Enrichment and Stress in Families Caring for a Child with a Serious Emotional Disorder

We examined enrichment and stress in 214 families who had children with severe emotional disorders. Caregivers' ratings of enrichment and stress were obtained through a newly developed instrument, the Effects of the Situation Questionnaire, which used parallel items covering 17 life areas. While ratings of stress were generally higher than enrichment, caregivers reported some enrichment in areas encompassing self concept and family relationships, Bivariate and multivariate analyses using various child, family, and service-system variables revealed that stress was notably associated with severity of the child's disorder, low empowerment, and a lack of coordination among service providers. Enrichment was unrelated to severity but associated with high empowerment and spiritual support. Our findings suggest that families' experiences of caregiving can have both positive and negative aspects and that a comprehensive approach to serving and studying families should take both into account.     

The New Old-Fashioned Girl: Effects of Gender and Social Desirability on Reported Gender-Role Ideology

In order to assess the effects of socialdesirability on (1) reported gender-role ideology and(2) the relative acceptance of rape myths, a shortsocial desirability (SD) scale was integrated into aquestionnaire containing items from both attitude sets.Participants were 160 university students. Less than 5%of the sample was of other than European ethnicity. Agender by SD interaction was predicted, wherein high SD would predict more feminist beliefs for men;the relationship was expected to be less strong forwomen. Although a significant gender by SD interactionwas found, the pattern of results was unexpected. SD did not predict attitudes for men, and womenwho were high in SD actually reported more traditionalgender-role attitudes and were more accepting of rapemyths than women lower in SD. Interpretations and implications of these unexpected findingsare discussed.     

Revisiting the relationship between attributional style and academic performance

Previous research into the relationship between attributions and academic performance has produced contradictory findings that have not been resolved. The present research examines the role of specific dimensions of attributional style in predicting subsequent academic performance in a sample of pupils (N = 979) from both high‐ and low‐achieving schools. Hierarchical regression and moderation analyses indicate that internal, stable, and global, attributional styles for positive events predict higher levels of academic performance. Global attributions for negative events were related to poorer performance across all schools. Stable attributions for negative events were related to higher levels of performance in high‐achieving schools but not in low‐achieving schools. Higher levels of internality for negative events were associated with higher performance only in low achieving schools.     

Young children with a positive reputation to maintain are less likely to cheat

The present study examined whether having a positive reputation to maintain makes young children less likely to cheat. Cheating was assessed through a temptation resistance paradigm in which participants were instructed not to cheat in a guessing game. Across three studies (total N = 361), preschool‐aged participants were randomly assigned to either a reputation condition, in which an experimenter told them that she had learned of their positive reputation from classmates, or to a control condition in which they received no such information. By age 5, children in the reputation condition cheated less often than those in the control condition even though nobody was watching and choosing not to cheat conflicted with their personal interest. These findings are the first to show that informing children that they have a positive reputation to maintain can influence their moral behavior.     

Self-affirmation and affective forecasting: Affirmation reduces the anticipated impact of negative events

When forecasting how they will feel in the future, people overestimate the impact that imagined negative events will have on their affective states, partly because they underestimate their own psychological resiliency. Because self-affirmation enhances resiliency, two studies examined whether self-affirmation prior to forecasting reduces the extremity of affective forecasts. Participants in self-affirmation conditions completed a values scale or wrote an essay asserting their most important value, whereas participants in the no-affirmation condition asserted a relatively unimportant value. Participants then predicted their affective reactions to a negative or positive imagined event. In both studies, self-affirmation reduced the unpleasant affect expected to result from a negative event, but had no impact on affective forecasts for a positive event. This pattern was mediated by participants’ cognitive appraisals of the imagined event, but not by differential focus on that event. Results are consistent with self-affirmation activating or enhancing psychological resiliency to counteract immune neglect during affective forecasting of a negative event.     

Grammatical Encoding in Aphasia: Evidence from a “Processing Prosthesis”

Agrammatic aphasia is characterized by severely reduced grammatical structure in spoken and written language, often accompanied by apparent insensitivity to grammatical structure in comprehension. Does agrammatism represent loss of linguistic competence or rather performance factors such as memory or resource limitations? A considerable body of evidence supports the latter hypothesis in the domain of comprehension. Here we present the first strong evidence for the performance hypothesis in the domain of production: an augmentative communication system that markedly increases the grammatical structure of agrammatic speech while providing no linguistic information, functioning merely to reduce on-line processing demands. Copyright 2000 Academic Press and Unisys Corporation.     

EFFECTS OF SELF-EVALUATION ON PRESCHOOL CHILDREN'S USE OF SOCIAL INTERACTION STRATEGIES WITH THEIR CLASSMATES WITH AUTISM

This study investigated effects of a self-evaluation procedure on preschool children's use of social interaction strategies among their classmates with autism. Three triads of children (comprised of 1 trained normally developing peer, 1 untrained peer, and 1 child with autism) participated. A multiple baseline design across subjects was used to demonstrate that peers who were taught facilitative strategies increased their use of strategies only after the self-evaluation intervention was introduced. Improvements in social behavior of children with autism was associated with peers' increased strategy use. Untrained peers demonstrated little change in their social behavior. Treatment effects were replicated when trained peers were asked to use self-evaluation with other children with autism during other play times. Self-evaluation procedures enhanced the use of social interaction strategies on the part of normally developing peers during social skills interventions.     

藏传佛教造像量度经

藏传佛教美术发展历史悠久、源远流长,它不仅有独自发祥孕育,发展演绎,成形定性的清晰脉络和事物迹象,并以其自成体系的精湛技艺及其造型经典理论,从一个侧面构建着中华民族美术、尤其是东方美术的典型实体。藏传佛教造像的庄严妙好,基本上依赖于其严格的型制量度经典的延续承传,故“三经一疏”经典是使藏传佛教美术乃至藏民族传统美术的民族性、宗教性、地域性、历史性、审美性得以确立的重要因素。也是使藏族绘画、雕塑、建筑、书法、工艺美术诸方面构成实体性文化层、艺术高度和有机组成部分的基本法度。本文就藏传佛教美术造型量度的纲领性理论经典“三经一疏”:即《佛说造像量度经》、《造像量度经》、《画相》和《佛说造像量度经疏》的量度法则作了简要论述。     

Regularity of symmetry verticality guides perceptual judgments of objects

Previous research indicated that most salient, real-world objects possess natural regularities that observers commonly assume in perceptual judgments of figural orientation and interpretation. Regularities include 3-dimensionality, bilateral symmetry, and the tendency for object tops to possess more salient information than bottoms. Thus, when observers interpret randomly shaped figures, they reliably impose volume, bilateral symmetry, and top and front orientation directions, even when figures are 2-dimensional and asymmetric. We confirmed generalizability for observers to assume these regularities with stimuli that vary in complexity, and we found evidence supporting another regularity, that of symmetry verticality (symmetry about a vertical axis). Findings support use of a family of perceptual heuristics corresponding to natural regularities that constrain stimulus indeterminacy and help guide judgment of object orientation and interpretation.