Research paper

In this age of technological change and innovation which has had a major impact upon schools, together with the continuing demands of an assessment driven curriculum, are schools providing opportunities which will develop and enhance children's creative, aesthetic and spiritual experiences? It is the contention of this paper that learning through the medium of creative dance can provide an opportunity which can deepen children's spiritual awareness and provide a context for the development of a kinaesthetic intelligence which enables children to embody, and give expression to, abstract ideas and concepts. In the discussion of the initial findings from a small scale research project carried out with Y3 children, we shall see that although the children's developing spirituality is very much interconnected with their everyday lives and preoccupations, the dance work enabled them to connect with an abstract theme in a concrete way, and inspired them to create a symbolic interpretation of the Creation story.     

Resilience-Based Intervention with Underserved Children: Impact on Self-Regulation in a Randomized Clinical Trial in Schools

Resilience and emotion regulation are crucial for optimal psychosocial functioning in children. This study assessed whether a group-based intervention, the Resilience Builder Program (RBP), improved student report of emotion regulation when administered in elementary schools. Sixty-seven students aged 9–12 years (M = 10.50, SD =.74; 82.1% male, 98.5% ethnic/racial minority) were randomly assigned to receive the RBP intervention immediately or following a semester delay. Participants reported their emotional control using the How I Feel scale. Students who received the RBP reported a significant increase in their emotional control and a significant decrease in negative emotion compared to those students in the delayed treatment sample who had not yet received the intervention. Further, students indicated a strongly positive perception of the therapy.     

Impact of Child and Parent Motivation on Social Skills Training Outcome

This study explores child and parent motivation at the start of a social skills training group program and its relationship with treatment outcome. A total of 59 children (aged 7–12) participated. Parents were more aware of, distressed by, and motivated to change the presenting problem than were their children. Greater parent awareness of their child’s difficulty making and keeping friends and perceived importance of their child learning ways to make and keep more friends significantly predicted more improved social skills. Increasing parents’ awareness and perceived importance of treating the presenting problem at the start of therapy may increase treatment effectiveness.     

Using experiential optimization to build lexical representations

To account for natural variability in cognitive processing, it is standard practice to optimize a model’s parameters by fitting it to behavioral data. Although most language-related theories acknowledge a large role for experience in language processing, variability reflecting that knowledge is usually ignored when evaluating a model’s fit to representative data. We fit language-based behavioral data using experiential optimization, a method that optimizes the materials that a model is given while retaining the learning and processing mechanisms of standard practice. Rather than using default materials, experiential optimization selects the optimal linguistic sources to create a memory representation that maximizes task performance. We demonstrate performance on multiple benchmark tasks by optimizing the experience on which a model’s representation is based.

     

What Works Best for Reducing Symptoms and Improving Quality of Life? A 6-Months Follow-up Study on the Effectiveness of Group Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and Group Information and Support for Adults Suffering from Depression

A non-randomized effectiveness trial was conducted in an urban secondary care public mental health service in Ireland. The effectiveness of an 8 session group cognitive behavior therapy program (gCBT-8), where the focus was on behavioral activation and cognitive restructuring, was compared with that of an enhanced 12 session group cognitive behavior therapy program (gCBT-12), which contained additional sessions on schema work, and a 12 session information and support control group program (gIS-12) in which there was no CBT skills training. One hundred and eighty-one adults with unipolar mood disorders were allocated to gCBT-8 (N?=?67), gCBT-12 (N?=?62), or gIS-12 (N?=?52). Before and after treatment, and at 6 months follow-up participants completed the Beck Depression Inventory II (BDI-II), the Beck Anxiety Inventory, the Clinical Outcome and Routine Evaluation, the Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale, and the brief World Health Organization Quality of Life Scale. An intention-to-treat analysis of mean scores showed that the three programs had similar outcomes. There were significant improvements on all dependent variables with post-treatment gains maintained at follow-up. The three programs also led to similar remission and combined reliable improvement and remission rates on the BDI-II. It was concluded that all three programs had similar levels of effectiveness.     

Effects of aging on the relation between episodic simulation and prosocial intentions

Imagining helping a person in need can facilitate prosocial intentions. Here we investigated how this effect can change with aging. We found that, similar to young adults, older adults were more willing to help a person in need when they imagined helping that person compared to a baseline condition that did not involve helping, but not compared to a conceptual helping control condition. Controlling for heightened emotional concern in older adults revealed an age-related difference in the effect of imagining on willingness to help. While we observed age-related condition effects, we also found that the subjective vividness of scene imagery predicted willingness to help for both age groups. Our findings provide insight into the relations among episodic simulation, healthy aging, emotion, and prosociality. Implications for effects of episodic memory and aging on social decision-making are discussed.     

The relationship between non‐verbal systems of number and counting development: a neural signatures approach

Two non‐verbal cognitive systems, an approximate number system (ANS) for extracting the numerosity of a set and a parallel individuation (PI) system for distinguishing between individual items, are hypothesized to be foundational to symbolic number and mathematics abilities. However, the exact role of each remains unclear and highly debated. Here we used an individual differences approach to test for a relationship between the spontaneously evoked brain signatures (using event‐related potentials) of PI and the ANS and initial development of symbolic number concepts in preschool children as displayed by counting. We observed that individual differences in the neural signatures of the PI system, but not the ANS, explained a unique portion of variance in counting proficiency after extensively controlling for general cognitive factors. These results suggest that differences in early attentional processing of objects between children are related to higher‐level symbolic number concept development.     

False recollection in children with reading comprehension difficulties

Children with reading comprehension difficulties display impaired performance on semantic processing tasks. These impairments are assumed to reflect weaker knowledge about abstract semantic associations between words in poor comprehenders [Nation, K., and Snowling, M. (1999). Developmental differences in sensitivity to semantic relations among good and poor comprehenders: evidence from semantic priming. Cognition, 19, B1-B13.]. We examined the performance of poor comprehenders on the Deese/Roediger/McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Children studied spoken words that were semantic associates (e.g., bed, rest, and awake) or phonological associates (e.g., pole, bowl, and hole) followed by free recall and a recognition test containing nonstudied critical words (e.g., sleep and roll). Results showed reduced recall and recognition of critical words in the semantic condition but not in the phonological condition for poor comprehenders. We argue that poor comprehenders are less sensitive to abstract semantic associations between words because of reduced gist memory.     

Lexical learning in bilingual adults: the relative importance of short-term memory for serial order and phonological knowledge

Studies of monolingual speakers have shown a strong association between lexical learning and short-term memory (STM) capacity, especially STM for serial order information. At the same time, studies of bilingual speakers suggest that phonological knowledge is the main factor that drives lexical learning. This study tested these two hypotheses simultaneously in participants with variable levels of English-French bilingual proficiency. A word-nonword paired-associate learning task was administered, with nonwords obeying French phonotactic patterns. French phonological knowledge was estimated by a composite French proficiency score summarizing productive and receptive French vocabulary knowledge as well as quantitative and qualitative measures of French exposure. STM measures maximized retention of order information (serial order reconstruction) or retention of phonological item information (single nonword delayed repetition). The French proficiency score and the serial order STM measure independently predicted performance on the paired-associate learning task. These results highlight the conjoined role of phonological knowledge and serial order STM in lexical learning. Importantly, serial order STM remains a strong predictor of lexical learning, even for bilingual individuals who have broad phonological knowledge.     

Narcissistic Subtypes and Contingent Self‐Esteem: Do All Narcissists Base Their Self‐Esteem on the Same Domains?

ABSTRACT It has been suggested that there are two forms of narcissism: a grandiose subtype and a vulnerable subtype. Although these forms of narcissism share certain similarities, it is believed that these subtypes may differ in the domains upon which their self-esteem is based. To explore this possibility, the present study examined the associations between these narcissistic subtypes and domain-specific contingencies of self-worth. The results show that vulnerable narcissism was positively associated with contingencies of self-worth across a variety of domains. In contrast, the associations between grandiose narcissism and domain-specific contingencies of self-worth were more complex and included both positive and negative relationships. These results provide additional support for the distinction between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism by showing that the domains of contingent self-esteem associated with grandiose narcissism may be more limited in scope than those associated with vulnerable narcissism.