Examining the Importance of Intentionally Structuring the Youth Sport Context to Facilitate Positive Youth Development

Researchers argue that sport must be deliberately structured to teach life skills. The purpose of this study was to examine differences in program quality and positive developmental outcomes across 3 youth programming contexts (intentional sport, nonintentional sport, intentional leadership) pertaining to the importance of intentionally teaching life skills. Researchers conducted 184 observations, and 377 youth completed 2 questionnaires. Results indicated intentionally structured programs scored higher on program quality and positive youth development outcomes than nonintentionally structured programs, with intentional sport scoring significantly higher on some measures of program quality and positive youth development than leadership programs. Practical implications and future research areas are discussed.     

Rights and Restrictions: Temporary Agricultural Migrants and Trade Unions’ Activism in Canada and Spain

In the last two decades, temporary worker programs have experienced an unprecedented expansion as instruments of what is defined as the migration management approach. Various migrant rights activists have voiced concerns about the treatment of temporary migrants in these programs and taken initiative to advance their rights. For some migrant rights advocates, it is the temporary nature of migration that is primarily responsible for the rights deficit. Yet, other migrant rights activists accept the temporariness of labour migration while trying to ensure that migrants receive legal protections for their work rights and that these protections are enforced. Trade unions are among the actors who try to protect and advance temporary migrants’ labour rights, but their role in supporting or challenging the principles of temporary migration governance has been neglected in the scholarly literature. The article addresses this gap by highlighting the divergent position of Canadian and Spanish Unions on temporariness of this type of migration. As the article argues, the difference is related to the following four factors: (1) the degree to which the unions in question are institutionally embedded in immigration policy-making, (2) the social environment (that is, discourses on temporariness advanced by other unions and grassroots organizations), (3) the degree of protectionism unions express vis-à-vis new immigrant flows and (4) whether regulated temporary migration is contrasted with permanent or unauthorized migration.     

A Social Priming Data Set With Troubling Oddities

A recent paper by Chatterjee, Rose, and Sinha (2013) reported impressively large “money priming” effects: incidental exposure to concepts relating to cash or credit cards made participants much less generous with their time and money (after cash primes) or much more generous (after credit card primes ). Primes also altered participants’ choices in a word-stem completion task. To explore these effects, we carried out re-analyses of the raw data. A number of strange oddities were brought to light, including a dramatic similarity of the filler word-stem completion responses produced by the 20 subjects who contributed most to the priming effects. We suggest that these oddities undermine the credibility of the paper and require further investigation.     

Ethnicity-Related Sources of Stress and Their Effects on Well-Being

Early research on ethnicity focused on the stereotyped thinking, prejudiced attitudes, and discriminatory actions of Euro-Americans. Minority-group members were viewed largely as passive targets of these negative reactions, with low self-esteem studied as the main psychological outcome. By contrast, recent research has increasingly made explicit use of stress theory in emphasizing the perspectives and experiences of minority-group members. Several ethnicity-related stressors have been identified, and it has been found that individuals cope with these threats in an active, purposeful manner. In this article, we focus on ethnicity-related stress stemming from discrimination, from stereotypes, and from conformity pressure arising from one's own ethnic group. We discuss theory and review research in which examination of ethnicity-related outcomes has extended beyond self-esteem to include psychological and physical well-being.     

Infant gaze following depends on communicative signals: An eye‐tracking study of 5‐ to 7‐month‐olds in Vanuatu

Gaze is considered a crucial component of early communication between an infant and her caregiver. When communicatively addressed, infants respond aptly to others’ gaze by following its direction. However, experience with face‐to‐face contact varies across cultures, begging the question whether infants’ competencies in receiving others’ communicative gaze signals are universal or culturally specific . We used eye‐tracking to assess gaze‐following responses of 5‐ to 7‐month olds in Vanuatu, where face‐to‐face parent–infant interactions are less prevalent than in Western populations. We found that—just like Western 6‐month‐olds studied previously—5‐ to ‐7‐month‐olds living in Vanuatu followed gaze only, when communicatively addressed. That is, if presented gaze shifts were preceded by infant‐directed speech, but not if they were preceded by adult‐directed speech. These results are consistent with the notion that early infant gaze following is tied to infants’ early emerging communicative competencies and rooted in universal mechanisms rather than being dependent on cultural specificities of early socialization.     

Assessing posttraumatic cognitive processes: the Event Related Rumination Inventory

Cognitive processes in the aftermath of experiencing a major life stressor play an important role in the impact of the event on the person. Intrusive thoughts about the event are likely to be associated with continued distress, while deliberate rumination, aimed at understanding and problem-solving, should be predictive of posttraumatic growth (PTG). The Event Related Rumination Inventory (ERRI), designed to measure these two styles of rumination, is described and validation information is provided. Using a college student sample screened for having experienced highly stressful life events, data were obtained (N=323) to conduct an exploratory factor analysis that supported the two factors of the ERRI. Separate confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) on two additional samples (Ns=186 and 400) supported a two-factor model. The two ERRI factors were validated by comparison with related variables and by assessing their contributions to predicting distress and PTG in two samples (Ns=198 and 202) that had been combined to conduct the second CFA. Data indicate the ERRI has solid psychometric properties, captures variance not measured by stable differences in cognitive styles, and the separate factors are related to posttraumatic distress and growth as predicted by existing models of PTG.     

Cognitive bias modification: induced interpretive biases affect memory

Previous research has shown that it is possible to experimentally induce interpretive biases using ambiguous scenarios. This study extends past findings by examining the effects of cognitive bias modification for interpretation on subsequent scenario recall. Participants were trained to interpret emotionally ambiguous passages in either a positive or negative direction. Transfer of the training to novel scenarios was tested. After training, participants were also asked to recall details from these novel scenarios. The results indicate that the training was effective in inducing the intended group differences in interpretive bias. Importantly, participants exhibited memory biases that corresponded to their training condition. These results suggest that manipulating interpretive biases can result in corresponding changes in memory. Findings from this study highlight the importance of future research on the relation among cognitive biases and on the possibility of modifying cognitive biases in emotional disorders.     

Factors of biological risk and reserve associated with executive behaviors in children and adolescents with spina bifida myelomeningocele.

This study examined differences between healthy children (n = 35) and those with spina bifida myelomeningocele (SBM; n = 42) on the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF), a measure of executive function behaviors. It also examined whether aspects of biological risk associated with SBM and reserve factors within the family could account for variability in BRIEF scores for children and adolescents with SBM. Patients in the SBM group exhibited more problems than both published norms and a local comparison group of healthy children in metacognition but not behavior regulation. Behavior regulation problems in children with SBM were predicted by parent psychological distress. More shunt-related surgeries and history of seizures predicted poorer metacognitive abilities.     

First impressions and last resorts: how listeners adjust to speaker variability

Perceptual theories must explain how perceivers extract meaningful information from a continuously variable physical signal. In the case of speech, the puzzle is that little reliable acoustic invariance seems to exist. We tested the hypothesis that speech-perception processes recover invariants not about the signal, but rather about the source that produced the signal. Findings from two manipulations suggest that the system learns those properties of speech that result from idiosyncratic characteristics of the speaker; the same properties are not learned when they can be attributed to incidental factors. We also found evidence for how the system determines what is characteristic: In the absence of other information about the speaker, the system relies on episodic order, representing those properties present during early experience as characteristic of the speaker. This "first-impressions" bias can be overridden, however, when variation is an incidental consequence of a temporary state (a pen in the speaker's mouth), rather than characteristic of the speaker.