Impact of learning orientation on African American children's attitudes toward high-achieving peers

This study examined Ogbu's widely accepted thesis that African American students reject high academic achievement because they perceive its limited utility in a world where their upward mobility is constrained by racial discrimination. Boykin's psychosocial integrity model contends that Black students value high achievement but that discrepancies between their formative cultural experiences and those imposed in school lead them to reject the modes of achievement available in classrooms. Ninety Black children completed a measure of attitudes toward students who achieve via mainstream or African American cultural values. Participants rejected the mainstream achievers and embraced the African American cultural achievers. Moreover, they expected their teachers to embrace the mainstream achievers and reject those who achieved through high-verve behavior. Results suggest that Boykin's thesis is a needed refinement to Ogbu's ideas. They indicate that Black children may reject not high achievement but some of the mainstream cultural values and behaviors on which success in mainstream classrooms is made contingent.     

Cognitive-behavioral treatment of irritable bowel syndrome

There is increasing evidence that supports the view that irritable bowel disorder (IBS) is a disorder of brain-gut function. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) has received increased attention in light of this recent shift in the conceptualization of IBS. This review has two main aims. The first is to provide a critical review of controlled trials on CBT for IBS. The second is to discuss ways of further developing CBT interventions that are more clinically relevant and meaningful to health care providers and individuals with a diagnosis of IBS. A theme from a CBT intervention will be presented to illustrate how CBT interventions can be incorporated within a larger social context. A review of CBT for IBS lends some limited support for improvement in some IBS symptoms and associated psychosocial distress. This conclusion needs to be expressed with some caution, however, in light of many methodological shortcomings including small sample sizes, inadequate control conditions and failure to identify primary versus secondary outcome measures. In addition, future studies will need to further develop more relevant CBT protocols that more fully integrate the patient's perspective and challenge social cognitions about this stigmatized disorder.     

Expectations about the future and the emotional consequences of perceiving prejudice

Three studies tested the hypothesis that possessing a pessimistic outlook on life moderates the effects of perceiving sexism on emotions and self-esteem. Across all studies, a pessimistic outlook on life (either dispositionally held or experimentally induced) served as a source of emotional vulnerability among women (Studies 1-3) and men (Study 1) faced with evidence of sexism directed against their gender group. Study 3 demonstrated that one's outlook on life influences emotional adjustment to prejudice through the cognitive appraisal process. Relative to optimists, pessimists appraised sexism as more stressful and believed they possessed fewer resources for coping with it. This research emphasizes the importance of examining sources of vulnerability and resilience in understanding emotional responses to prejudice.     

Lesion analysis of the brain areas involved in language comprehension

The cortical regions of the brain traditionally associated with the comprehension of language are Wernicke's area and Broca's area. However, recent evidence suggests that other brain regions might also be involved in this complex process. This paper describes the opportunity to evaluate a large number of brain-injured patients to determine which lesioned brain areas might affect language comprehension. Sixty-four chronic left hemisphere stroke patients were evaluated on 11 subtests of the Curtiss-Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation - Receptive (CYCLE-R; Curtiss, S., & Yamada, J. (1988). Curtiss-Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation. Unpublished test, UCLA). Eight right hemisphere stroke patients and 15 neurologically normal older controls also participated. Patients were required to select a single line drawing from an array of three or four choices that best depicted the content of an auditorily-presented sentence. Patients' lesions obtained from structural neuroimaging were reconstructed onto templates and entered into a voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM; Bates, E., Wilson, S., Saygin, A. P., Dick, F., Sereno, M., Knight, R. T., & Dronkers, N. F. (2003). Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. Nature Neuroscience, 6(5), 448-450.) analysis along with the behavioral data. VLSM is a brain-behavior mapping technique that evaluates the relationships between areas of injury and behavioral performance in all patients on a voxel-by-voxel basis, similar to the analysis of functional neuroimaging data. Results indicated that lesions to five left hemisphere brain regions affected performance on the CYCLE-R, including the posterior middle temporal gyrus and underlying white matter, the anterior superior temporal gyrus, the superior temporal sulcus and angular gyrus, mid-frontal cortex in Brodmann's area 46, and Brodmann's area 47 of the inferior frontal gyrus. Lesions to Broca's and Wernicke's areas were not found to significantly alter language comprehension on this particular measure. Further analysis suggested that the middle temporal gyrus may be more important for comprehension at the word level, while the other regions may play a greater role at the level of the sentence. These results are consistent with those seen in recent functional neuroimaging studies and offer complementary data in the effort to understand the brain areas underlying language comprehension.     

What counts as knowing? The development of conceptual and procedural knowledge of counting from kindergarten through Grade 2

The development of conceptual and procedural knowledge about counting was explored for children in kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2 (N = 255). Conceptual knowledge was assessed by asking children to make judgments about three types of counts modeled by an animated frog: standard (correct) left-to-right counts, incorrect counts, and unusual counts. On incorrect counts, the frog violated the word-object correspondence principle. On unusual counts, the frog violated a conventional but inessential feature of counting, for example, starting in the middle of the array of objects. Procedural knowledge was assessed using speed and accuracy in counting objects. The patterns of change for procedural knowledge and conceptual knowledge were different. Counting speed and accuracy (procedural knowledge) improved with grade. In contrast, there was a curvilinear relation between conceptual knowledge and grade that was further moderated by children's numeration skills (as measured by a standardized test); the most skilled children gradually increased their acceptance of unusual counts over grade, whereas the least skilled children decreased their acceptance of these counts. These results have implications for studying conceptual and procedural knowledge about mathematics.     

Repeated acute stress alters heart morphometry in male and female rats differently

Stress exerts deleterious effects on the cardiovascular system. Left ventricular hypertrophy has been identified as a risk factor for heart disease. The effects of stress on other heart parameters, including heart size and heart shape, are not well-characterized. In addition, the extent to which males and females differ in stress effects on these measures has not been examined, but may help to further explain gender differences in heart disease morbidity and mortality. The present experiment examined effects of mild daily stress on heart morphology and blood volume (obtained by ex-sanguination at decapitation) in 39 male and 40 female rats of two strains. Following 14 days of stress exposure, rats were killed and blood volume was measured. Heart length, heart weight, left ventricle cavity width, right ventricle width, lateral wall thickness, anterior wall thickness, posterior wall thickness, and septal wall thickness were measured. In males, after controlling for body weight, stress decreased heart length and left ventricle cavity width and increased septal wall thickness. In females, after controlling for body weight, stress reduced total blood volume, but did not significantly affect other heart parameters. These findings suggest that stress exposure can alter heart morphology and blood volume and that there are sex differences in these effects.     

The support gap for dual clergy couples

Within this study six levels of support for dual clergy couples with and without children were investigated. Seven dual clergy couples of several synods of the Lutheran Church in two western Canadian provinces were asked open-ended questions about the support they had received in several employment and family related areas. While findings in each of the areas varied, overall, most individuals received the most support from their spouse and little from close friends and relatives often due to physical distance. Support provided by other clergy and church administrators was mixed. Only one major difference was found between couples with and without children. The group without children were more optimistic about the support that would be provided by family and friends in the area of child care while couples with children failed to mention support from friends and family.     

Office or kitchen? Wellbeing consequences of role participation depend on role salience

In light of the emerging trend of men and women sharing work and family roles, the goal of this study is to investigate which individuals will experience a role as depleting or enriching their energy levels. We apply self-discrepancy theory and propose that role salience explains when a role will lead to exhaustion versus engagement. Exhaustion is likely when participating in a role for which salience is low, while engagement is likely when spending time on a role for which salience is high. We test this idea using a diary study whereby participants logged time spent on work and family tasks on seven consecutive days, while reporting feelings of exhaustion and engagement in the morning. For individuals with high work salience, time spent on work increased exhaustion less, and increased engagement more, as compared to individuals with low work salience. Spending time on family tasks increased exhaustion less, and increased engagement more, when work role salience was low as compared to high. Our findings suggest that wellbeing consequences of role participation depend on work role salience. We discuss how these findings advance theoretical thinking in the work–family literature and give leads for managerial practice.     

The power of affirming group values: Group affirmation buffers the self-esteem of women exposed to blatant sexism

Extending the group affirmation literature to the domain of prejudice, this study investigated whether group affirmation buffers the self-esteem of women exposed to blatant sexism. In accordance with Self-Affirmation Theory and group affirmation research, we hypothesized that when one aspect of the collective self is threatened (gender identity), self-esteem can be maintained via the affirmation of an alternative aspect of the collective self. In a 2 × 2 between-participants design, female students were randomly assigned to read about discrimination directed toward women or a non-self-relevant disadvantaged group (the Inuit). All then participated in a (fictitious) second study, in which half completed a group affirmation manipulation (wrote about the top three values of a self-defining group) and half completed a control writing exercise. The self-esteem of women who were threatened by sexism, but group affirmed, was protected from the negative effects of perceiving sexism.