Ready for Anything the World Gives Her? : A Critical Look at Sports-Based Positive Youth Development for Girls

Girl-centered sport and physical activity programs that are grounded in a positive youth development approach have grown tremendously in the United States since the 1990s. While research on the efficacy of sports-based positive youth development is limited, recent studies conducted in the United States suggest these programs yield benefits. Our assessment of the literature and programming efforts however highlight a significant gap in the theoretical assumptions of girl-centered, sports-based positive youth development: an understanding of the complexity of sport and physical activity within a gendered context. Focusing on the U.S. context and using a feminist sociological lens, we articulate a paradox in these programs: sport participation and physical activity can improve girls’ lives along numerous psycho-social dimensions, yet in absence of attention to the social and political context of gender relations, girl-centered, sports-based positive youth development programs risk unwittingly maintaining the gender status quo. We review three specific critiques to illustrate this paradox: 1) the emphasis on the individual and the immediate context of girls’ lives masks larger systems of inequality and privilege; 2) the use of post feminist narratives, such as Girl Power, suggests girls live in a world beyond sexism; and 3) the focus on reducing the childhood “obesity epidemic” through fitness contributes to harmful fat phobic messages for girls. We offer recommendations that assist programs in leveraging their existing strengths to have a meaningful impact on girls’ lives, and that address cultural and structural factors as well as individual and interpersonal ones.     

Anomalous Evidence,Confidence Change,and Theory Change

A novel experimental paradigm that measured theory change and confidence in participants' theories was used in three experiments to test the effects of anomalous evidence. Experiment 1 varied the amount of anomalous evidence to see if “dose size” made incremental changes in confidence toward theory change. Experiment 2 varied whether anomalous evidence was convergent (of multiple types) or replicating (similar finding repeated). Experiment 3 varied whether participants were provided with an alternative theory that explained the anomalous evidence. All experiments showed that participants' confidence changes were commensurate with the amount of anomalous evidence presented, and that larger decreases in confidence predicted theory changes. Convergent evidence and the presentation of an alternative theory led to larger confidence change. Convergent evidence also caused more theory changes. Even when people do not change theories, factors pertinent to the evidence and alternative theories decrease their confidence in their current theory and move them incrementally closer to theory change.     

Procedural learning: A developmental study of motor sequence learning and probabilistic classification learning in school-aged children

In this study, we investigated motor and cognitive procedural learning in typically developing children aged 8–12 years with a serial reaction time (SRT) task and a probabilistic classification learning (PCL) task. The aims were to replicate and extend the results of previous SRT studies, to investigate PCL in school-aged children, to explore the contribution of declarative knowledge to SRT and PCL performance, to explore the strategies used by children in the PCL task via a mathematical model, and to see whether performances obtained in motor and cognitive tasks correlated. The results showed similar learning effects in the three age groups in the SRT and in the first half of the PCL tasks. Participants did not develop explicit knowledge in the SRT task whereas declarative knowledge of the cue–outcome associations correlated with the performances in the second half of the PCL task, suggesting a participation of explicit knowledge after some time of exposure in PCL. An increasing proportion of the optimal strategy use with increasing age was observed in the PCL task. Finally, no correlation appeared between cognitive and motor performance. In conclusion, we extended the hypothesis of age invariance from motor to cognitive procedural learning, which had not been done previously. The ability to adopt more efficient learning strategies with age may rely on the maturation of the fronto-striatal loops. The lack of correlation between performance in the SRT task and the first part of the PCL task suggests dissociable developmental trajectories within the procedural memory system.     

Effect of motivation on academic fluency performance in survivors of pediatric medulloblastoma

It has been proposed previously that extrinsic motivation may enable survivors of childhood medulloblastoma to significantly improve aspects of neurocognitive performance. In healthy populations, enhanced motivation has been shown to promote academic fluency, a domain likely more relevant to the educational outcomes of pediatric medulloblastoma survivors than academic skill development. The present study investigates the effect of enhanced extrinsic motivation on fluent (i.e., accurate and efficient) academic performance in pediatric medulloblastoma survivors. Participants were 36 children, ages 7–18, who had completed treatment for medulloblastoma. Participants completed a neuropsychological battery that included administration of equivalent tasks on Forms A and B of the Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Achievement. Half were randomly assigned to an incentive condition prior to the administration of Form B. Provision of a performance-based incentive resulted in statistically significant improvement, but not normalization of function, in performance on measures of academic fluency. No demographic, treatment-related, academic, neuropsychological, or self-perception variables predicted response to incentive. Findings suggest that academic performance of survivors may significantly improve under highly motivating conditions. In addition to implications for educational services, this finding raises the novel possibility that decreased motivation represents an inherent neuropsychological deficit in this population and provides a rationale for further investigation of factors affecting individual differences in motivational processes. Further, by examining effort in a context where effort is not inherently suspect, present findings also significantly contribute to the debate regarding the effects of effort and motivation on neuropsychological performance.     

Sleep Increases Susceptibility to the Misinformation Effect

When individuals witness an event and are exposed to misleading postevent information, they often incorporate the misleading information into their memory for the original event, a phenomenon known as the misinformation effect. The present study examined the role of sleep in the misinformation effect. Participants (N = 177) witnessed two events; were exposed to misleading postevent information immediately, 12 hours later the same day, 12 hours later the next day, or 24 hours later; and then took a recognition test. All groups demonstrated the misinformation effect, and this effect was larger in groups with an overnight retention interval. Signal detection analyses revealed that sleep decreased sensitivity. These results suggest that sleep increases susceptibility to the misinformation effect, which may occur because sleep results in gist‐based representations of original events or because sleep improves learning of postevent information. Implications for interviewing eyewitnesses are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Characteristics of patients in routine psycho-oncological care,and changes in outcome variables during and after their treatment

Objective: The primary aim of this study was to determine the characteristics of clients and interventions in routine psycho-oncological care. The secondary aim was to determine the course of symptomatology during and after the psychological interventions.

Design: During a period of nine months, all clients who sought help in one of the seven psycho-oncological care institutes in the Netherlands were approached to participate in the present study (N = 483). Information was gathered with respect to demographic and medical characteristics, and type and duration of the interventions. In addition, depression, anxiety, well-being, quality of life, fatigue and daily function were determined before interventions and three and nine months later.

Results and conclusions: Compared to the Dutch cancer population, patients in psycho-oncological care were more often young and female. Compared to the general Dutch population, they were highly educated and were more likely to have a partner. Clinical levels of depression, anxiety and/or fatigue were found among 83% of the patients. After three months, only 23% had completed their intervention; this figure was 62% after nine months. Symptoms decreased significantly for all outcome variables. An importance difference with randomised controlled trials is the low session frequency and the long intervention time of patients in clinical care.     

Socioemotional Correlates of Creative Potential in Preschool Age Children: Thinking Beyond Student Academic Assessments

This study examines the correlates of creative potential in preschool children, with a focus on children’s social behavior. Ninety-four preschool-aged children, their mothers, and teachers participated in the study. Mothers completed a questionnaire measure of children’s shyness, and teachers reported on children’s levels of shyness, prosocial behavior, and aggression. Children completed Torrance’s Thinking Creatively in Action and Movement. Results indicated that imagination was predicted by lower levels of shyness and greater prosocial behavior, whereas divergent thinking was predicted by older child age and teacher ratings of aggression. Implications for promoting young children’s creative potential in the classroom are discussed.