Time for Values: Responding Educationally to the Call from the Past

This paper rethinks the fostering task of the teacher in a time when it, paradoxically, has tended to become marginalized and privatized despite its public urgency. Following post-holocaust thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman, the position explored here is radical in the sense that it takes ‘the crisis of traditions’ and the erosion of a common moral ground or value basis seriously, and it is conservative in the sense that it insists on responding educationally to the call from the past by returning to (a) the moral character of our existence and (b) our own embeddedness in the incompleteness of living traditions. The argument is that there is a difference between educating for common values—which entails a belief in pre-existing commonalities—and making values common in and through education. The latter, we argue, entails an aspiration for continuously creating new commonalities and for cultivating the ability to act and judge as a thinking moral agent in specific, lived and worldly cases. In this sense, the fostering task of the teacher is to create commonality of what is not (yet) common, turning the liberal democratic values of the past into contested objects of study.     

Spatial interference and response control in sequence learning: the role of explicit knowledge

In several sequence learning studies it has been suggested that response control shifts from the stimuli to some internal representation (i.e., motor program) through the learning process. The main questions addressed in this paper are whether this control shift is related to explicit knowledge and whether the formation of these internal representations depends on the stimulus attributes. In one experiment we compared the learning of a response sequence triggered by either spatial location or location symbol (left-right) by using a serial response task (SRT). Symbols were presented at either a centered or random location. The results showed that in the symbolic conditions the shift of response control correlated with the emergence of explicit knowledge. Only participants with complete explicit knowledge seemed to learn the sequence structure beyond probabilistic information (response time "RT" did not depend on the frequency of the response). Moreover, these participants were able to overcome, when needed, spatial interference (RT was the same for both spatially corresponding and non-corresponding trials). However, when spatial location was relevant, RT was always faster, especially for more frequent responses. These results suggest that the relevant stimulus dimension (location or symbol) seems to engage different sequence learning mechanisms.     

Gender differences and the Defense Mechanism Test: A comparative study of adolescents in psychiatric care and healthy controls

The aim of this paper was to study gender differences in the percept-genetic method Defense Mechanism Test (DMT) among a group of 60 adolescent subjects. Three subgroups were used: patients with psychotic disorders (Axis 1); borderline personality disorder (Axis 2) according to the DSM-IV classification system, and a non-patient group. The test protocols were scored with respect to 124 DMT variables and analyzed by means of the multivariate projection method Partial Least Squares (PLS) in latent structures. The overall results showed considerable gender differences in the whole group as well as in the subgroups. The most striking finding was that girls compared to boys were characterized by the perceptual defense identification with the opposite sex, which means that they perceived male gestalts instead of females in the stimulus picture. When both gender and diagnostic group membership were considered simultaneously, the influence of diagnostic group membership seemed to be stronger than gender even if there was an interaction between diagnoses and gender. It was concluded that gender must be considered when the DMT is used on adolescent populations.     

Phonological short‐term memory and vocabulary development: further evidence on the nature of the relationship

The nature and generality of the developmental association between phonological short‐term memory and vocabulary knowledge was explored in two studies. Study 1 investigated whether the link between vocabulary and verbal memory arises from the requirement to articulate memory items at recall or from earlier processes involved in the encoding and storage of the verbal material. Four‐year‐old children were tested on immediate memory measures which required either spoken recall (nonword repetition and digit span) or recognition of a sequence of nonwords. The phonological memory–vocabulary association was found to be as strong for the serial recognition as recall‐based measures, favouring the view that it is phonological short‐term memory capacity rather than speech output skills which constrain word learning. In Study 2, the association between phonological memory skills and vocabulary knowledge was found to be strong in teenaged as well as younger children, indicating that phonological memory constraints on word learning remain significant throughout childhood. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Recall of morphologically complex forms is affected by memory task but not dyslexia

The authors studied the effect of morphological complexity on working memory in list recall tasks with base words (boy), inflected words (boy + 's) and derived words (boy + hood) in a morphologically rich language: Finnish. Simple serial recall was compared to complex working memory tasks, combining word recall with sentence verification in 8-year-old normally reading participants, dyslexic children, and adults. The normally reading children performed better than dyslexic children on both memory tasks and a test of morphology. Base words were better recalled than morphologically complex words. Memory was better for derived than inflected words in simple but not complex span tasks. There was no interaction between word type and reading group and thus no suggestion of dyslexia being associated with specific problems to represent complex morphology in working memory. Morphological processing in working memory appeared to depend on the task.     

Stability and prediction of parenting stress

The study focused on stability and prediction of parenting stress experiences over a 6‐year period. Mothers (N=93) who had received a clinical intervention for feeding or sleeping problems during infancy (Time 1; T 1) were followed‐up when the children were 5–10 years old (Time 2; T 2). An age‐ and sex‐of‐child matched normal group was used for comparison of stress levels at T 2. Parenting stress was measured by the Swedish Parenthood Stress Questionnaire, which consists of a general parenting stress scale and sub‐scales tapping different aspects of parenting stress experiences. T 1 predictors were clinical assessments of child problem load, maternal unresponsiveness, and family psychosocial problems. T 2 predictors were mother‐reported concurrent child problem load and psychosocial problems. The individual stability in stress experiences was moderate. Effect sizes indicated that mothers with early clinical contacts had reduced their stress to levels close to those in the normal sample. Parenting stress at T 2 could be predicted from early and from concurrent child and family problems. The results point to the relevance of early clinical assessments and to the importance of a sub‐area approach in parenting stress research, as there were differences between stress sub‐areas regarding both prediction and stability. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Psychometric evaluation of the Brazelton Scale in a sample of Spanish newborns

This study analyses the data obtained from a sample of 220 healthy full-term neonates evaluated with the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale, NBAS, 3rd edition. Standard scores were obtained for each of the 35 behavioral items and analysis of the main components of all the clusters was performed. Similarly to the original scale, the five following factors were obtained: Autonomic and Motor Systems, Habituation, State Organization, State Regulation, and Social Interactive. The analysis of the reliability of these groupings reveals that it is between moderate and high (the average Cronbach's alpha coefficient was .78).     

Young People,Sexuality, and HIV Prevention Within Christian Faith Communities in South Africa: A Cross-Sectional Survey

Faith communities exert a powerful influence on the life of their members, and studies are needed about how they may be able to influence young people’s attitudes regarding sexuality and HIV prevention. Data were collected through a self-administered questionnaire from young people (811), aged 15–24 years, affiliated to the Roman Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church and the Assemblies of God. The majority of participants perceived themselves at risk of HIV infection (53 %). Premarital sexual abstinence was the most frequently (88 %) reported prevention message, followed by faithfulness (23 %), HIV testing (18 %) and condom use (17 %). Furthermore, religious affiliation was associated with education on sexuality and HIV in youth groups, with better information given to members of the Lutheran and Catholic churches. Faith communities need to strengthen their capacity to educate young people in a more holistic way about sexuality and HIV prevention.