Psychosocial Stimulation: A Qualitative Study on Kenyan Mother’s Motives and Challenges to Promote Children’s Development

Interventions designed to enhance the mental and socio-emotional development of children in low and middle income countries through improving psychosocial stimulation are the subject of national and international organizations research and programs. Before new interventions can be designed and tested in low income countries, it is important to understand what psychosocial stimulation mothers are already providing, how beliefs influence the stimulation used, and what challenges are faced by mothers when trying to do this. We aimed to find out what types of stimulation are being commonly used by mothers in Kenya, alongside exploring the beliefs and associated challenges in providing psychosocial stimulation. This is a qualitative study using focus group discussions held in Kisumu, a regional urban centre in Western Kenya, with 35 mothers caring for at least one child under the age of 5 years. Mothers in this study identified four key themes of commonly employed stimulation: singing, play, dancing and story-telling. A range of challenges were raised such as ensuring their child’s basic physiological needs were met, managing marital conflict, and trusting non-familial caregivers, with mothers concerned that their child may be mistreated through accidental or purposeful harm. Findings indicate that mothers in a low income country are faced with multiple challenges when trying to provide psychosocial stimulation for their child’s development. It is important to consider these results when designing an intervention for this setting.     

Competence and confusion: How stereotype threat can make you a bad judge of your competence

Women tend to have competence doubts for masculine‐stereotyped domains (e.g., math), whereas men tend to think they can handle both feminine‐stereotyped and masculine‐stereotyped domains equally well. We suggest that perhaps women's more frequent experience with stereotype threat can partly explain why. Our results showed that when stereotype threat was primed in high school students (n = 244), there was no relationship between their performance on an academic test (the SweSAT) and their assessment of their performance (how well they did), whereas in a non‐stereotype threat condition, there was a medium‐sized relationship. The effect was similar for both men and women primed with stereotype threat. The results imply that stereotype threat undermines performance assessments.     

Neoliberal Beliefs and Perceptions of Unintended Adolescent Pregnancy after Consensual or Forced Sex

From a neoliberal perspective, young women are free to make autonomous choices and are personally responsible for the outcomes of these choices. Neoliberal ideals may appear to empower women as free sexual agents; however, an individualistic focus on self-sufficiency and personal responsibility may lead to harsh, decontextualized responses to those who experience unintended outcomes. We hypothesized that observers with stronger neoliberal beliefs would show more stigmatizing responses to an unintentionally pregnant adolescent. We also explored whether these expected associations would be moderated by whether or not the young woman chose to consent to sex. U.S. undergraduate students (n = 200) completed a measure of neoliberal beliefs and were randomly assigned to read one of two scenarios in which an adolescent became pregnant after either consensual or forced sex. As expected, participants with stronger neoliberal beliefs were more blaming toward the adolescent for becoming pregnant, felt less sympathy toward her, and had less positive attitudes about her receiving help. These associations remained after controlling for general political ideology and regardless of whether the pregnancy was due to consensual or forced sex. Our results suggest that, for the neoliberal observer, young women are held personally responsible for even uncontrollable sexual and reproductive outcomes.     

A Lot of Warmth and a Bit of Control? How Parenting Mediates the Relationship Between Parental Personality and Their Children’s Mental Health Problems

Journal of Child and Family Studies - Research has identified parental personality and parenting behaviour as important contributors to healthy child development. However, indirect associations are...     

Impaired strategic regulation of contents of conscious awareness in schizophrenia

Conscious awareness comprises two distinct states, autonoetic and noetic awareness. Schizophrenia impairs autonoetic, but not noetic, awareness. We investigated the strategic regulation of relevant and irrelevant contents of conscious awareness in schizophrenia using a directed forgetting paradigm. Twenty-one patients with schizophrenia and 21 normal controls were presented with words and told to learn some of them and forget others. In a subsequent test, they were asked to recognize all the words they had seen previously and give remember, know or guess responses according to whether they recognized words on the basis of autonoetic awareness, noetic awareness, or guessing. Overall, patients showed the same degree of a directed forgetting effect as normal subjects. However, whereas the effect was observed both for remember and know responses in normal subjects, it was observed for know, but not for remember, responses in patients. These results indicate that patients with schizophrenia exhibit an impaired strategic regulation of contents of autonetic awareness for relevant and irrelevant information.     

Semantics versus statistics in the retreat from locative overgeneralization errors

The present study investigated how children learn that some verbs may appear in the figure-locative but not the ground-locative construction (e.g., Lisa poured water into the cup; *Lisa poured the cup with water), with some showing the opposite pattern (e.g., *Bart filled water into the cup; Bart filled the cup with water), and others appearing in both (Lisa sprayed water onto the flowers; Lisa sprayed the flowers with water). Grammatical acceptability judgments were obtained for the use of each of 142 locative verbs (60 for children) in each sentence type. Overall, and for each age group individually, the judgment data were best explained by a model that included ratings of the extent to which each verb exhibits both the broad- and narrow-range semantic properties of the figure- and ground-locative constructions (relating mainly to manner and end-state respectively; Pinker, 1989) and the statistical-learning measure of overall verb frequency (entrenchment; Braine & Brooks, 1995). A second statistical-learning measure, frequency in each of the two locative constructions (pre-emption; Goldberg, 1995), was found to have no additional dissociable effect. We conclude by drawing together various theoretical proposals to arrive at a possible account of how semantics and statistics interact in the retreat from overgeneralization.     

Object and size awareness in preschool-age children

Self-awareness is a skill developed during the first few years of life. Although some research demonstrates that this ability may be incomplete in toddlers, there is little to no literature relating to preschoolers. This study tested 44 preschool-age children on 8 tasks to assess their awareness of the structural characteristics of their own size and weight as well as the size and weight of external objects. The most frequently observed behavior was for children to make an attempt at something that was inappropriate for their size and weight, but overall participants showed a better understanding of their own bodies than other objects. Both the number of attempts required to solve the problems and accuracy of their solutions demonstrated these task differences. These results indicate that the development of body awareness skills is far from complete for 3- and 4-year-olds.     

Auditory–motor learning influences auditory memory for music

In two experiments, we investigated how auditory–motor learning influences performers’ memory for music. Skilled pianists learned novel melodies in four conditions: auditory only (listening), motor only (performing without sound), strongly coupled auditory–motor (normal performance), and weakly coupled auditory–motor (performing along with auditory recordings). Pianists’ recognition of the learned melodies was better following auditory-only or auditory–motor (weakly coupled and strongly coupled) learning than following motor-only learning, and better following strongly coupled auditory–motor learning than following auditory-only learning. Auditory and motor imagery abilities modulated the learning effects: Pianists with high auditory imagery scores had better recognition following motor-only learning, suggesting that auditory imagery compensated for missing auditory feedback at the learning stage. Experiment 2 replicated the findings of Experiment 1 with melodies that contained greater variation in acoustic features. Melodies that were slower and less variable in tempo and intensity were remembered better following weakly coupled auditory–motor learning. These findings suggest that motor learning can aid performers’ auditory recognition of music beyond auditory learning alone, and that motor learning is influenced by individual abilities in mental imagery and by variation in acoustic features.     

Relating Kindergarten Attention to Subsequent Developmental Pathways of Classroom Engagement in Elementary School

We examine the relationship between children's kindergarten attention skills and developmental patterns of classroom engagement throughout elementary school in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods. Kindergarten measures include teacher ratings of classroom behavior, direct assessments of number knowledge and receptive vocabulary, and parent-reported family characteristics. From grades 1 through 6, teachers also rated children's classroom engagement. Semi-parametric mixture modeling generated three distinct trajectories of classroom engagement (n?=?1369, 50% boys). Higher levels of kindergarten attention were proportionately associated with greater chances of belonging to better classroom engagement trajectories compared to the lowest classroom engagement trajectory. In fact, improvements in kindergarten attention reliably increased the likelihood of belonging to more productive classroom engagement trajectories throughout elementary school, above and beyond confounding child and family factors. Measuring the development of classroom productivity is pertinent because such dispositions represent precursors to mental health, task-orientation, and persistence in high school and workplace behavior in adulthood.