Measurement of Cruelty in Children: The Cruelty to Animals Inventory

Cruelty to animals may be a particularly pernicious aspect of problematic child development. Progress in understanding the development of the problem is limited due to the complex nature of cruelty as a construct, and limitations with current assessment measures. The Children and Animals Inventory (CAI) was developed as a brief self- and parent-report measure of F. R. Ascione's (1993) 9 parameters of cruelty. The CAI emerged as a reliable, stable, and readily utilized measure of cruelty using parent and child reports. Children (especially the older children) reported higher rates of cruelty than their parents and boys reported more cruelty than girls. Self- and parent-reports showed good convergence with independent observations of cruelty versus nurturance during free interactions with domestic animals. The results indicate that cruelty to animals can be reliably measured using brief child and parent report measures.     

Suicidal behavior among inpatients with schizophrenia and mood disorders in Chengdu, China

This study evaluated the characteristics of suicidal behavior (suicide attempt or suicidal ideation) among 230 consecutively admitted inpatients with schizophrenia and mood disorders in a university hospital in China. The rate of lifetime suicidal behavior was found to be significantly higher in patients with mood disorders (62.4%) than in patients with schizophrenia (38.6%). The rate of suicidal behavior was significantly higher in patients with major depressive disorder (86.8%) than those with bipolar disorders (42.6%). Patients with schizophrenia attempted suicide for the first time earlier in life than the patients with mood disorders. Mood disorder patients, especially those with major depressive disorder, had more and more serious suicide attempts than the patients with schizophrenia.     

Two- and three-year-olds infer and reason about design intentions in order to categorize broken objects

In naming artifacts, do young children infer and reason about the intended functions of the objects? Participants between the ages of 2 and 4 years were shown two kinds of objects derived from familiar categories. One kind was damaged so as to undermine its usual function. The other kind was also dysfunctional, but made so by adding features that appeared to be intentional. Evidence that 2‐, 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds were more likely to apprehend the broken objects than the intentionally dysfunctional objects as members of the familiar lexical categories favors the conclusion that, in naming, children may spontaneously infer and reason about design intentions from an early age. This is the first evidence that 2‐ and 3‐year‐olds not only take design intentions into account in object categorization, but that they do so even without explicit mention of the objects’ accidental or intentional histories. The results cast doubt on a proposal that young children's lexical categorization is based on automatic, non‐deliberative processes.     

Co-reference and reasoning

Memory &; Cognition - Co-reference occurs when two or more noun phrases refer to the same individual, as in the following inferential problem: Mark is kneeling by the fire or he is looking at...     

Families created through surrogacy arrangements: parent-child relationships in the 1st year of life

Findings are presented of a study of families created through surrogacy arrangements. Forty-two surrogacy families were compared with 51 egg-donation families and 80 natural-conception families on standardized interview and questionnaire measures of the psychological well-being of the parents, the quality of parent-child relationships, and infant temperament. The differences that were identified between the surrogacy families and the other family types indicated greater psychological well-being and adaptation to parenthood by mothers and fathers of children born through surrogacy arrangements than by the natural-conception parents.     

Children's understanding of television advertising: a revisit in the Chinese context

The authors conducted a survey of 1,758 elementary school children (6-14 years old) from December 2001, to March 2002, in 3 Chinese cities with different levels of television advertising. The authors used D. R. John's (1999) model of consumer socialization as the theoretical framework for their study. More than half of the children whom the authors interviewed were able to understand that television stations broadcast commercials to earn money. Their understanding of the purposes of television commercials and the persuasive intention of television commercials developed with age. The authors examined the influence of gender, level of advertising, and level of television viewing on children's understanding of television advertising by using 3-way factorial models.     

Verbalizing facial memory: criterion effects in verbal overshadowing

This article investigated the role of the recognition criterion in the verbal overshadowing effect (VOE). In 3 experiments, people witnessed an event, verbally described a perpetrator, and then attempted identification. The authors found in Experiment 1, which included a "not present" response option and both perpetrator-present (PP) and perpetrator-absent (PA) lineups, an increased reluctance to identify a person from both lineup types after verbalization. Experiment 2 incorporated a forced-choice procedure, and the authors found no effect of verbalization on identification performance. Experiment 3 replicated the essential aspects of these results. Consequently, the VOE may reflect a change in recognition criterion rather than a changed processing style or alteration of the underlying memory trace. This conclusion was confirmed by computational modeling of the data.     

How are social identities linked to self-conception and intergroup orientation? The moderating effect of implicit theories

Social identity approaches assume that social identification affects both self-conception and intergroup orientation. The authors contend that such social identification effects are accentuated when people hold a fixed view of human character and attribute immutable dispositions to social groups. To these individuals, social identities are immutable, concrete entities capable of guiding self-conception and intergroup orientation. Social identification effects are attenuated when people hold a malleable view of human character and thus do not view social identities as fixed, concrete entities. The authors tested and found support for this contention in three studies that were conducted in the context of the Hong Kong 1997 political transition, and discussed the findings in terms of their implications for self-conceptions and the meaning of social identification.     

Phonological processing in reading Chinese among normally achieving and poor readers

Ninety-four children in grades one to six (7 to 12 years old) in Hong Kong were individually administered a Chinese reading test consisting of 80 characters that varied in frequency (high or low) and orthographic structure (simple or complex). Phonological processing tasks, including short-term memory, pseudo-character recognition, and tone discrimination, were also administered. During reading, younger normal and poor readers made more semantic and visual errors, whereas older and normally achieving children made more phonologically related errors. Normally achieving readers also performed at a higher level than poor readers on short-term memory, pseudo-character recognition, and tone discrimination tasks. Phonological processing apparently plays a significant part in the development of reading skills in Chinese.