Validation of the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment in Cypriot Clinical and non-Clinical Adolescents

Journal of Child and Family Studies - Being able to assess attachment during adolescence is important for clinical practice and research addressing adolescents’ well-being and mental health....     

Early Learning Experience and Adolescent Anxiety: A Cross-Cultural Comparison Between Japan and England

The main aim of this study was to compare the frequency of anxiety symptoms among adolescents in Japan and England, and to examine the association between early learning experiences and anxiety symptoms. A total of 299 adolescents (147 from England and 152 from Japan), aged 12 to 17 years were investigated. Results showed that adolescents in England reported significantly higher levels of anxiety symptoms than adolescents in Japan. For early learning experiences, no significant differences emerged between the two countries for parent punishment and reinforcement of anxious behavior. However, for non-anxiety physical symptoms (i.e. cold), adolescents in England scored significantly higher in parent punishment and the Japanese sample scored higher in parent reinforcement. Parent verbal transmission about the danger of anxiety and cold symptoms was more common in Japan than in England. The impact of learning experience on adolescent’s anxiety seemed to differ across cultures, which underscore the importance of cultural factors on adolescent’s anxiety.     

Word and Person Effects on Decoding Accuracy: A New Look at an Old Question

The purpose of this study was to extend the literature on decoding by bringing together two lines of research, namely person and word factors that affect decoding, using a crossed random-effects model. The sample was comprised of 196 English-speaking grade 1 students. A researcher-developed pseudoword list was used as the primary outcome measure. Because grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) knowledge was treated as person and word specific, we are able to conclude that it is neither necessary nor sufficient for a student to know all GPCs in a word before accurately decoding the word. And controlling for word-specific GPC knowledge, students with lower phonemic awareness and slower rapid naming skill have lower predicted probabilities of correct decoding than counterparts with superior skills. By assessing a person-by-word interaction, we found that students with lower phonemic awareness have more difficulty applying knowledge of complex vowel graphemes compared to complex consonant graphemes when decoding unfamiliar words. Implications of the methodology and results are discussed in light of future research.     

Training social cognition: from imitation to Theory of Mind

Evidence for successful socio-cognitive training in typical adults is rare. This study attempted to improve Theory of Mind (ToM) and visual perspective taking in healthy adults by training participants to either imitate or to inhibit imitation. Twenty-four hours after training, all participants completed tests of ToM and visual perspective taking. The group trained to inhibit their tendency to imitate showed improved performance on the visual perspective-taking test, but not the ToM test. Neither imitation training, nor general inhibition training, had this effect. These results support a novel theory of social cognition suggesting that the same self-other discrimination process underlies imitation inhibition and perspective taking. Imitation, perspective taking and ToM are all pro-social processes--ways in which we reach out to others. Therefore, it is striking that perspective taking can be enhanced by suppressing imitation; to understand another, sometimes we need, not to get closer, but to pull away.     

Predicting First Graders' Development of Calculation versus Word-Problem Performance: The Role of Dynamic Assessment

The purpose of this study was to assess the value of dynamic assessment (DA; degree of scaffolding required to learn unfamiliar mathematics content) for predicting 1(st)-grade calculations (CA) and word problems (WP) development, while controlling for the role of traditional assessments. Among 184 1(st) graders, predictors (DA, Quantity Discrimination, Test of Mathematics Ability, language, and reasoning) were assessed near the start of 1(st) grade. CA and WP were assessed near the end of 1(st) grade. Planned regression and commonality analyses indicated that for forecasting CA development, Quantity Discrimination, which accounted for 8.84% of explained variance, was the single most powerful predictor, followed by Test of Mathematics Ability and DA; language and reasoning were not uniquely predictive. By contrast, for predicting WP development, DA was the single most powerful predictor, which accounted for 12.01% of explained variance, with Test of Mathematics Ability, Quantity Discrimination, and language also uniquely predictive. Results suggest that different constellations of cognitive resources are required for CA versus WP development and that DA may be useful in predicting 1(st)-grade mathematics development, especially WP.     

Contributions of domain-general cognitive resources and different forms of arithmetic development to pre-algebraic knowledge

The purpose of this study was to investigate the contributions of domain-general cognitive resources and different forms of arithmetic development to individual differences in pre-algebraic knowledge. Children (n = 279, mean age = 7.59 years) were assessed on 7 domain-general cognitive resources as well as arithmetic calculations and word problems at start of 2nd grade and on calculations, word problems, and pre-algebraic knowledge at end of 3rd grade. Multilevel path analysis, controlling for instructional effects associated with the sequence of classrooms in which students were nested across Grades 2-3, indicated arithmetic calculations and word problems are foundational to pre-algebraic knowledge. Also, results revealed direct contributions of nonverbal reasoning and oral language to pre-algebraic knowledge, beyond indirect effects that are mediated via arithmetic calculations and word problems. By contrast, attentive behavior, phonological processing, and processing speed contributed to pre-algebraic knowledge only indirectly via arithmetic calculations and word problems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

What's social about social learning?

Research on social learning in animals has revealed a rich variety of cases where animals--from caddis fly larvae to chimpanzees--acquire biologically important information by observing the actions of others. A great deal is known about the adaptive functions of social learning, but very little about the cognitive mechanisms that make it possible. Even in the case of imitation, a type of social learning studied in both comparative psychology and cognitive science, there has been minimal contact between the two disciplines. Social learning has been isolated from cognitive science by two longstanding assumptions: that it depends on a set of special-purpose modules--cognitive adaptations for social living; and that these learning mechanisms are largely distinct from the processes mediating human social cognition. Recent research challenges these assumptions by showing that social learning covaries with asocial learning; occurs in solitary animals; and exhibits the same features in diverse species, including humans. Drawing on this evidence, I argue that social and asocial learning depend on the same basic learning mechanisms; these are adapted for the detection of predictive relationships in all natural domains; and they are associative mechanisms--processes that encode information for long-term storage by forging excitatory and inhibitory links between event representations. Thus, human and nonhuman social learning are continuous, and social learning is adaptively specialized--it becomes distinctively "social"--only when input mechanisms (perceptual, attentional, and motivational processes) are phylogenetically or ontogenetically tuned to other agents.     

The roles of categorical and coordinate spatial relations in recognizing buildings

Categorical spatial information is considered more useful for recognizing objects, and coordinate spatial information for guiding actions??for example, during navigation or grasping. In contrast with this assumption, we hypothesized that buildings, unlike other categories of objects, require both categorical and coordinate spatial information in order to be recognized. This hypothesis arose from evidence that right-brain-damaged patients have deficits in both coordinate judgments and recognition of buildings and from the fact that buildings are very useful for guiding navigation in urban environments. To test this hypothesis, we assessed 210 healthy college students while they performed four different tasks that required categorical and coordinate judgments and the recognition of common objects and buildings. Our results showed that both categorical and coordinate spatial representations are necessary to recognize a building, whereas only categorical representations are necessary to recognize an object. We discuss our data in view of a recent neural framework for visuospatial processing, suggesting that recognizing buildings may specifically activate the parieto-medial-temporal pathway.