Maternal Empathy and Changes in Mothers’ Permissiveness as Predictors of Toddlers’ Early Social Competence with Peers: A Parenting Intervention Study

The goal of the current study was to examine how changes in parenting due to a parenting intervention designed to decrease permissive parenting affected the quality of children’s peer interactions. Forty-nine mothers of toddlers aged 2–3 years participated in a 12-week intervention in which half got hands-on training and practice using positive guidance in a toddler classroom setting, while the other half learned positive guidance solely via a seminar format. To observe children’s peer interactions, toddlers were divided into 8 groups of 5–7 children mixed across condition. Observers coded mothers’ empathy, permissiveness, and positive guidance parenting strategies. Children’s peer interactions were coded for antisocial behaviors, verbal aggression, physical aggression, prosocial behaviors, positive social bids, and empathy. Prior analysis of this intervention indicated that mothers in both conditions showed reductions in permissiveness over the course of the intervention. Results from the present study indicated that reductions in permissiveness predicted decreases in toddlers’ verbal aggression. Maternal empathy was a moderator such that mothers low in empathy who got hands-on training in positive guidance had children who demonstrated the greatest reductions in antisocial behaviors.     

Early Negative Affect Predicts Anxiety, not Autism, in Preschool Boys with Fragile X Syndrome

Children with fragile X syndrome (FXS) face high risk for anxiety disorders, yet no studies have explored FXS as a high-risk sample for investigating early manifestations of anxiety outcomes. Negative affect is one of the most salient predictors of problem behaviors and has been associated with both anxiety and autistic outcomes in clinical and non-clinical pediatric samples. In light of the high comorbidity between autism and anxiety within FXS, the present study investigates the relationship between longitudinal trajectories of negative affect (between 8 and 71 months) and severity of anxiety and autistic outcomes in young males with FXS (n?=?25). Multilevel models indicated associations between elevated anxiety and higher fear and sadness, lower soothability, and steeper longitudinal increases in approach. Autistic outcomes were unrelated to negative affect. These findings suggest early negative affect differentially predicts anxiety, not autistic symptoms, within FXS. Future research is warranted to determine the specificity of the relationship between negative affect and anxiety, as well as to explore potential moderators. Characterizing the relationship between early negative affect and anxiety within FXS may inform etiology and treatment considerations specific to children with FXS, as well as lend insight into precursors of anxiety disorders in other clinical groups and community samples.     

Free viewing perceptual asymmetries for judgment of brightness and quantity: dependence on stimulus orientation

Previous research has indicated that normals exhibit strong leftward biases during free-viewing perceptual judgments of brightness and quantity. When participants view two symmetrical objects and they are forced to choose which object appears darker or more numerous, participants usually select the stimulus with the relevant feature on the left side. The present study investigated the possibility that these perceptual asymmetries are dependent on scanning a stimulus horizontally across the midline by administering a task with two rectangular reversed stimuli presented either horizontally or vertically. When the stimuli were presented horizontally (crossing the midline), participants exhibited leftward biases, but these biases disappeared when the stimuli were presented vertically. This result supports the position that free-viewing perceptual asymmetries are dependent on scanning the stimuli across the midline.     

Changes in health status after one year for persons at-risk for and with HIV infection

Abstract

Health status is an important component of the evaluation of patient outcome in HIV infection where disease is chronic, progressive, and debilitating. This paper compares patient self-report for 9 dimensions of health status for patients followed in ATHOS (AIDS Time-Oriented Health Outcome Study). We compared changes in functioning after 12 months for 1, 524 patients with varying HIV disease severity: 238 asymptomatic, 447 symptomatic, 441 AIDS, and 398 HIV-negative individuals who are at-risk for infection.

Declines in health status were observed for all HIV-infected persons, including also asymptomatic patients. Individuals with symptomatic disease or AIDS had significant declines (p < 0.001) in physical functioning, energy, global health, pain, and increased disease symptoms, but no significant declines in health distress, cognition, or mental health. Persons with AIDS had greater declines than those with symptomatic disease. All HIV-infected individuals reported significantly fewer hours at work and more disability days than HIV-negative patients from similar risk pools. The adverse impact that HIV infection has on the health status of HIV-positive asymptomatic individuals is striking; HIV-negative individuals are more similar to HIV-positive individuals than to the general population.     

The use of diabetes-specific perceived control and health belief measures to predict treatment choice and efficacy in a feasibility study of continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion pumps

Abstract

In the course of a feasibility study of continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion pumps, 382 insulin-requiring diabetic patients were offered a choice of CSII, intensified conventional treatment or conventional treatment. Two hundred and eighty-six (75%) patients completed newly developed diabetes-specific measures of health beliefs and attributions before any change of treatment regimen. The scales were useful predictors of patients' choice of treatment. Furthermore, they were useful in predicting efficacy of treatment in terms of glycosylated haemoglobin measures of diabetes control after one year of treatment in the study. The implications of the findings for introducing patients to new forms of treatment are discussed.     

Sleep Disturbances Among Combat Military Veterans: A Comparative Study Using Subjective and Objective Sleep Assessments

The sleep characteristics of 37 military veterans and active-duty service members (17 with PTSD and 20 without PTSD) of recent wars were analyzed to determine if combat deployment, with its associated sleep restriction, may be an alternative explanation for the sleep complaints found among combat veterans with PTSD (as determined by PTSD Checklist Military Version scores). Over a 1-week period, sleep data were collected using sleep actigraphy and self-report. Across the entire sample, subjective and objective assessment methods of sleep were strongly correlated, although there were some notable within-group differences. Specifically, although sleep duration between groups did not differ based on actigraphy, veterans without PTSD reported sleeping 1 h and 11 min (p = .002) longer than did veterans with PTSD. In an effort to determine why individuals without PTSD might be overreporting sleep, we found that symptoms of emotional arousal (anger, anxiety, and nightmares) were significantly correlated with self-reported sleep duration, suggesting a pattern of higher autonomic arousal found in veterans with PTSD. Thus, although sleeping for 6 h, the higher levels of emotional arousal reported by veterans with PTSD may mean that they do not perceive their sleep as restful. Further research is necessary to determine if the sleep architecture of veterans with PTSD is actually different from that of combat veterans without PTSD and if such differences are actually amenable to standard behavioral treatments for this disorder.     

Memory for Faces in Children with Autism

Previous research has established that children with Autistic Disorder have deficits in aspects of social cognition and in verbal memory, but research on social memory is limited. Twenty-four autistic boys aged 7 to 12 years and normal controls matched for verbal mental age were administered parallel social and nonsocial matching and memory tasks. Results showed that the children with autism were impaired relative to the normal children on the social (face) memory task only. Furthermore, of the four experimental tasks, the social memory task had the highest and most consistent correlations with measures of social development and adaptive skills. Whereas the normal children used the special status of faces to recall them more easily than objects, the children with autism showed equal recall of objects and faces.     

The relationship between short‐term memory and working memory: Complex span made simple?

This experiment addresses the question of what makes a working memory measure a good predictor of higher‐level abilities. Verbal and visuospatial processing episodes were interleaved with distinct verbal and visuospatial storage episodes to form four complex span tasks. Although these measures were reliable predictors of reading and mathematics ability in children, they were no more predictive of these abilities than corresponding simple span tasks involving storage alone. However, when individual differences in storage ability and processing capacity were controlled for, residual variance in complex span performance was related to academic ability in some cases. These findings indicate that complex span tasks are multiply determined, and that differences in task structure can dramatically influence the relative importance of these multiple constraints and the predictive power of a complex span measure.     

Speech‐evoked auditory brainstem responses reflect familial and cognitive influences

Cortical function and related cognitive, language, and communication skills are genetically influenced. The auditory brainstem response to speech is linked to language skill, reading ability, cognitive skills, and speech‐in‐noise perception; however, the impact of shared genetic and environmental factors on the response has not been investigated. We assessed auditory brainstem responses to speech presented in quiet and background noise from (1) 23 pairs of same sex, same learning diagnosis siblings (Siblings), (2) 23 unrelated children matched on age, sex, IQ, and reading ability to one of the siblings (Reading‐Matched), and (3) 22 pairs of unrelated children matched on age and sex but not on reading ability to the same sibling (Age/Sex‐Matched). By quantifying response similarity as the intersubject response‐to‐response correlation for sibling pairs, reading‐matched pairs, and age‐ and sex‐matched pairs, we found that siblings had more similar responses than age‐ and sex‐matched pairs and reading‐matched pairs. Similarity of responses between siblings was as high as the similarity of responses collected from an individual over the course of the recording session. Responses from unrelated children matched on reading were more similar than responses from unrelated children matched only on age and sex, supporting previous data linking variations in auditory brainstem activity with variations in reading ability. These results suggest that auditory brainstem function can be influenced by siblingship and auditory‐based communication skills such as reading, motivating the use of speech‐evoked auditory brainstem responses for assessing risk of reading and communication impairments in family members.     

Religious orientation and its association with personality,schizotypal traits and manic-depressive experiences

A total of 180 respondents completed the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, Claridge's STQ, Thalbourne's Manic-Depression scales and the Batson and Ventis Religious Life Inventory (RLI). The RLI was used to yield scores for external, internal and quest dimensions of religiosity. Principal Component Analysis showed the quest dimension to be separate from external and internal religion, which loaded together on one factor. It was found that when the personality and schizotypal trait measures were entered together to predict scores on religiosity, psychoticism emerged as the only predictor of external and internal religiosity, where as schizotypal traits emerged as the only predictor of religious quest.