The cultural adjustment and mental health of Japanese immigrant youth

Interviews were conducted with eight Japanese immigrant youth about their experiences with respect to adjusting to life in the United States, dealing with discrimination, and coping with cultural challenges. They were also questioned about their mental health and family and peer relations. Results indicate that participants managed to maintain bicultural identities and to cope with the problems that they encountered. Nevertheless, they experienced the following difficulties: racism and prejudice, language barriers, and conflict regarding identity and values. In terms of coping, participants mostly relied on friends for support; only one had sought the help of a professional counselor. The implications of the findings are discussed in terms of working with immigrant youth from Japan.     

Early intervention after universal neonatal hearing screening: impact on outcomes

This article summarizes the developmental outcomes of Colorado children with significant hearing loss. Some of the research compares children born in hospitals that have implemented universal newborn hearing screening programs for newborns. Other research compares the developmental outcomes of children who have been early-identified with hearing loss. Early-identification is defined as identification of hearing loss within the first six months of life. Late identification in the Colorado studies is defined as age of identification of hearing loss after the age of six months. In a few of the Colorado studies, age at initiation of intervention was used. Within the Colorado system, age of identification can be interpreted as almost synonymous with age of intervention, as the vast majority of children enter intervention services with two months after the identification of the hearing loss. Children who were early-identified and had early initiation of intervention services (within the first year of life) had significantly better vocabulary, general language abilities, speech intelligibility and phoneme repertoires, syntax as measured by mean length of utterance, social-emotional development, parental bonding, and parental grief resolution. Two other studies (Nebraska and Washington state) of early- versus later-initiation of intervention services report findings similar to the Colorado studies. Direct comparisons with the historical literature are not possible because the developmental delays of what would now be termed "later-identified" were too low to report developmental ages for the birth through five-year-old population.     

Personality assessment in neuropsychology: the nonspecificity of MMPI-2 neurocorrection methods

Three established methods of neurocorrection claim to improve Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)/MMPI-2 validity with closed-head injury (CHI) patients. These methods (which suggest removing "neurological" items from scoring) were employed here comparing 35 CHI patients with 35 psychiatric patients with elevated profiles. The 14-item correction changed 2-point codes for 41% of CHI and 31% of psychiatric profiles, the 30-item system changed 77% of CHI and 71% of psychiatric profiles, whereas the 37-item system changed 80% of CHI and 71% of psychiatric profiles. There were no significant differences between the two groups in number of profiles changed or number of neurocorrective items endorsed. Using each of the three correction systems, the following percentage of profiles remained elevated: 99%, 87%, and 89%, respectively.     

Spiritual distress at life's end: finding meaning in the maelstrom

Recent trends in social research indicate a decline in church attendance and a corresponding increased interest in spirituality. With the aging of the population, attention to end of life care, with its corresponding spiritual concerns and distress, has become a prominent issue. Spiritual distress can be difficult to distinguish from psychological and physical distress and indicates the need for differential diagnostic markers to distinguish between genuine spiritual experience and psychosis related to the physical death process. Further, for hospice patients who are in genuine need of amelioration through pharmacologic suppression, the question of when and how to medicate becomes paramount as the distinction between spiritual process and physchosis becomes less evident. This article is an exploratory attempt to encourage dialogue across interdisciplinary lines and foster participation from alternative therapies representing the spiritual context of the patient. Anecdotal data from hospice professionals representing a variety of disciplines are presented to illustrate and emphasize the need for continued dialogue and research in this important area.     

The effects of aging on location-based and distance-based processes in memory for time

Retrieving when an event occurred may depend on an estimation of the age of the event (distance-based processes) or on strategic reconstruction processes based on contextual information associated with the event (location-based processes). Young and older participants performed a list discrimination task that has been designed to dissociate the contribution of both types of processes. An adapted Remember/Know/Guess procedure [Can. J. Exp. Psychol. 50 (1996) 114] was developed to evaluate the processes used by the participants to recognize the stimuli and retrieve their list of occurrence. The results showed that aging disrupts location-based processes more than distance-based processes. In addition, a limitation of speed of processing and working-memory capacities was the main predictor of age-related differences on location-based processes, whereas working-memory capacities mediated partly age differences on distance-based processes.     

Challenge and hindrance stress: relationships with exhaustion, motivation to learn, and learning performance

In a study of 696 learners, the authors found that stress associated with challenges in the learning environment had a positive relationship with learning performance and that stress associated with hindrances in the learning environment had a negative relationship with learning performance. They also found evidence suggesting that these stress-learning performance relationships were partially mediated by exhaustion and motivation to lean. Both forms of stress were positively related to exhaustion, and exhaustion was negatively related to learning performance. Hindrance stress was negatively related to motivation to learn, challenge stress was positively related to motivation to learn, and motivation to learn was positively related to learning performance. Implications with respect to theory and practice are discussed.     

Object recognition and object segregation in infancy: historical perspective, theoretical significance, "kinds" of knowledge, and relation to object categorization

Needham (2001, this issue) reports that 4.5-month-old infants can use a short-term familiarization experience with a single object to facilitate the segregation of a visual display consisting of a configurally similar object and a configurally dissimilar adjacent object. We reflect on this finding in the larger context of Needham's systematic research on the development of object perception, a program that has included (1) a series of empirical studies designed to identify the different cues that infants use for object segregation and (2) a theoretical framework in which infants are presumed to integrate these cues to form interpretations of complex visual displays.     

High school students’ math and science gender stereotypes: relations with their STEM outcomes and socializers’ stereotypes

Social Psychology of Education - This longitudinal study explores three research questions. First, what is the prevalence of math and science gender stereotypes among high school students, their...     

Socio-economic status,executive functions,and theory of mind ability in adolescents: Relationships with language ability and cortisol

Socio-economic status (SES) is linked to the development of cognitive abilities, particularly language and executive processes. It is unclear whether these represent a single or independent correlates. We studied 110 Ecuadorian youths aged 12–17 with measures of SES, language, executive function, and theory of mind (ToM), a.k.a. mentalizing. A subsample gave hair samples to estimate recent cortisol levels. Restricting analyses to reliable measures, SES was highly associated with language skill, and to a lesser extent with executive function and ToM performance. However, those latter associations were attenuated and non-significant when language ability was controlled for statistically. Systemic cortisol levels were not associated with SES, but were significantly and negatively correlated with ToM, independent of variation in language skills. We conclude that language development underlies most of the impact of SES on executive function and ToM ability of adolescents, but that stress-related cortisol may have an independent, direct effect on mentalizing.