Mother and self-representations: investigating associations with symptomatic behavior and academic competence in middle childhood

This article reports two studies examining the content and structural aspects of maternal and self-representations in middle childhood in two prospective studies of 9 to 11-year-old children, their stability over time and interrelations, and their contribution to symptomatology and academic functioning. In Study 1 (N=169), content and structural dimensions of participants' open-ended narratives of self and mother were assessed, and their factor structure was replicated across two consecutive measurement waves carried out a year apart. In Study 2 (N=137), using an independent sample, the authors investigated the associations of self- and maternal representations with teachers' subsequent reports of children's internalizing and externalizing symptomatology and academic competence. It was assumed that dimensions of self-representations played a mediating role in the prediction of children's symptomatology and competence by their maternal representations. Results corroborated the existence of interdependent but distinct representations of self and mother in middle childhood, as well as the stability over time of the structural and thematic aspects within each representation. The content of the self- and maternal representations was found to associate with observed symptomatic behavior, while their structure associated with children's academic competence. In addition, results indicated that self-representation content mediates the association of maternal representation content with subsequent symptomatic behavior. Findings are discussed in the light of the differentiation and interdependence of self- and maternal representations in middle childhood.     

Collaboration Talk: The Folk Theories of Nano Research

The nano initiative in the US and elsewhere encourages and promotes various forms of multi-stakeholder activities, such as industrial collaborations. Forming part of the discourse of expectations around emerging technologies, collaboration is an important resource holding together different practices of knowledge production. In the conversations between policy and science, collaboration becomes a measurable entity and a measure in itself, figuring in the evaluations of the performance of individual faculty and research centres; however, the policy metaphor of ‘collaboration’ stands for a variety of different forms and shapes of interactions between university and industry. From a discourse analysis perspective, ‘folk theories’ of nano collaboration help to explore the dynamics of the university/industry boundary in the scientific organisational discourse as in a recent series of interactions with scientists, university officials and technology transfer officers in a number of US universities. What does the introduction of the new entity (nano) mean for scientists, and for university practices of technology transfer and commercialisation, in terms of trying to accommodate individual ‘nano’ cases into university regulations and procedures? How are these practices and experiences discussed in terms of collaboration? Assessments of value of collaboration ranged between polarised views, raising questions about occasions, audiences and communities of assessors invoked in the construction of acceptable accounts of nano collaboration. Metaphors and analogies were used to mobilise specific meanings in the discourses of the innovative potential of emerging fields. As such, assessments of the potential of terms pertinent to the emerging discourses, such as collaboration, would be better based on the assumption of shared meanings, not fixed and given, but actively achieved.     

Perceived control over personal goals in Russian and American college students

This study investigated cultural variations in perceived control over personal goals in Russian and American college students. Several appraisal dimensions of personal goals were studied including goals’ importance, their attainability, and sources of control over goal attainment, such as self, others, luck, and fate. The association between assimilative (tenacious goal pursuit) and accommodative (flexible goal adjustment) control strategies and perceived attainability of goals was also examined. The results indicated that both Russian and American students gave higher priority to work‐ and education‐related goals and lower priority to the familial goal. In both samples, the familial goal was the most influenced and health was the least influenced by luck/chance and fate. Overall, American students were more optimistic about the perceived probability to attain their goals, which may be affected by a cultural tendency for self‐enhancement and positive outlook. Russian students had a stronger belief in control by luck/chance and fate over personal goals, which coincides with a less agentic orientation of Russian culture. Regardless of culture and goal content, goal importance was associated with greater perceived success in goal attainment. However, control strategies (assimilative and accommodative) as well as internal control differentially predicted perceived attainability of goals depending on the goals’ content. For both Russians and Americans, perceived attainability of education‐related goals was associated with assimilative strategies and internal control; leisure was associated with accommodative strategies and health‐related goals were associated with internal control. Characteristics of cultural contexts accountable for crosscultural differences in perceived control over personal goals are discussed.     

Human food preferences and cultural identity: The case of Aragón (Spain)

This research aims to analyze the relationship between sociocultural values and human food preferences. The latter, as shown in this paper, are greatly influenced by cultural identity. This work stems from a theoretical context that originated in Europe and the United States towards the mid‐twentieth century, within the field of the anthropology of food. A qualitative and quantitative analysis has been performed in the Comunidad Autónoma de Aragón (Spain). Research methods include focus groups, in‐depth interviews, participant observation, and a questionnaire that was handed out to a representative sample of the Aragonese population (816 people over 21 years of age; confidence level of 95.5% and error margin of ±3.5). Regarding the research outcome, a highly significant qualitative and quantitative connection has been found between food selection and cultural identity. In other words, people prefer to consume foods that are symbolically associated with their own culture, in order to reinforce their sense of belonging. Although this study has been carried out in Aragón, it is our belief that the results can be generalized to other areas. The originality and interest of our findings are notable considering that, to date, few works have analyzed the sociocultural factors motivating food behavior. Moreover, these results could be used by public and private organizations to meet objectives such as health promotion and product marketing.     

Effect of Short-Term Training on Reaching Behavior in Infants: A Randomized Controlled Clinical Trial

The purpose of this study was to test the effect of short-term training on reaching behavior in infants at the onset of reaching. The study was a single-blind, parallel group design, randomized controlled clinical trial. Thirty healthy infants were randomly assigned to a social control group (n = 15) or a reaching training group (n = 15). Infants began the study up to 3 days after the onset of reaching and were assessed three times across 2 days: pretraining (before training), posttraining 1 (after 1 session of training), and posttraining 2 (after 3 sessions of training). The reaching training group received 3 sessions of training by a physical therapist while the control group received a similar amount of time sitting in the therapist's lap. The data were analyzed using repeated-measures analyses of variance, and independent-samples tests with Bonferroni adjustments. Short-term training resulted in increased frequency of object contacts, shorter and smoother reaches, and improved hand positioning. The few short training sessions likely provided opportunities for infants to explore and learn to select movements from their existing movement repertoire. These results demonstrate that adaptive changes in infants' novel behaviors can emerge rapidly, and highlight the need for increased understanding of how to most effectively time early interventions.     

“We will work for you” – Social influence may suppress individual food preferences in a communicative situation in dogs

The level of motivation (i.e. incentive power) is thought to be one of the most important factors affecting performance and learning in various tasks. We investigated whether reward quality has an effect on the performance of family dogs in a two-way object choice test in which they can find the hidden food by relying on distal momentary human pointing cues. In three experiments we varied (1) the type of food reward according to the subjects’ own preference; (2) the quality of the reward offered at the same time in the indicated and not-indicated locations; and (3) the order of the high or low quality rewards in consecutive sessions. In Experiment 1, we first tested whether dogs prefer one kind of reward over another. Then one group was tested with the ‘preferred’ food as reward in the indicated bowl, while dogs in the other group received the ‘non-preferred’ food as reward. We did not find any difference between the performance and choice latencies of the two groups. In Experiment 2 for the first group, the indicated bowl contained a piece of carrot and the not-indicated bowl was empty. In the second group the indicated bowl contained carrot, but the not-indicated bowl contained sausage. According to a preliminary preference test, most dogs prefer sausage over carrot invariably. After 20 trials, the two groups performed surprisingly similarly. There was no difference found between groups in the number of correct choices, incorrect choices and non-choices. However, the comparison between the first and last five trials revealed that subjects who found sausage when they chose the not-indicated bowl (did not follow the pointing) chose the non-indicated bowl significantly more often toward the end of their test session. In Experiment 3, each dog received two sessions with 12 pointing trials in each. For the first session, one group was rewarded with sausage and the other with carrot upon choosing the indicated bowl. In the second session, the indicated bowl contained dry dog food for both groups. We found that correct choices and response latencies did not change over two sessions in the ‘sausage’ group. In the ‘carrot’ group, the dogs chose faster in the second session, but their performance did not improve; in fact, they chose the not-indicated bowl more often than the indicated bowl. As a conclusion, we can say that reward quality had some effect on dogs’ choice behavior in these experiments. The drop in their performance was not drastic, taking into account the general refusal to eat one of the ‘rewards’ (carrot) during the preference tests and also during the test trials. It seems that incentive contrast may play a relatively minor role in dog-human social interactions. Appropriate reward quality can be very important in asocial problem solving tasks, but, when interacting with humans, following human signals may override the effect of changed incentive power.     

Performance in Autobiographical Memory of Older Adults with Depression Symptoms

The aim of this study was to compare the performance in the Autobiographical Memory Test in older adults with high scores on depression symptoms (HDS) compared with a matched group with low scores on depression symptoms (LDS) according to the clinical cut‐off of the Centre for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale. Participants were asked to generate specific autobiographical memories in response to a series of positive and negative cue words. Latencies of responses for each item were also scored. LDS participants showed a higher proportion of specific memories than HDS participants. Latencies of responses to positive and negative cues were greater for HDS than LDS. Specific autobiographical memory was positively associated with Life Satisfaction. Cognitive emotional changes in the function of memory with age are suggested as a possible explanation for the findings. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Conditional Associative Learning of Spatial and Object Information in Children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

The present study assessed frontostriatal mediated memory functions in children with ADHD (N = 12) and healthy control participants (N = 12) using two tests of conditional associative learning (i.e., object and spatial) that shared similar stimulus-response association structures but that differed in terms of the demands placed upon strategic processes. Children with ADHD displayed normal performance on the object learning task but were impaired on the spatial learning task that placed greater demands on internally derived strategic processes. Secondary analyses further indicated that this strategic processing impairment cannot be attributed specifically to perseverative or working memory errors but rather appears to be related to a more general inability to maintain a high degree of consistency in responding across trials. Although the results of this study must be interpreted in light of the small sample sizes, they suggest that ADHD does not produce a basic deficit in acquiring stimulus-response associations previously shown to be associated with basal ganglia dysfunction. Rather, these findings suggest that the impaired conditional associative learning performance of children with ADHD is attributable to deficits in strategic processes previously been found to be dependent upon the integrity of the prefrontal cortex.     

Poor Readers but Compelled to Read: Stroop Effects in Developmental Dyslexia

We studied a group of 24 children with dyslexia in second to fifth primary school grades by using a discrete-trial computerized version of the Stroop Color-Word Test. Since the classic Stroop effect depends on the interference of reading with color naming, one would expect these children to show no interference or, at least, less interference than normal readers. Children with dyslexia showed, however, a Stroop effect larger than normal readers of the same age. This suggests that reading, although difficult and slow, is an inescapable step that precedes naming both in poor and in normal readers.