Space for GRRAACCEESS: some reflections on training for cultural competence

This article is focused on a particular exercise that helped to reinforce the learning about social difference on the Relate Institute's Systemic Practice Year 1 course. This exercise helped move students into a reflexive position in their learning. Positive outcomes were shown from course feedback, and the subsequent application of learning into written assignments.     

Biased cognitive processing of cancer-related information among women with family histories of breast cancer: evidence from a cancer stroop task.

Stimuli associated with sources of stress have been shown to interfere with cognition. The authors hypothesized that women with the stress of having a family history of breast cancer (FH+) would exhibit greater interference on a task with cancer-related stimuli than women without cancer in the family (FH-). The authors developed a modified Stroop color-naming task to test this hypothesis in a sample of FH+ (n = 72) and FH- (n = 96) women. Consistent with the hypotheses, FH+ women had longer color-naming times and more errors (ps < .01) on a cancer word list relative to noncancer lists. This biased processing was not mediated by the significantly higher perceived risk, general distress, or cancer-specific distress in FH+ women. Maladaptive alterations in processing cancer stimuli may have important clinical implications, as these women must process complex cancer-related information critical to their health (e.g., options for chemoprevention, screening).     

The automatic access of emotion: Emotional Stroop effects in Spanish–English bilingual speakers

The emotional Stroop task provides an experimental measure of selective attention to emotional information. In the current study, the emotional Stroop effect was examined in a Spanish–English bilingual speaking population. The results revealed that the emotional Stroop effect is a robust phenomenon and replicable within a bilingual population. Furthermore, highly proficient bilinguals demonstrated equal interference effects in both their first language and their second language. The current study provides evidence of the automatic activation of emotional components in words appearing in more than one language. These results are discussed with reference to previous findings in the literature on bilingual emotion word representation.     

Props,not pictures,are worth a thousand words: verbal accessibility of early memories under different conditions of contextual support

When they are tested nonverbally, even young children demonstrate long-term recall. There have been few studies of whether early memories later are verbally accessible; the results of those that exist are mixed. Inconsistencies may be due to differences in the contextual cues provided at the time of recall. In two experiments, children 13–20 months were exposed to multi-step sequences and tested for nonverbal recall after 3–6 months. At age 3 years, they were tested verbally, under varying conditions of contextual support: in the original laboratory with event-related props versus at home with photographs of the props (Experiment 1), and at home with props (Experiment 2). Children younger than 20 months at initial experience of the events did not demonstrate verbal recall. Children who were 20 months at the initial exposure recalled verbally, as long as they had physical props as cues, regardless of whether testing took place at home or in the laboratory. This research informs the conditions under which memories from very early childhood later can be recalled verbally. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.