mainly related to inhibition. The only distinction between high- and low-load PM cognitive correlates lies in an additional, but marginal, correlation between updating and the high-load PM condition. The association of distinct cognitive functions, as well as shared mechanisms with event- and time-based PM, confirm that each type of PM relies on a different set of processes.     

Mediator-based encoding strategies in source monitoring in young and older adults

Past research has examined the contribution of mediator-based encoding strategies (interactive imagery and sentence generation) to individual (particularly age-related) differences in associative memory exclusively in the paired-associates paradigm. In the present study, we examined young and older adults' mediator-based strategy use on source-monitoring tasks. Participants spontaneously used mediator-based strategies to encode about 30% to 40% of word-source pairs and were able to follow instructions to use the specific mediator-based strategy of interactive imagery; mediator-based strategy use was associated with higher source memory and explained variance in source memory. There were no age-related differences in the patterns of mediator-based strategy production and utilization. Age-related differences in source memory were explained by age-related declines in the ability to bind information in memory (incidental memory for digit-symbol associations) but not by encoding strategy production. Results underscore the importance of assessing encoding strategy use for understanding individual differences in source memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Emotional information in body and background hampers recognition memory for faces

Emotional influences on memory for events have long been documented yet surprisingly little is known about how emotional signals conveyed by contextual cues influence memory for face identity. This study investigated how positively and negatively valenced contextual emotion cues conveyed by body expressions or background scenes influence face memory. The results provide evidence of emotional context influence on face recognition memory and show that faces encoded in emotional (either fearful or happy) contexts (either the body or background scene) are less well recognized than faces encoded in neutral contexts and this effect is larger for body context than for scene context. The findings are compatible with the hypothesis that emotional signals in visual scenes trigger orienting responses which may lead to a less elaborate processing of featural details like the identity of a face, in turn resulting in a decreased facial recognition memory.     

Specificity of autobiographical memory and mood disturbance in adolescents

The combined perception of affective information provided by seeing a facial expression and hearing a tone of voice presents us with a phenomenon that has received little systematic attention in the laboratory. We argue that although the FLMP appears good at modelling the presently available data, more complex theoretical questions must be raised. We discuss the theoretical shortcomings of the FLMP and envisage two other theoretical frameworks that could guide future research.